Spain’s Salma Paralluelo has come off the bench and scored in the quarterfinals and semifinals. The 19-year-old, part of a major youth movement in this World Cup, and Spain play England in the final on Sunday morning. Andrew Cornaga/Associated Press
SYDNEY — Thirty-two World Cup teams have been whittled to two finalists, but somehow the neighborhood scrap between England and Spain so far away from their neighborhood winds up embodying the whole month-long global yarn.
It boasts fresh, newfangled finalists, in the manner of this landmark tournament that tilted so much toward the fresh and newfangled.
It holds the possibility of brilliance from those who are either teenagers or got finished being teenagers not so long ago, signifying the whoosh forward of the skill level in the women’s sport, plus the incapacity of these youths to give a damn about their ages as they contribute on the most daunting stage.
It even has one team – Spain – which, like so many other teams among the 32, had to ride on rapids of controversy. “The first thing that goes through your head after winning,” Spain Manager Jorge Vilda said after the semifinal, “is you think about loved ones and everything that has happened this year” – a year that included 15 players sending an email to their national federation last fall calling for his ouster or their resignations.
Lauren Hemp, right, and Millie Bright are part of an England team in its first Women’s World Cup final after reaching the semifinals in 2015 and 2019. Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
England, which reached World Cup semifinals in 2015 and 2019, graces its first final with its rarefied skill and composure. Spain, which had never won a knockout-stage match and had reached World Cups in only 2015 and 2019 before this, graces its first final with its rarefied skill and pluck as it tries to become only the second women’s team (after Japan in 2011) to win a World Cup after losing a match (this one to Japan by a whopping score of 4-0, in group play). Both finalists represent nations that hardheadedly got round to acknowledging the potential of the women’s game only this century.
They played each other in a smashing 2022 European Championship quarterfinal, in which Spain led into 84 minutes on an Esther González goal before Ella Toone equalized just then and then Georgia Stanway loosed a banger from the top of the box in the 95th minute to win for England, the eventual champion. Now they represent the fresh guard in an event where the United States (five) and Germany (three) had hogged half of the first 16 finalist slots across eight World Cups from 1991 to 2019.
Now here came the World Cup in which German forever star Alexandra Popp wound up saying, upon a shocking group-stage departure: “I don’t know what to say. I can’t understand very well what’s happening at the moment.”
It’s the World Cup where Brazil Manager Pia Sundhage said, upon a shocking group-stage departure: “I think one or two people were a little bit anxious (as to) whether the teams were good enough” to expand to 32 for the first time. “And absolutely, it was a great time to extend the number of teams.”
Jamaica, the team that shooed her team with a 0-0 draw, made the knockout stage. So did South Africa in just a second World Cup and so did Morocco in a first, a stunning achievement after losing, 6-0, to Germany at the outset. It’s the tournament where England Manager Sarina Wiegman fielded a question about whether it worried her how England looked in a 0-0 round-of-16 draw with Nigeria, settled on penalties. “I think when we say I’m worried,” Wiegman said, “then we underestimate Nigeria.”
“It’s not a big difference,” Sundhage put it, “between failure and success.”
“I think at this level,” Canada Manager Bev Priestman said, “margins are fine,” and she said so as she, too, departed at the group stage – with her reigning Olympic champions.
As much as this final brims with Spain’s Aitana Bonmatí or the English scoring duo of Lauren Hemp and Alessia Russo, which felled Australia in the semifinals, it also nods toward the preposterously young. The tournament has been unusually good at that, given the beyond-years input from Colombia’s Linda Caicedo (age 18), Haiti’s Melchie Dumornay (age 19 while she played this World Cup), Australia’s Mary Fowler and Kyra Cooney-Cross (ages 20 and 21), the Netherlands’ Esmee Brugts (age 20).
Now it gets a final potentially with who knows what from England’s Lauren James, 21, who scored three wowing goals in two matches before a thudding two-game suspension for misbehavior cost her a quarterfinal and a semifinal. It gets the question of how much Wiegman should play James given the excellence and crackling goal of her replacement, Toone. And goodness, it gets Spain’s Salma Paralluelo, 19, who made the 2019 European track and field championships and who plays like it, flinging energy around the pitch as a substitute in both the quarterfinal against Netherlands and the semifinal against Sweden, then referring to the “great euphoria” she herself helped create.
The well-financed England, which has nibbled at this kind of thing for a while, will appear in the nation’s second World Cup final ever (and first since the men’s trip there in 1966). It has conceded only three goals this tournament, when it took the booming talent of Australia’s Sam Kerr to get one of those and a disputed penalty for China to get another.
Spain, barreling out of the New Zealand half of this co-hosted event, has reached great heights here while also dealing with great upheaval in the run-up. After 15 players wanted Spain’s coach replaced late last year for being too controlling, and some other teammates agreed with them, and the federation basically told the players to refrain from choosing the coach, and the coach chose a team in June with only three of the 15 (including Bonmati) plus two others who agreed, here they all are.
They represent a program that lost a round-of-16 match at the 2019 World Cup to the United States, 2-1, on penalties at the seventh and 76th minutes, both from Megan Rapinoe. Now Rapinoe unthinkably has missed a penalty and the United States has gone home in the round of 16 unthinkably, as the world has gone upturned until the finalists and their youth are shiny-new.
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