Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd seize moment for U.S. women’s soccer

LONDON — When the clock finally ran out after the U.S. women’s soccer team’s gold-medal win over Japan on Thursday, a group of players ran from the sideline to goalkeeper Hope Solo while another dashed toward the other end of the field to dog-pile atop Carli Lloyd.

How appropriate. Because in a game that was so much about retribution and redemption, few players felt as if they had more to prove than Solo and Lloyd.

In the Olympic semifinals, Solo had given up three goals to Canada’s Christine Sinclair, the most the U.S. has allowed in a game Solo has played in in more than four years. And Lloyd, who had started every game for the U.S. last year, started these Olympics on the bench.

But both came up big Thursday when it counted most, with Lloyd scoring a pair of goals and Solo making three phenomenal saves in a 2-1 victory that gave the U.S. its third consecutive Olympic title.

“We weren’t coming home without a gold medal,” said Lloyd, who scored the game-winner in the last Olympic final when her overtime score beat Brazil. “We all said that. We all worked hard for that. It feels really good to go out like this.”

Yet it’s likely the win felt best for forward Abby Wambach, the heart and soul of the U.S. team who has repeatedly been frustrated on soccer’s biggest stages.

A broken leg, suffered in the last tuneup before the 2008 Olympics, kept her out of the Beijing Games. And she has narrowly missed in two attempts at winning a World Cup, with the U.S. losing against Japan on penalty kicks last summer.

On Thursday, however, she finally got to leave a stadium with a gold medal around her neck and an American flag draped over her shoulders.

“It’s been eight years since I’ve been champion of the world,” said Wambach, who played on the gold-medal team in Athens. “We came so close to winning a World Cup, which I’ve not yet done. But I knew that if we put our energies, our belief in each other into this year, we could pull off something really special. And we did.”

It wasn’t easy. Playing at Wembley Stadium in front of an Olympic-record crowd of 80,203, the U.S. struck early on a Lloyd header in the eighth minute. Lloyd may actually have made a mistake on the play, since the Alex Morgan pass that led to the score was intended for Wambach, who had raced toward the six-yard box from the right side and raised her left foot for the shot.

But Lloyd cut in front of her teammate, then dipped her head to deflect the ball in.

She made it 2-0 nine minutes into the second half, making a long run through the Japanese defense before pulling up and lining a 20-foot shot into the side of the net at the left post.

Then it was Solo’s turn. She has made most of the news in this tournament on Twitter, but she was huge in goal for the U.S. on Thursday, making two acrobatic — and nearly identical — saves on Yuki Ogimi in the first half, leaping to tip a header off the crossbar, then deflecting a shot off Ogimi’s foot in the 33rd minute.

Ogimi didn’t quit, though, cutting the lead in half in the 63rd minute after taking the ball off U.S. defender Kelley O’Hara’s foot at the edge of the six-yard box and banging it into an open net.

That was all Japan would get, though, with Solo making the biggest save of the tournament in the closing minutes when second-half substitute Mana Iwabuchi took advantage of a lazy clearance by the Americans to break in on the goal alone.

“You can’t win a major tournament without some great goalkeeping,” said Solo, who proved that by standing her ground and waiting for Iwabuchi to commit. When she did, Solo dived to her left to push the ball away.

“Hope saved the day. Literally,” an emotional Wambach said. “I’m so proud of us. The resilience of this team. For never giving up. For always believing in ourselves.

“This is what the Olympics is all about.”

And now she has a medal to prove it.

kevin.baxter@latimes.com