How much can you learn from a match in which the opponent perfectly plays to your strengths?

United States women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes must mull that context as she analyzes her team’s 3-0 win over China on Saturday.

Hayes has been operating a carousel of new and inexperienced players to identify the group she will develop on the road to the 2027 Women’s World Cup. She sought clarity at the wide forwards role ahead of this training camp — and she ostensibly got answers on Saturday.

Forwards Alyssa Thompson and Michelle Cooper were electric on Saturday as the USWNT’s starting wingers who terrorized China’s defense. Each player registered an assist and frequently got into space behind to be the catalyst of the USWNT’s attack. China may have had its own development reasons to play a higher line, which gave Saturday’s game the feeling of two teams playing around rather than against each other.

But Hayes now has further confirmation that both Thompson and Cooper are part of the solution as she narrows down her team heading into the summer. What’s more important is that Saturday’s performance, combined with recent outings, shows that the USWNT has depth in a winger position and area of the field that has long been integral to its dominance.

If the Americans want to win the 2027 World Cup, they’ll need to be excellent in those wide areas. The self-proclaimed “Triple Espresso” of Trinity Rodman, Mallory Swanson and Sophia Wilson scored 10 of the USWNT’s 12 goals on the Americans’ Olympic gold-medal run last year. The dominance of Rodman and Swanson in those wide areas at last year’s Olympics carried on the team’s strength from its World Cup title in 2019, when Megan Rapinoe, Tobin Heath and Christen Press were ruthless wide forwards.

But except for a brief appearance by Rodman in April, all three of the Triple Espresso have been absent from the team since that gold-medal game last August. Swanson and Wilson are on maternity leave and Rodman has been sidelined for over a month with a chronic back issue. Hayes needs solutions beyond just this camp.

On Saturday, Thompson and Cooper salivated from the opening whistle as China — by some surprise — applied high pressure on the USWNT and held an increasingly high defensive line. It was a situation ripe for the Americans to exploit, and they did exactly that. Thompson assisted Catarina Macario’s opening goal (after nearly scoring it herself). Thompson also made the darting diagonal run and then served the cross that led to the USWNT’s second goal. Cooper consistently utilized the space behind China’s defense to serve dangerous crosses, and she assisted Lindsey Heaps’ goal for the third USWNT tally.

“We wanted to be a bit more dynamic in our rotation, so the timing of those rotations to pull their wide player out, I thought in the first half, we did that really, really well,” Hayes said. “What we didn’t do as well as we wanted to was we tried to find the spaces in between when actually the space was in behind. So, sometimes we overplayed. And actually, if they want to give us [those] areas, then we take [those] areas.”

Thompson, who at 20 years old already has World Cup experience, has emerged as a long-term answer since her resurgence in form last fall after missing out on the Olympics. She has been one of the best American players in the NWSL since September, which has led her to become a consistent winger for the USWNT.

At minimum, Thompson continues to look like both a short- and long-term answer for the USWNT. Her form for club and country makes her a deserved starter for Hayes. Cooper is a less proven entity at the international level — Saturday was only her fifth cap — but as Hayes said after the match, “she’s growing into the shirt.”

Add in the versatile Ally Sentnor, among other emerging talents — Gisele Thompson was supposed to trial as a winger, but left camp injured — and the USWNT is getting back to its days of forwards who can dominate games in wide areas. That was sorely missed at the 2023 World Cup, where the team crashed out in the Round of 16.

None of which is to say that Rodman, Swanson and Wilson won’t be part of the 2027 World Cup picture at 23, 27 and 24 years old, respectively. But the USWNT needs depth — and it needs to use this formative time to shape its identity before games start to count again, like at qualifying next year. While 2027 feels like a long time away, there are only about a dozen more international windows until the next World Cup.

So, yes, it would be wise not to draw too definitive of a conclusion from Saturday’s result. China rightfully played like a team trying to learn a hard lesson about itself rather than win a friendly.

Hayes, however, has said frequently that she can’t change the fact that she can only work with the amount of time that she has. And on Saturday, she said she wasn’t going to take anything away from a victory that should have provided her with more affirmative answers about who she can rely on.

“I always say it’s one of those real terrible curses with women, where they are always so extremely hard on themselves,” Hayes said. “So, I’m not going to do that today. I’m going to make sure I keep lifting my team spirits, because they’re such a tremendous bunch, and they do so much to represent the badge in the way they do. And today, I thought they were tremendous at what I’d asked them to do.”