It's Mike Newell's worst nightmare

Just a quick reminder (to myself as much as anyone) that the Women's World Cup is coming up next month, starting September 10.

I did a short preview of the groups here back when the draw was made; if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll do a longer write-up of all the teams sometime between now and when the tournament starts.

The Canadian women's team is currently in the middle of a training camp in Vancouver, leading up to their final pre-World Cup tune-up, a friendly against Japan in Tokyo on August 30. Canada is coming off an uneven showing at the Pan American games, where they ultimately finished third but had a couple of terrible performances along the way. The training camp has allowed them to get some injured players back, and coach Even Pellerud believes the team is stronger than the squad that finished fourth in 2003. (The Canadian roster is here.)

The U.S. women are saying pretty much the same thing about their team. The New York Times article I linked there also makes a point about the women's team being virtually ignored compared to the men's team, which is something the Canadians have to deal with as well; ironic, seeing as in both countries, the women's record is actually much better than the men's. So I can sympathize with that. What I don't have a lot of sympathy for, though, is the whining from the U.S. women (the USWNT?) about how "We don't know how to recover from a loss." Oh, you poor babies.

(I suspect my annoyance at that is partly due to latent anti-Americanism, and partly due to having read the NY Times article in conjunction with this story about the U.S.'s new gold jerseys, which go along with their "Take back the gold" slogan. Entitlement much?)

Right. Anyway, the U.S. are definitely the favourites going into the World Cup, but I think Canada has a chance to make it to the semi-finals at least. We'll see. If you're interested in watching the games, the CBC is showing all three of Canada's first-round matches, as well as all of the quarter-finals and semi-finals, the third-place match and the final on September 30. All the games are at 17:00 and 20:00 local time, which means 4:00 am and 7:00 am ET, so set your alarm clock.