Wamback Gets Whamed
July 17, 2008 by Lyndsey D'Arcangelo
Filed under Sports Rumors
One sport I am looking forward to watching during the Olympics is women’s soccer. (Sorry guys, they’re just a bit more interesting and talented). But the U.S. women’s team was hit with a blow last night (no pun intended) when their star player, Abby Wamback (who’s from Rochester, NY which is only about an hour away from my home town of Buffalo) went down with an injury.
How serious of an injury was it? Serious enough for her teammates to be concerned …
From USA Today ~ SAN DIEGO (AP) — On a night when the United States woman should have been eyeing the upcoming Olympics, they were dealt a crushing blow to their gold medal hopes when Abby Wambach broke her left leg.
Wambach, the team’s leading scorer, was carted off the field after a violent collision in the first half of a 1-0 win over
Brazil. Wambach is expected to be out for 12 weeks and will miss the Olympics, which start in three weeks.
Wambach fractured both her tibia and fibula and will have surgery Thursday to have a titanium rod inserted into her leg.
“I want to thank all the fans, the doctors, the players on the team and Tasha Kai for scoring the winning goal,” Wambach said from the emergency room. “Obviously, it’s devastating, but above everything else, I’m only one player, and you can never win a championship with just one player. I have the utmost confidence in this team bringing home the gold.”
Wambach is the team’s leading scorer this year with 13 goals and 10 assists. She has led the team in scoring in the last three major championships and is one of the top scorers in U.S. history with 99 goals in 127 games. READ MORE
Talk about a serious blow to the team’s confidence. I’m not saying that they can’t win without Wamback, I’m just saying that she made it a heck of a lot easier for them to win. She’s to them what Michael Jordan was to the Chicago Bulls. She elevates the players around her and she provides leadership as well as an offensive spark.
If the team can make a decent run in the Olympics without her, I’ll be that much more impressed.
Photo provided by Newscom
