{"id":89715,"date":"2022-10-07T09:33:13","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T09:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-megan-rapinoe-uswnt-will-cope-with-special-england-game-amid-horrifying-report-on-abuse\/"},"modified":"2022-10-07T09:33:13","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T09:33:13","slug":"how-megan-rapinoe-uswnt-will-cope-with-special-england-game-amid-horrifying-report-on-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-megan-rapinoe-uswnt-will-cope-with-special-england-game-amid-horrifying-report-on-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"How Megan Rapinoe, USWNT will cope with ‘special’ England game amid ‘horrifying’ report on abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Megan Rapinoe and the US women’s national team emerged from a Wembley Stadium tunnel on Thursday to bathe in beaming sunshine. They gazed around the cavernous “Home of Football” that will fill with 90,000 people and vibrancy on Friday. They stepped out onto a pristine pitch that will stage “something really special,” Rapinoe said, a highlight of her and their careers.<\/p>\n

And yet, as Rapinoe and captain Becky Sauerbrunn said this week, they are “angry, and exhausted.”<\/p>\n

They came to London to meet England, the European champion, the breakthrough team that captivated its nation this summer with an unprecedented explosion of pride and joy. They came to play a soccer game billed as a beacon of progress and growth. But then, while in transit, US Soccer released the Yates report, the findings of a yearlong investigation that detailed widespread abuse and “failures” throughout women’s soccer.<\/p>\n

The report was “re-triggering or re-traumatizing” for players, some of whom played for the coaches and teams implicated in the report, and some of whom “likely have been abused in one form or another,” Rapinoe said. The details, though many were already known, were nonetheless “horrifying” and “devastating,” she said. An emotional Sauerbrunn said Tuesday that she and her teammates were “heartbroken, and frustrated,” and, three days ahead of a showdown that sold-out Wembley in less than 24 hours, they were “not doing well.”<\/p>\n

The players have been training but also coping, speaking as a group but also digesting silently, toward the end of a year in which they also won a bitter, prolonged battle for equal pay and treatment. An amazed British reporter asked Rapinoe on Thursday: “How are you not just emotionally exhausted, as a group of players?”<\/em><\/p>\n

“We are,” Rapinoe responded.<\/p>\n

But then she made a point that only she and other female athletes can really, truly, intimately understand.<\/p>\n