How to win a World Cup, from three coaches who have done it
Only seven coaches have won a Women's World Cup. Anson Dorrance, Even Pellerud and Jill Ellis offer their insight and knowledge into how they did it...
“Preparation is massive,” says Jill Ellis, winner of the last two World Cups with the USA. “The two World Cups for me were very different because in 2015 I inherited a team very close to a World Cup, so I didn’t make a whole lot of changes.
You can ask our players, I think after 2019 some of them said they felt more prepared and preparation gives me confidence as a coach.
Only seven coaches can say they’ve won a Women’s World Cup, and former USA head coach Ellis is the only person who can say they’ve done it twice.
The English-born coach had initially joined US Soccer as an opposition scout at the 2000 Olympics and returned in 2008 as an assistant coach to Pia Sundgage.
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Ellis twice took on the main role on an interim basis after Sundhage left and again when successor Tom Sermanni left in 2014, taking the job on a permanent basis just a year before the 2015 World Cup in Canada.
“We really looked at every little detail. Our players would know if we were in that scenario and we were down a player, what it would look like on the field…”
The most obvious thing Ellis points out is the attention to detail needed to win the tournament, and that starts long before the games begin. It’s your squad selection, looking at previous tournament successes and failures, trying to plot who you will face on your route to glory, and the details Ellis can go into when recalling her back-to-back successes gives a fascinating insight into why and how the USA was so successful as they now search for an unprecedented third successive win under Ellis’s successor Vlatko Andonovski.
“The level of detail, it’s every little detail,” says the former head coach. “What’s a force a goal scenario? You’re a goal down, there’s 10 minutes left in the game, how does that look? How do you want it to look? Do you train those moments? Because historically, looking back big tournaments are sometimes lost on set-pieces in certain key moments.
“We really looked at every little detail. Our players would know if we were in that scenario and we were down a player, what it would look like on the field. What we didn’t want to do was make impulsive decisions in the moment that we hadn’t really thought through. What Tony [Gustavsson, assistant head coach] and my staff tried to do was prepare so much that in that moment – and of course you have to make gut decisions sometimes – but it was thinking out all these decisions in advance.”
The USA came into 2015 having not won the tournament for 16 years since 1999, and had been stunned by Japan four years previous in a thrilling final which saw Norio Sasaki’s side take the honours on penalties after a late equaliser in extra-time denied the US.
“If a USA team gets to penalty kicks, it feels like a defeat, so psychologically if you haven’t won the actual game, for us it feels like defeat.
“I wanted to flip that mindset so penalties became just another opportunity to win the game. This might seem very detailed, but we trained penalty kicks and I pumped in noise and sounds because I wanted to see a penalty shootout the same as a corner kick, a free-kick, just an opportunity to score a goal. That was the level of detail we went into, we wanted players to know if a team took us to penalties we were prepared and all that it was is another opportunity to win.”
When the USA had last previously won the tournament in China in 1991, the legendary Anson Dorrance was the head coach, duelling the role with his job as coach of the University of North Carolina team, which he remains in today and has enjoyed unprecedented success at collegiate level.
Hired by US Soccer in 1986 just a few years after the national team was created, US Soccer was in a very different position to how it is now and after a disappointing tournament in 1988 which was designed as a test event for a fully-fledged World Cup three years later, Dorrance put in the hard work to ensure his team was well prepared to stun everyone when they returned to China in 1991.
“Back in the early 1990s the USA had no international respect,” he says. “We had a wonderful German fellow by the name of Hubert Vogelsinger [who has sadly passed away since we spoke] who left Germany to come to the USA and became one of the most respected coaches across the country.
“I remember he was interviewed before the event and was trying to explain to our soccer journalists that the USA would be shocked when it jumped into its first World Cup. We didn’t have the cultural background to be successful in that kind of environment and without that kind of experience behind us, we would flame out relatively quickly, that’s what he said. In the back of my mind I remember thinking he was absolutely wrong, I thought we’d go in and rip it up.”
The reason Dorrance was so confident was for several reasons. He had spent three years developing a way of playing which was uncommon back then.
“This adventure for me was visceral, I went in with something to prove about our spirit and our culture…”
He recalls how every team back then largely played a simplistic 4-4-2 formation, while he devised a 3-4-3 system with a sweeper, two centre-backs, a midfield four and a dynamite front three comprising of Carin Jennings, Michelle Akers and captain April Heinrichs, a front three so deadly they coined the term ‘triple edged sword’ because of their performances as individuals and as a trio at the tournament.
“Everyone else worshipped 4-4-2 and played a very polite game with a low line where the other team could just pass the ball around. It was very traditional, very classic, but there was nothing traditional or classic about how we played.
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