On a cool July night in Frankfurt four years ago, Carli Lloyd stood over a penalty kick that would go a long way toward deciding the 2011 World Cup final. She told herself to kick the ball as hard as she possibly could, inside the left post—her go-to penalty kick.  Then she remembered she had kicked the ball in that spot in the quarterfinal shootout against Brazil. So at the last moment, Lloyd decided to hit it high and down the middle, harder than she had ever kicked a ball.  That’s how Carli Lloyd’s crucial penalty shot sailed far above the crossbar, landing some 15 rows up in the stands. The miss started a downward spiral that landed Lloyd on the bench and forced her to question her future as a professional. Lloyd seemed like a microcosm of the U.S. team that hasn’t won a World Cup since 1999: physically gifted but prone to sloppiness and lacking in the technical skills ingrained in more established soccer nations.  “Maybe I let the kick bother me,” she said, during a break from a recent training session. “Maybe I was just trying to force things.”  Now, four years later, comes the next World Cup, amid a major scandal in international soccer, whose governing body was hit by a series of indictments of high officials for about $150 million in bribes. Its president, Sepp Blatter, who wasn’t indicted, resigned on Tuesday and is under investigation.  The allegations involved the big-money men’s game, but it was still bad timing for the women’s World Cup, which FIFA also oversees along with the male version, to be played in Russia in 2018. The organization had ignored protests—and a lawsuit—from some women players over its refusal to move the games from artificial turf to natural grass, which many feel causes fewer injuries. The lawsuit was dropped after heavy FIFA lawyering.  Come Saturday’s opening game in Canada, though, the clouds should thin for a while as fans focus on the matches, which run through July 5. The U.S. has a real chance of winning, and Carli Lloyd’s performance is likely to be critical. Now 32 years old and a chiseled five-feet-8 inches tall, Lloyd has turned herself into the core element that every great team needs—a player who can score, control the middle of the field, and break down the defense with a perfectly delivered pass to a sprinting striker. Another key role: She is often the roommate-on-the-road of the notoriously erratic, all-world goalkeeper Hope Solo, who nearly got kicked off the team after being charged with assault. (Solo issued a public apology. After the charges were dismissed in January, her lawyer maintained that she was the victim in the incident.)  Lloyd also stars in the morality tale that head coach Jill Ellis, a 48-year-old Briton, recounts to struggling rookies and veterans alike, a metaphor for a team trying to return to the basics in an attempt to master the game’s most complex skills and win a championship.  “Jill tells us to look at Carli’s journey, her change in mindset, how fit she got,” said Julie Johnston, 23, a World Cup rookie who trained with Lloyd last year, when she was fighting for a spot on the national team.  Lloyd, once known mostly as a tough New Jersey girl with a self-described chip on her shoulder and a cannon-like right foot, is showing how an athletically superior U.S. team can play a brand of soccer that emphasizes precision passing and speed. The efforts of previous coaches to develop a more sophisticated style emphasizing possession have produced three consecutive Olympic gold medals—won by the narrowest of margins— but no world championships since 1999, when Brandi Chastain blasted home a final penalty kick, ripped off her shirt and changed women’s sports forever.  “There has been this idea developing that if you hang back and stay organized defensively, you can beat the U.S. women,” said Alexi Lalas, the former star defender for the U.S. men who is now an analyst for Fox Sports. “You’ll get your chances and if you take advantage of them you can win.”  Japan did it in the World Cup final in 2011. Sweden and Denmark pulled it off last year at the Algarve Cup in Portugal, beating the U.S. 1-0 and 5-3, respectively. On any given day, other technically proficient teams can be dangerous opponents. At the World Cup, the hometown Canadians should prove awfully tough, too.  Ellis, who took over last year, has embraced the physical advantages of the American women. Playing keep-away can be plenty effective, she says, but there is also nothing wrong with out-muscling opponents and punishing them with long balls from the midfield to strikers Alex Morgan and Sydney Leroux, who have the deer-like speed necessary to get behind the defense.  “A ball from the midfield over the defenders can be an incredible weapon,” Ellis said.  However, when opponents sag back on defense, playing eight or even 10 players behind the ball, the U.S. women need enough game smarts and technical skills to break down what can seem like a series of impenetrable walls in front of the opponent’s goal. This is where Lloyd, Version 3.0, comes in.  Six weeks before the World Cup, Lloyd arrives at a town-owned gym in southern New Jersey, about a 15-minute drive from her home, just after 9 a.m. The building is a cinderblock and steel structure with three basketball courts, devoid of modern accessories like machines to measure things like VO2 max levels. The U.S. women are in the middle of a two-week break between pre-World Cup training camps. Most of the players do some light conditioning to remain healthy and rested before the biggest tournament in their sport.  Lloyd treats her downtime differently. Since 2003 when she flamed out of the U.S. team’s U-21 team for players 20 or younger, she has used every break from college or professional soccer to train relentlessly with a former Australian pro named James Galanis, who oversees a southern New Jersey youth soccer academy.  At 43, paunchy and bespectacled, Galanis comes off like a wizard instructor from the Harry Potter films. He and Lloyd first met on a winter Friday evening 12 years ago. Under floodlights, Galanis ran Lloyd through a series of drills to evaluate her skills.  Lloyd was still a student at Rutgers. She was supposed to go skiing with her friends that weekend. Galanis said if she was serious about becoming a fixture on the U.S. team, the game had to come first, even if it meant dropping her weekend plans on a moment’s notice. Lloyd skipped the ski trip. Galanis has been her mentor ever since.  Every session, Galanis and Lloyd work through a series of drills aimed at belatedly developing all the skills and creativity that come naturally to players who grow up playing pick-up games all afternoon in Europe and Latin America. Even mediocre athletes in Brazil can play beach volleyball using only their feet—really.  By contrast, children in the U.S. rarely play soccer outside of a rigid, organized practice. That leaves only one way to catch up as an adult—a seemingly endless series of repetitive drills which only increase in intensity with the World Cup a month away.  “Everything in this game is a golf swing,” Galanis explains. “There’s a precision to it.”  Like an eighth-grader at travel-soccer practice, Lloyd sprints up the gym floor dribbling only with her right foot, first the outside, then the inside. Then she does the same with her left. On one series, she fakes a kick before each touch, making sure to raise one arm in the exact motion. On another she dips her inside shoulder each time to accent a feint.  She whacks the ball off the cinderblock wall 15-feet away, cradling the ricochets at her ankle the way a shortstop uses a glove to field a grounder. She takes a series of hard passes from Galanis at midcourt, turns with the ball and sprints away with it. Then she pounds it against a wall, traps the rebound and passes it back to Galanis, over and over.  After a few minutes of one-touch, she hits a series of chips to Galanis, chasing the perfect arc. On and on it goes, basic drills that wouldn’t seem necessary for the top midfielder on the world’s top team. Forty-five minutes of strength training using tension cords are next. At night she will meet Galanis at a nearby track for 90 minutes of endurance training, everything from a series of 50-yard sprints to three-mile tempo runs.  When Johnston started training with Lloyd last fall, the 23-year-old defender quickly realized how long it had been since she had really worked on the simplest skills, she said.  “No one trains like Carli,” added Heather Mitts, a former longtime U.S. team member who has trained with her.  Yet, even with all that preparation, in the year following the last World Cup, it all seemed like it was going to slip away for Lloyd. She’d had scored just once and missed that crucial penalty kick against Japan. As she tried to force the action in subsequent games, too many passes began landing at the feet of defenders, a pattern that continued in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.  During a trip to Sweden for an Olympic tune-up in June 2012, then-head coach Pia Sundhage came to Lloyd’s hotel room and told her she was headed to the bench in favor of Lauren Holiday, a player five years younger.“You can’t make too many mistakes in the middle of the park,” Lloyd said.  Returning home in early July for a two-week break before the Olympics, she cried in front of Galanis for the first time.  He told her to quit pouting and get to work. An opportunity would arise, he promised. Her job was to be as sharp as possible when it came. That meant six hours a day of training during those two weeks before the team left for London, three in the morning with the ball, and three in the evening focused on both endurance and pure speed. Think 200s, 400s and 800s, plus shorts sprints up hills and across sand pits to build leg strength.  A dozen minutes into the team’s opening game of the 2012 Olympics against France, defensive midfielder Shannon Boxx re-injured her hamstring. Sundhage sent Lloyd onto the field to replace her. Early in the second half, Lloyd scored the go-ahead goal in a 4-2 win. Lloyd started every game after that. Two weeks later, she scored both U.S. goals in the 2-1 win over Japan for the gold medal.  When Lloyd got home, Galanis told her she had finally shown him a glimpse of the player he believed she could become. He said she had reached about 50% of her potential. A week later they began training together again.  The focus now is on what Galanis says is the third phase of Lloyd’s development as player. The first years were about getting her in the door to the U.S. team. Next came evolving into a major contributor. That began with her gold-medal winning goal against Brazil in extra time at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.  “Phase three is about taking over and finishing,” Galanis said, using soccer vernacular for goal-scoring.  Lloyd scored 33 goals in 66 national team games from 2012-14, compared with nine goals in 40 games from 2009-11. “There may be a phase four,” Galanis said. “We’re not sure yet.”  Other members of this team are better known. Alex Morgan, the star striker, has 1.7 million Twitter followers. The Internet features plenty of pictures of her and Sydney Leroux, her close friend and fellow striker, in skimpy bathing suits and at celebrity-filled parties. Not Lloyd, who recently got engaged to her longtime boyfriend Brian Hollins, an assistant golf pro in New Jersey.  During tournaments, three times a day Lloyd will spend 30 minutes with her eyes closed visualizing game scenarios. She won’t spend any time with family or friends in Canada, just as she didn’t during the 2012 Olympics. Galanis has banned all of them, along with himself.  Lloyd didn’t actually believe she could be the kind of player who could take over a game until she scored those two goals against Japan in the 2012 Olympic final. Now she understands very clearly her job in the center of the field—to lead a withering press and counterattack that eventually overwhelms opponents. She must connect the defense and the offense, get the ball out to the wings and up the field, and keep it glued to her feet until she can deliver it to someone else’s or into the back of the net.  Nearly four years after a missed penalty kick for the ages, she believes she is up to the task and that she knows why.  “It’s all about repetition,” she said. “You can watch my game and pick out what I have been working on.”  Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
Carli Lloyd anchors the U.S. Women’s World Cup offense, feeding the ball to teammates like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, or scoring herself.