Girma tipped to be cornerstone of US defence for years

NEW YORK : United States defender Naomi Girma completes her meteoric rise from national team debutant to the Women's World Cup stage next month and many are predicting she will be a key player for the four-times champions for many years.

The 23-year-old centre back first played for the senior U.S. team last year and quickly settled in to earn a place in Vlatko Andonovski's World Cup squad.

"She’s threading balls down the middle of the field, skipping, bypassing the midfielders, playing it into the forwards’ feet," retired two-time World Cup winner Carli Lloyd told Reuters.

"She’s playing well ahead of her time for the little experience she’s had. It’s really impressive," added Lloyd who is now a Fox Sports analyst.

Girma has overcome problems on her journey to soccer's biggest stage, forced to withdraw due to injury from her first senior call-up in 2019 and suffering a serious knee problem in 2020.

"For me it feels like a lot of hard work coming together," she told Reuters.

"There was like a lot of work that went behind the scenes, because I went out injured and not playing... it was really gratifying and rewarding to feel like it was paying off and putting me in a better position."

Girma will be particularly crucial for the U.S. after veteran Becky Sauerbrunn, long-time bedrock of the defence, announced last week she would miss the World Cup due to injury.

"Her potential is one of the highest bars of potential I've seen in a person in a long time," said Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper in the United States' 1999 World Cup-winning team.

Scurry, the host of the "Counterattack" podcast, told Reuters it is "almost blinding how quickly" Girma has improved and believes the Stanford graduate is a future team captain.

"She can read the