Sports

Rampone and US Women's Soccer Team Need to Beat Brazil to Stay in World Cup

US has won two games and lost one in the World Cup in Germany

The US Women's Soccer team needs to beat Brazil on Sunday or they're bounced from the World Cup.

The game will be broadcast from Germany on ESPN at 11 a.m. Sunday.

Team Captain and Defender Christie Pearce Rampone and her teammates had beat North Korea and Colombia, their first two World Cup opponents, before losing to Sweden on Wednesday.

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Rampone, born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, grew up in and graduated from high school in Point Borough, graduated from Monmouth University and now lives in Manasquan.

ESPN Columnist Jeff Carlisle said in an email that the first three games the US Women played "were in the 'group stage' where the teams are divided into groups and you play each team in your group once.

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"Now they are in the knockout stage where in each game, the loser goes home. If the US wins on Sunday they go to the semifinals where they will play the winner of England/France."

Carlisle, who wrote a game story and brief performance evaluation for every US player who went up against Sweden, describes Rampone's performance as "Not as reliable as in previous outings, but still defused some tricky situations. Eventually got the better of [Swedish players] Schelin and Oqvist in the second half."

After losing to Sweden, Rampone was quoted as follows on the US Soccer website:

On Sweden’s performance:
“They put pressure on us and got two goals on set pieces. We’ll have to work on that, but it’s positive we didn’t give up anything in the run of play. We definitely had a great second half and came after it, but we were unlucky not to get that second goal. We played our style in the second half, we just didn’t have enough time.”

 On how the team will handle tonight’s loss:
“I don’t think this is really going to affect us. The way that we ended the game and how positive the team felt about how we played in the second half, we need to take that momentum going forward.”

On facing Brazil in the quarterfinals:
“Brazil is definitely a great team to play against. We’ll have to get past them at some point to win the tournament, but now we may be going in a different path and playing them a little bit earlier. Marta is a great player, one of the best in the world, and there is nothing like playing them in the quarterfinals.”

"Marta" is Marta Vieira da Silva, Brazil's star player, who scored two goals and assisted in a third, in her team's successful match with Norway last Sunday.


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