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The U.S. kicks off and pushes immediately

That’s not unexpected, but the Dutch will need to be on guard. At the moment even O’Hara and Dunn have pushed into the attack. It’s a sign of confidence if anything.

An American Invasion in Lyon: Rory Smith checks in

Via Rory Smith of The Times, inside the Stade de Lyon:

It is quite hard to underestimate the scale of the American takeover of Lyon: this morning, certainly, there was no street that did not contain at least one person carrying the Stars and Stripes, or draping it over their shoulders, or wearing it on their pants.

On the trams streaming out of Lyon toward the stadium, American fans outnumbered the Dutch by some considerable order of magnitude: three to one? Four to one? Five? Given that the Netherlands is, famously, quite a lot closer to France than the United States, and given that the Dutch generally travel in vast quantities, that they should be in such a minority is testament to the pulling power of this United States team.

In the stadium, Jill Ellis’s players will feel they have home advantage, even on this side of the Atlantic. There is one bank of Dutch fans, in that vibrant orange, but most of the rest of the stands are dominated by Americans. The players were roared from the field when their warm-up session ended; each name was cheered when the starting lineup was read out, and none more so than Megan Rapinoe, the captain, and the standard-bearer for this squad. That says a lot, too, about the team and its fans and the bond between them: her unapologetic activism, her outspokenness, makes her more popular, not less.