2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, Featured, June 2019, USWNT

Tobin Heath: American Magic Maker, Soccer Idol

If the US Women’s National Team win a fourth World Cup, Tobin Heath’s ability to make magic will be critical.

 

Neil W. Blackmon

 “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of woman, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. She is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and she enters the world clinging to a ball.“


— Eduardo Galeano*

PARIS- 

It’s just past 10 PM on a pleasant June night in Le Havre, the port town on the French side of the English Channel, when the magic happens.

To that point, the Americans had spent most of the game’s first 50 minutes thoroughly dominating longtime rival Sweden, yet the US had only a 1–0 lead to show for it. Making matters more tense, the Swedes were finding themselves, creeping closer to an equalizer through the dangerous attacking play of the constantly moving Sofia Jakobsson. There’s a sense of nervy expectation and dread creeping into the throngs of Americans in the building. Body language is different. What early on were primal roars of approval have become tense groans of frustration.

Then, in an instant: ecstasy.

 

A looped in, seemingly harmless cross from Megan Rapinoe is cleared poorly by the typically sturdy Swedish defense and falls at the feet of Tobin Heath at the right side of Sweden’s penalty area. Heath, a 31-year old sinewy, sunburnt New Jersey native, danced with the ball at her foot as if a pendulum, left than right than left than right again, mercilessly juking her late arriving mark, Jonna Andersson, before ripping a shot that may or may not have skimmed past the Swedish defender’s leg on its way to the back of the net.

 

 

Out of nothing, the extraordinary, in a stunning moment of intelligence, speed, strength and skill.

That eventually, FIFA rules the goal an own goal- likely incorrectly, because FIFA- doesn’t change the jolt of id and unadulterated joy that comes from watching it on bit.

What matters is that the goal happened, and it was another in a string of extraordinary moments offered by Tobin Heath, American magic maker. Soccer Idol.

 

*** *** ***

 

Football- or soccer- the English called it one before the other and we shouldn’t quarrel over nomenclature- is largely a collaborative game. It is about space and movement and generally, the team that uses collective movement to create the most space for themselves and limit the space and time for their opponent has the best chance to score the most goals. The better you function as a fused group, the more likely you are to win. The sum is more important than the parts, as they say, and this is true regardless of whether it is women’s soccer or men’s soccer.

Leicester City won the Premier League in 2015-16 predominantly because of how they functioned as a collective, as opposed to because they had N’Golo Kanté, although I’m certain that helped. Liverpool won the Champions League because Klopp’s system- his idea of using passing and possession and spacing to limit the opponent’s playing time—was able to overcome opponents with better individual parts.

The US Women’s National Team have won three World Cups because they are the deepest team and typically, the most fit team, even when they occasionally lack a great number of the world’s most technical players. Traditionally, the US don’t beat you with players 1-5; they beat you because they play collectively and are better than you at players 6-23.

The same rules apply to losing. Argentina have one of the three greatest players of all-time in Lionel Messi, but since capturing gold at the 2008 Summer Olympics, they’ve failed to win a single international trophy with him in the fold. Chile, led by Jorge Sampaoli, José Letelier  and the visionary Marcelo Bielsa, have utilized a high-pressing, swarming playing style that emphasizes the collective to win more consistently in the Messi-era instead.

For the most part, we even experience football as fans collectively. The reason soccer is so important- particularly international soccer but club soccer as well- is because of the sense of community it provides. We don’t experience joy as fans apart from others. It is joy by association. Hence- perhaps- association football.

But here’s the thing.  

Just because football requires the subordination of the individual to the collective good doesn’t mean there’s no place for individual brilliance in the sport.

We obsess over teams and narratives in soccer, to be sure.

We spend hours writing about and dissecting their legacies, the way we should remember them. If the United States capture a fourth-star, are they the greatest champion yet? If France unify the World Cup belts, is France the greatest footballing nation on earth? If the US lose, is it because Jill Ellis got everything wrong and the plane has crashed into the mountain? Or is the world finally catching up?

Often, even in a team game like soccer, it’s individual performances, like Mbappe last summer, we remember most.

 

Yet even as we experience football collectively and obsess over teams and narratives and legacies, what we fixate on, in the main, are individual moments.

 

A few- for me- because we all have our own, chronologically:

Ryan Giggs vs. Arsenal at the FA Cup in 99.

Chastain at the Rose Bowl later that summer.

Zidane and Materazzi in 2006.

“Distribution, brilliant…” and the world slowing down to the dulcet tones of Ian Darke, summer, 2010.

Keylor Navas willing Costa Rica (another prime example of the value of the collective, in a performative contradiction) to a World Cup quarterfinal in 2014.

Carli Lloyd’s chip and hat trick in the World Cup Final in 2015.

Kylian Mbappé, an Adonis of speed and technique and joy, exploding past Argentina in 2018.

Lionel Messi normalizing the extraordinary in the first leg of the Champions League semifinals vs Liverpool last spring.

 

Even a blistering counterattacking Thailand goal down four in the World Cup group stage can live for years in the collective imagination.

 

The soul of the sport, the music of it, dwells inside the sublime acts of the most gifted individuals.

Perhaps this is because soccer is one of our more pensive sports, a game where we spend a good deal of time thinking and waiting: contemplating the form of a defense, waiting for space to open, seeing and waiting for a run through the channel, waiting for the slicing, scintillating final ball. We submit to the rhythm and flow of a game and wait for the moments of magic that break up that flow.

Perhaps it is because, as the late Johan Cruyff put it brusquely, “it’s difficult to score goals.” Given the structure of the game: eleven a side, only one ball, only one player a side allowed to use hands, no timeouts, only three substitutions, goals must be onside and now, the dreaded VAR, it’s fair to suggest scoring a goal is a minor miracle.

For that reason, we highly value those players who can score them and maybe more, we appreciate those who manufacture the magic that often creates them.

As we obsess over our teams, debate tactics, shape and reshape narratives and offer hot takes on legacies, what we yearn for, more than anything, are the individual moments that bend time and suspend our belief.

The best players in soccer do this.

They have a way of playing soccer a step faster than you can think about soccer. They have a way of moving that is breathtaking, powerful and graceful all at once. As if they function at a different speed than everyone watching them, they play as if in slow-motion. They move so freely, so astonishingly simply, that a defender in a seemingly ideal position suddenly appears hopelessly lost.  While we hold our breaths, they make magic.

 

*** *** ***

Tampa, FL – Tuesday March 05, 2019: The women’s national teams of the United States (USA) and Brazil (BRA) play in a 2019 SheBelieves Cup match at Raymond James Stadium.

 

For the US Women’s National Team, Tobin Heath is that player.

There have been other magical American players, to be fair, and there are others that merit mention, all true soccer idols. Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe come to mind. Alex Morgan, a bewildering blend of speed and touch and tactical nous, is another. Mallory Pugh will arrive at this party one day. In Italy, we’d write sonnets about Sauerbrunn, the greatest defender America has ever produced.

But Heath is the one that makes you hold your breath whenever she latches onto or stands above the ball.

Heath exemplifies soccer’s beautiful interaction between the collective unit and the individual who stands and challenges the opponent alone.

She has a magnificent first touch, an assortment of on-ball moves, an explosive first step and a way of moving off the ball that is almost dumbfoundingly intelligent. She thinks soccer like a chess champion blessed with the mind to see the board several moves ahead, and as a result, is constantly in the right position, a prerequisite to her magic-making. She’s also unabashedly brave and unafraid to fail, as are most the beautiful game’s true masters.

In one-on-one situations, Heath’s mastery and comfort with the ball isn’t just breathtaking, it’s intimidating.

Nilla Fischer, the great Swedish defender who has seen enough of Heath for one lifetime, had this to say before the US group stage game with Sweden.

“For (Heath) I think, she’s one of the best one-on-one players because she’s so calm and dynamic with the ball. She can move and attack almost as if she’s not thinking. It’s a challenge to defend that.”

For this, Heath credits her family, or at least she did last month, ahead of the World Cup.

“My (siblings) didn’t play- we were a tennis family and I was the one that played soccer, but we were competitive. I would take them all on, my mom, my little brother. Anytime I had a soccer ball, which was often,” Heath said.

The important thing to Heath was simply having a soccer ball.

“I admired Ronaldinho growing up,” Heath said. “Really anything that had to do with Brazilian football, the way the love being with the ball. I thought it was beautiful, the simplicity and artistry of it. I wanted to achieve that feeling with the ball, to play without thinking. So, I took a soccer ball everywhere.”

Brazil’s love affair with the ball helped establish the country as one of the greatest footballing nations on earth. Of particular importance to Brazilian footballing culture- and as such, Brazilian culture writ-large, is the malandro, a black or mixed-race “other” who, for lack of a succinct definition, is an outlaw and trickster who survives by his wits and savvy, often fooling those richer or more powerful than themselves, evading rigid formality and structure, rejecting legalism. He/she is a bohemian, a joker, a smartass. When you ask a Brazilian why (historically) they play soccer so beautifully, they’ll likely bring up the malandro first.

In Soccer Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper’s masterful account of the interrelation between soccer, political power, politics, culture and revolution, Kuper asks a Brazilian professor, Muniz Sodre, to explain the malandro of the Brazilian favela.

His response is illuminating:

 

 “Let me draw you a picture,” he said. “If you go to a favela,” and I would have been mad to do so, “you will see a woman—there is no man in the house—who takes care of her five or six boys. The smartest of these boys, who can flee from police if he needs to, who can put up a fight, is a good soccer player. He can dribble past life’s difficulties. He can provide food for his mother. There is a deep connection between tricking defenders on the soccer field and being a smart boy in real life. This boy is a Malandro.” 

 

Football is a game of space and movement.

Brazilians play soccer admiring, and aspiring, to the malandro’s grand sense of grace and trickery. Their greatest players- Garrincha, Pelé, and even of late, Ronaldinho, were great movers of the ball and dribblers, capable of inventing their own movements, of creating and diagnosing space. Of these- Garrinhca, born with deformed legs and nicknamed “joy of the people”- was malandro to the core, essentially tricking a physical defect (his legs weren’t the same size) with a mesmerizing, artistic skill on the ball. Brazil never lost a single game with Pele and Garrincha on the field together.

It’s no coincidence Heath has emulated this Garrincha-like style and, in a women’s game that in her own country often embraces rigidity and structure, made it her own.

The US have lost (it is possible!) games with Heath on the field, so there’s no Garrincha-Pele pursuit of perfection at stake this summer. But Heath’s individual brilliance, the stand alone technical and creative quality of her football, is a perfect complement for her often regimented, occasionally hyper-technical teammates.

There’s an element of “otherness” of identity that is vital to the malandro, and if you’ll permit me to borrow from the idea for a moment, it’s a useful way to think about Tobin Heath. As a woman playing a sport FIFA too often forgets, Heath plays not only differently, but more beautifully than any American male contemporary, despite years of global narratives dismissing or diminishing the talent of women in the sport. In that vein, Heath isn’t racially “different,” but she is a woman, and it’s hard to not see a bit of the malandro in her game, at least in terms of the outsider who approaches the sport from a position of difference and offers a unique blend of grace and joy.

 

*** ***

Heath’s artistry and creativity with the ball has earned her the nickname “Queen of the Nutmeg” from US Soccer, and the wonderful name “Tobinho”, among other affections. According to a wonderful chronicle from Yahoo Sports journalist Henry Bushnell, Heath has nutmegged 20 of her 22 US teammates, and enjoyed every moment of it.

 

As New Zealand learned the hard way in a pre-World Cup friendly, Heath’s prowess with the nutmeg is so prodigious it was even incorporated into FOX Sport’s promotional materials for the FIFA World Cup.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB3mmuPXGOw

 

But Heath’s largest accomplishment may be in the dreams she inspires and the way she’s used her own creativity and freedom with the ball to inspire young players to rethink the way they approach the game.

“In the United States, players like Tobin are rare,” Julie Carter, a 15-year-old player from Atlanta tells me as she waits, wearing an autographed Heath jersey, for a plane to see Heath and the USWNT play in Paris. “Our coaching is so precise, so drill-oriented. Tobin is inspiring because she can do those things that she’s asked but there’s a comfort, a freedom to her game that offers something different.”

“Watching Heath brings us great joy”, adds Carter’s mother Emma.

To Heath, inspiring that type of new thinking about how to play soccer is precisely how she hopes to use her platform, both with her club and with the national team.

“There’s an element to my game that is creative and free,” Heath acknowledges. “But all of it is harnessed towards the team and a fierce desire to win. I hope people who watch us play see that you can have both.”

Whether Heath’s beautiful, magical game inspires future Heaths remains to be seen. It’s easier said than done to mimic soccer’s greatest masters.

But even if it doesn’t, there’s value in thinking about football differently. A more diverse approach to training and development is essential across the American soccer landscape, whether we’re talking men’s soccer or women’s soccer.

Beyond that, there’s the impact that a unique individual talent offers the collaborative. After all, football, of course, is about the collaborative- the team- most of all.

Heath’s creativity is essential to a US side that can sometimes get bogged down in midfield. One of four main creative outlets on the team (Rose Lavelle, Lindsey Horan and Megan Rapinoe are the others), Heath is the one most likely to seize a game from thin air when all seems lost. She’s the one you want make the last gasp run, or the final one-on-one stoppage time push.

With the knockout stages set to begin, there’s a sense that if the US are to win a fourth star, they’ll need Heath’s capacity for magic-making more than ever.

I wouldn’t bet against her being able to deliver.

 

Neil W. Blackmon is co-founder of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.

  • The original Galleano quote has been modified to reflect a woman.
Written by: Neil W. Blackmon on June 23, 2019.
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