Your swine flu preview – USWNT vs Canada

A calm and tranquil national team watches Sunday’s FC Gold Pride v La Sol game

That’s right kids. Monday, 7pm EST on Fox Soccer Channel, the US Women take on Canada for one of (I think) three matches because everyone else is totally using swine flu as an excuse to avoid getting their asses beat by the #1 ranked national team in the world. And you can call this part 0.165849 (not quite part 1) of the road to World Cup 2011. Pia is ready for change: “You need different players. Everybody will be on their toes… To try to win another gold medal the same way for me is not inspiring.” Pia has called up a few youngsters (will they see playing time?). And Pia is still “resting” a few injured players left off this roster (doesn’t mean they are completely out!).

So number one, Carli Lloyd went and got herself injured on Saturday – which probably means we’ll see Shannon Boxx back in the midfield. Seems we have enough depth in defense now so last year’s little experiment is completely unnecessary. And other than that… I’m not really seeing much of a change from the usual line-up. That is, unless Pia goes crazy and throws out something totally new.

As for Canada, the 24th minute blog has a nice preview write up for you to read. Canada have a brand new head coach who took them to second place in the Cypress Cup in March. And oh hey! I did not know that both Abby Wambach and Christine Sinclair have 99 international goals each. So this game could easily be the big one oh oh for either of the two star forwards.

But he final words of this preview go to Lori Chalupny:

I play with a Canadian teammate in St. Louis, and I can say that we have probably trash talked a little bit about this game. One of the good things about the WPS is that it’s nice to get to know foreign players. You can bet this will be a good battle [between us and Canada].

And I think that pretty much sums up the state of women’s soccer in CONCACAF right now.