Ada Hegerberg, the team’s striker, watched it happen from afar; she missed the whole of last season’s campaign with injury. She noted, too, how quickly women’s soccer seemed to move, how fast the world could change. Barcelona now was the team held up as the game’s standard-bearer. The Women’s Super League, England’s highest division, was now regarded as the strongest championship. Lyon’s achievements, its pre-eminence, seemed to Hegerberg to have been eclipsed and, on some level, forgotten.
That conclusion may have been, on reflection, premature. Lyon is on track to regain its French title; it has not lost a game all season, and has only conceded eight goals. More important, with Hegerberg restored to the side, it has returned to the Champions League final. Barcelona, the team it still regards as the pretender to its throne, is its opponent in Turin on Saturday.
Lyon will go into the game as an outsider, more or less, though it is harder to compare the relative merits of teams in the women’s game than it is in the men’s. The fact that so many games — especially away from England — are not televised has a warping effect on how players, and teams, are regarded, as Caroline Graham Hansen, Hegerberg’s compatriot for Norway but rival this weekend, pointed out earlier this year.
It would be of enormous benefit to the women’s game, of course, for that situation to be amended, for its constituent clubs and their stars to be granted more airtime. It is a minor solace, but a solace nonetheless, that it does lend these sorts of games an element of mystery that is sorely lacking from the men’s game. Lyon and Barcelona are both dominant in their domestic leagues, but it is difficult to know what that dominance means in relation to each other.

Source: New York Times

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