There have been many adaptations to Sarina Wiegman’s English working life, not the least of which is encounters with cows as she jogs along the country lanes around St George’s Park. “They run away when I come over,” she told a Dutch writer before this World Cup. ‘Dutch cows would remain standing’
Managing this national team was unlike anything she’s ever known. She was amazed to discover a brief national obsession with the £67 Marks & Spencer suits she wore last summer. But the focus on the cheap ballpoint pens from Bruna, the Dutch booksellers and stationery shops, with which she took notes on the sidelines in the tournament, was something else. “All attention to my four-color pen!” she told Patrick van IJzendoorn of De Volkskrant. “I’m not going to stand on the sidelines with a gold pen, am I?”
She has been the manager who, according to the players, understood the reality of a female player in a way that her predecessors did not. “As a woman, Sarina gives us that little bit more,” Beth Mead said of her in her recent autobiography.
But now Wiegman’s biggest challenge comes some distance away. How to re-engineer the machine of an England team that went unbeaten in 30 games until April, but whose struggle to get through the gears at the World Cup hit rock bottom against Nigeria.
When the dust settled on Monday’s penalty shootout, some players reenacted with a senior FA staffer what it had been like for them to play shoulder-to-shoulder against a number of Nigerians, feeling overshadowed by their strong muscularity.
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At the airport in Brisbane where the game had taken place, the same member of staff saw players like Lauren Hemp and Georgia Stanway look physically exhausted, having covered twice the distance they usually cover in the last 16 game.
The good news is that England will not be up to that level of physical challenge today. The Nigerians are a better team than the Colombians and the suggestion that the South Americans will ruin England is a myth. They haven’t been overly physical in this tournament.
At her press conference here last night, Wiegman did what she always did on such occasions: play down the importance of the moment by saying very little and listening to some of the questions with a surprised look that they were even asked.
This is why she is a good person for the big moments. She is an expert at relieving the pressure. Mead tells how Wiegman sent the team to the European Championship final against Germany last summer with twelve closing words: ‘We don’t have to win today, but we really want to.’ The team had transformed the landscape of women’s football simply by reaching the final.
When Wiegman was asked last night what it meant to her to be the last female coach in this final, she was once again unrelenting. ‘I’m not busy with my trip right now. I’m busy with my soccer team,’ she replied.
But some of those involved in hiring her into the FA argue that a female manager is not a requirement at this elite level. “The team wants who can help them win,” one of them says. “At a lower level, further down the system, women feel more comfortable being coached by women.”
Lucy Ward, the former England international who worked for ITV at the tournament, says qualities not usually associated with female coaches are a key asset at Wiegman.
“I think one of the reasons Sarina is so good is that she has a lot of traditionally ‘masculine’ coaching characteristics – straight forward, relentless but combines them with fairness,” Ward tells Mailsport. “Not overly emotional, but enough to allow honesty and empathy.”
Sarina Wiegman hopes for less stress when she watches her English team in the quarterfinals
An underappreciated influence on how England set up and performed is Wiegman’s assistant Arjan Veurink, the partnership’s tactical thinker. “Having a male assistant coach is an interesting dynamic that probably works very well,” added Ward. “The best scenario I ever worked in was a male coach with a background in the men’s academy working under a female manager. It worked brilliantly. He was an excellent coach and she tempered the ‘edge’ that male football had at the time, which we were not used to.’
Just as important as Wiegman’s directness with players is the self-confidence she has imbued them with in so many ways. Mead tells how Wiegman, when she first took over, noticed that the players weren’t waving and applauding the fans sitting in the stands during the pre-game warm-up. “We had been very English about it and worried about looking like divas,” Mead said. “She thought we should.”
Wiegman will need all her managerial power this time around, as the game in Nigeria was a shock to the core – one in which she and Veurink seemed curiously powerless to change the tactical balance, with substitutions coming very late.
If you win on Saturday, her star still seems to be at the top, and there are already many rumors in the US that she is the woman who will rebuild that country’s team, while her contact with England runs until 2025. Lose, and it will feel like a step back for her and the team she hired.