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Emma Hayes has grit and guile; the question remains will that be enough for gold. The former Chelsea coach was in combative mood as she put the final touches to the USA’s preparations for the Olympic women’s football tournament.
Expectation management is often the name of the game in these seemingly endless days before the Olympic flame actually ignites. Some like to beat their chest and talk themselves up, others - from the ‘no-one puts more pressure on me than me’ school of sports psychology - prefer to fly under the radar.
Hayes - as we’ve come to learn from her seven Women’s Super League titles - doesn’t overthink this stuff, she just tells it like is it.
“I just don’t like bulls**t,” she famously said and there is quite a bit of that before the Olympics - and not just in the River Seine.
Red America may be looking inwards but their new women’s football coach has a more internationalist outlook.
“I think I know our biggest problem,” she said, as her team put the finishing touches to their preparations, with their opening match against Zambia in Nice on Thursday, live on Discovery+.
“We have to reframe our focus a little bit and have respect for the rest of the world. We talk about what happens when we get to the semis and finals, and I think it’s disrespectful.
“The game has moved; nothing is a shoo-in now. We got no given right to any result, everything has to be earned, especially against the top footballing nations we’ve got to play here.”
To be fair former coach Vlatko Andonovski said something very similar in the days before last summer’s Fifa Women’s World Cup in Australia. The only problem was no-one listened.
USA arrived as defending champions, having made the final in the previous three editions, winning twice, you needed to go back six tournaments for the last time they finished outside the top three. They edged through their group, lost on penalties to Sweden in the round of 16 and Andonovski was offski.
“This team is over the World Cup, we’re about some new history, not what happened in the past,” added Hayes.
“Our motivation isn’t always about righting the wrongs. Far from it. We’re excited and we’re prepared. The team is exactly where it needs to be at this stage. And for us it’s just so, so important we continue to focus on that process.”
‘Focus on the process’ is up there with ‘control the controllables’ in sports cliche bingo here in Paris but Hayes is not known for playing it safe.
She showed her ruthlessness in dropping three-time Olympian Alex Morgan from the 18-strong team here in France, insisting she wanted players that offered her multiple options, with the squad size five less than her predecessor took to Australia last summer.
When Catarina Macario was injured she ignored the calls for a Morgan reprieve and selected rising star Emily Sams.
Hayes built Chelsea into a women’s football powerhouse by the force of her personality and the intellect of her coaching. She’s also quick to surround herself with people who will question her decisions, the appointment of former Aston Villa coach Carla Ward to her backroom staff for the Olympics a good example.
The Olympics are a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it World Cup-lite, with only 12 teams compared the 32 that played Down Under last season.
World champions Spain will start favourites, though only two other quarterfinalists from that tournament are here - Australia, Japan, and France.
Hayes’s first opponents Zambia shipped ten goals against Spain and Japan in their group campaign last summer, but she’s previously called their captain Barbra Banda the most in-form striker on the planet.
One of the fun Games to play in these days before the Games is what athlete or sport will shoot itself in the foot before it even starts.
Three-time dressage gold medallist Charlotte Dujardin looked like she’d win that prize after a video emerged of her mistreating a horse and forced her home in disgrace.
But she could have a rival from Canada, who are defending their women’s football gold from Tokyo.
Assistant coach Jasmine Mander and analyst Joseph Lombardi have both been axed after they flew a drone over the training session of their first opponents New Zealand. Canada’s British coach Bev Priestman has now stood herself down from that opening match after a cringey apology that would make even Dujardin blush.
It really seems nothing is predictable at these Olympics, just as Hayes suggests.
:: Watch every moment of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 live only on discovery+, the streaming home of the Olympics
