FRISCO - A month ago, Carli Lloyd was posing next to Lionel Messiin Switzerland as the 2015 FIFA World Players of the Year. This week, she's in Texas with her eye on more hardware.
Only months after leading the Women’s U.S. National Team to their third FIFA Women's World Cup, Lloyd and the USWNT are set to begin their quest for a fourth-straight gold medal as the CONCACAF Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournament begins on Wednesday.
“We’re back competing, it’s crazy that the World Cup was just six months ago,” said Lloyd before training at the Toyota Soccer Center. “We’re still riding the wave. I think we’re still going strong and it’s still great. People gravitate towards our team and they still want to see the team do well, and hopefully once we qualify we’ll go after our fourth gold medal in a row.”
The 33-year-old, named the top player at last summer's World Cup after scoring six goals, and who has already won two gold medals herself at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, was also very cautious when talking about the qualifying.
“There’s no second chances,” she said. “There’s no half a spot that you can go and qualify like we did in 2011. So we’ve got to take care of business, focus on one game at a time, and not look past the first game at Costa Rica.”
The U.S. will play Costa Rica in their first qualifying match on Wednesday at Toyota Stadium. Lloyd, who finished 2015 with 18 goals and five assists in 25 matches, is focused on the task at hand and will only think about getting another gold medal after qualifying.
“The only thing on my mind is Costa Rica. 6 months is a long time away. You can’t get wrapped up in that final result and it’s all about preparing for the next thing, and that’s Costa Rica.”
Lloyd, who is the third American to win the FIFA World Player of the Year award - following Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach - is confident the USWNT will play in the Olympics. But 2011 reminds her about the dangers of being too confident.
“We’re confident. The culture, the history of the US National Team feeds off of being confident,” she said. “But there’s also a point to that where you can’t be overly confident. We know what happened in 2011 when we didn’t qualify right away and we were lucky to have that extra spot to go and compete against Italy. So, there’s a fine line of being confident. But [right now] I think we are confident, and we know that we have to take care of business and take it one game at a time.”