USA's Opening World Cup Match No Walkover
USA's Opening World Cup Match No Walkover
The USA Women's National 15s team has a huge task ahead of them in the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.
The main task is to, first of all, get to the quarterfinals. The easiest way to ensure that is to win at least two of their pool games. With most observers looking at Japan as a likely victory for the Americans, and Canada to be a toss-up with the Canadians somewhat favored, it all comes down, really, to this coming Saturday night (US time) against Italy.
For the USA team, historically, Italy would be an opponent the Americans would expect to dismiss. Bigger, stronger, and more skilled the Eagles would expect to roll past the Italians. But his is a different world. The USA team, while still considered within the top echelon of the women's international game, has not logged dominant victories of late. Even in their warmup clash with Scotland, the Eagles needed a late try to come back to win 21-17. The professionalizing of the game has helped some teams gain ground.
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Italy? Well yes they did lose 74-0 to England and 39-6 to France this year. But they also beat Scotland 20-13 and Wales 10-8. Italy is fast, physical, can defend, and can kick goals. They have seen how their tenacity can win international games, and frustrating the USA will certainly be a goal.
So the lesson is, don't take them lightly, and also use those weapons out wide. Yes the USA pack has to front-up and be powerful and smart, but the difference may well be with the talented Eagle backs. Those backs will only be able to show their running talents if they execute the basic catch-pass skills.
USA captain Kate Zackary knows about the challenge ahead, but she also pointed out that they've been hard at work for this game.
"We haven’t played Italy since last World Cup so in the meantime there’s been a bunch of Six Nations which they’ve been a part of," said Zackary, characteristically summing the situation in a sentence. "It’s also been great to see that they’ve gone professional with some contracts and with that comes more games which also means more footage for us, so we’re getting some analysis from those games. But the biggest thing has been focusing on ourselves. I know it’s a cheesy answer, but at the end of the day we have to overcome competing against ourselves. This week the focus has been completely on us. We landed and wanted to get the jet lag off and wanted to get through some of the refinement stuff so then this week as we head into Italy it’s all about that final prep and detail and putting the icing on the cake basically."
USA Rugby World Cup Schedule in New Zealand:
USA vs Italy: Saturday, October 8, 7:45PM Eastern Time (NZ KO time October 9, 12:45PM)
USA vs Japan: Saturday, October 15, 12:30AM Eastern Time (NZ KO time October 15, 5:30PM)
USA vs Canada: Saturday, October 22, 10:15PM Eastern Time (NZ KO time October 23, 3:15PM)