The table for her was quiet. At the United States women’s national team’s pre-World Cup media day, third goalkeeper Adrianna Franch, who goes by “AD,” wasn’t a big draw. Only a handful of reporters surrounded the back-to-back National Women’s Soccer League goalkeeper of the year, whereas dozens would clamor around the team’s big stars. But they were rapt, drawn in by Franch’s eloquence and intensity as her freshly cut Mohawk bobbed up and down with her gestures.

Still, she almost certainly won’t play in France. Backup goalkeepers seldom get on the field in what is, at most, a seven-game tournament. Third goalkeepers have no hope at all. The odds are prohibitive.

Which casts Franch in a strange role. One that doesn’t even exist at the Olympics, where teams are allowed to roster just two goalkeepers, rather than three. Yet the 28-year-old Portland Thorns player will be there, at every practice and every game, at every meal and every meeting, very much a part of the team looking to defend its World Cup title but also kind of on the outside.

Alyssa Naeher is the undisputed starter. Franch says nobody has ever said whether she’s the second goalkeeper or the third. But Ashlyn Harris has 21 national team appearances to her name. Franch has just one, which didn’t come until March 2 of this year, in a 2-2 tie with England in the SheBelieves Cup – when she made a mistake that cost her team a goal. Harris, then, is the logical alternative to Naeher, should she get injured or suffer a disastrous collapse in form.

So what is Franch going for?

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The goalkeeping hierarchy is not uncontroversial.

When Hope Solo was unceremoniously kicked off the national team after the 2016 Olympic debacle and almost a decade as the undisputed starter, a bit of a goalkeeping crisis ensued. Little attention had been paid to Solo’s succession, such was her transcendence and age when the federation finally grew fed up with her antics. Harris and Naeher were allowed to fight it out for the job. Franch wasn’t yet established in the NWSL. But by the end of 2017, she was the league’s goalkeeper of the year and she won that prize again in 2018. Both years, she beat out Naeher and Harris. Yet she never got a real chance with the national team.

View photos Adrianna Franch has a valuable role to play for the United States women's national team. (Getty) More

She’d first been called up in 2012, back when she played at Oklahoma State University, and she represented the under-20 and under-23 national teams. But it would be seven years from her first call-up to actually getting on the field.

“We brought her in a long, long time ago and she wasn’t ready,” head coach Jill Ellis says. “But when I brought her in [again] I could see a growth in her. The success she had with the Portland Thorns, that gave her a confidence when she came back into the national team environment. You could see a slightly different mindset in terms of her comfort level being around elite players.”

Franch, for her part, doesn’t worry about whether or not she got a fair shake anymore. “It’s not really something I have control of, so I try not to think on that too much,” she says. “Though there were times when I did and was frustrated about it and read too much into it, rather than focusing on my career on letting that do the talking. When the team is doing well and the goalkeeper is consistent, the coach isn’t going to make a change and that’s understandable. You only control what you can control, and that’s me and what I do on a daily basis.”

Besides, she figures there’s no room for rancor in a World Cup campaign. “In the space that we’re in right now, me, personally, I’m the team,” she says. “And the goalkeeper unit, we don’t have time for that kind of thinking. We’re here to win the World Cup. And if an individual starts thinking along those lines, they start pulling away from the team. And I think it’s really important not to be thinking about that. If you’re stuck in that mindset, when you are called upon, it’ll be hard to get out of that and make sure you are ready. That’s a distraction from being ready and giving to the team and what they need.”

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