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A review by liralen
When Nobody Was Watching: My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World by Carli Lloyd, Wayne Coffey
3.0
Soccer was pretty much my first love, and I retain a vague interest in soccer memoirs, so I thought I'd give this a go. It's...not great. Impossible to know how much of the writing is down to Lloyd and how much down to Coffey (the ghostwriter), but it ends up feeling pretty bland. The present tense didn't work for me, and there's very little development of characters beyond Lloyd and James Galanis, her trainer.
What there is is a lot of soccer. Huge swathes of the book that are rundowns of tournament games—which is fine here and there, but tournaments by nature consist of numerous games, which means that there'll be a breakdown of a game against China (who scored, and how many minutes into the game, and who was fouled, and so on and so forth), followed by a breakdown of a game against France, and a game against Brazil... It's probably more interesting for people who followed those games closely or who like reading game recaps. Personally, I would have been much much much more interesting in seeing some discussion of the pay discrimination lawsuit—there's a photo from said period, but no mention otherwise. (Abby Wambach, who I'm not sure was actually involved in the suit, lays it out in much more detail in Forward.) I can only guess that somebody involved in the book's writing or publication decided that talking about women earning equal pay would be too controversial or too complicated or something for the target audience...? I hope it's not that, but it seems like a glaring omission.
I don't know. A lot of it feels like an extended elegy to a still-living Galanis. Otherwise...too much 'here are the people who done me wrong' (including calling out specific older-generation national team members for not being nice enough to newcomers) and not enough people-driven story.
What there is is a lot of soccer. Huge swathes of the book that are rundowns of tournament games—which is fine here and there, but tournaments by nature consist of numerous games, which means that there'll be a breakdown of a game against China (who scored, and how many minutes into the game, and who was fouled, and so on and so forth), followed by a breakdown of a game against France, and a game against Brazil... It's probably more interesting for people who followed those games closely or who like reading game recaps. Personally, I would have been much much much more interesting in seeing some discussion of the pay discrimination lawsuit—there's a photo from said period, but no mention otherwise. (Abby Wambach, who I'm not sure was actually involved in the suit, lays it out in much more detail in Forward.) I can only guess that somebody involved in the book's writing or publication decided that talking about women earning equal pay would be too controversial or too complicated or something for the target audience...? I hope it's not that, but it seems like a glaring omission.
I don't know. A lot of it feels like an extended elegy to a still-living Galanis. Otherwise...too much 'here are the people who done me wrong' (including calling out specific older-generation national team members for not being nice enough to newcomers) and not enough people-driven story.