Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #167: Olympic Qualifying — the play-in game vs Honduras

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

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Welcome to the scuffed podcast. I'm Adam Bells in Georgia. With me is Greg Velasquez in Iowa. We talk about U.S. men's soccer. Hey, we didn't qualify for the Olympics. Honduras beat us 2-1 on a set piece and a howler from David Ochoa. Jackson, you had pulled one back with a fantastic strike in the second half, but it was, in general, a bad performance, and we deserve to lose and not go to Tokyo. Greg, how are you? Bells, I'm all right. I'd actually canceled my Tokyo ticket after the first game in the group stage because I was quite sure that things were. were not going to know I didn't uh yeah it was disappointing disappointing day disappointing event yeah nobody gets to go nobody not from japan gets to go to the olympics anyway so this is going to be a television experience but it will not be that either we got to walk a fine line here between candor and sort of gratuitous criticism so forgive us in advance if you think we fall off that line

uh this is a game the u.s vaccine rollout is going swimmingly a lot of good things to be excited about in our country our best U-23s are in fact in Europe playing for big clubs. The women are prohibited favorites to take gold in Japan. They're the best. The women are the best national team of all time by a long distance. And these young men who lost Honduras are all very disappointed and have their whole lives ahead of them. And we don't need to take out our general life frustrations on them.

But it's open season on Jason Kreis, is it not? It absolutely is Jason Christ and maybe one layer removed to the people who decided to hire him. Yep. Here's a clip from Christ in his post-game press conference. Again, it just comes down to general sharpness of players. I mean, I don't know that I've ever seen a game where we've had players miscontrol the ball so much, balls rolling under people's feet, passing out of bounds. These are things that are just really, you kind of scratch your head.

These are young players that need to continue to push forward and continue to approve and the more experiences that they have in pressure situations. And I think they learn to cope with them and perform better through those. We have players that aren't moving. We have people on the ball that aren't committing defenders to make decisions, to open up spaces. We have guys that look like they just don't really want the ball. And so, you know, again, it just kind of goes back to mostly mentality for me. That's my opinion right now, and I could have it wrong.

But, you know, I just, I think at the end of the day, it just wasn't quite there from a confidence point of view. He said a lot more, including that he doesn't question anyone's commitment and work rate and that everyone wanted very, badly to win, so it wasn't all just him bagging on his players, but it was a little bit of that. What is your assessment of Jason Christ's, Greg? So I think basically all of the blame falls at Christ's feet. And again, you could take it another layer and say whoever decided Christ was the right person for this. And then in some of the comments, I don't think they were in that one we just listened to.

But Christ did like mention that the roster selections weren't all his to make or that there was other input that maybe he couldn't ignore. So I'm very curious about how the final say, who had the final say, or how much pressure there was on to take certain players. Yeah, we need an inquest into that. Or do we? Or do we? I'd be kind of interested in that. Yeah, yeah, I would do. He did pick some of the wrong players, and we will get into specifics on that. But here's the thing for me that's the most troubling is even the ones he picked didn't play up to what I perceive to be their level. Like Sam Vines, I think, is a pretty good player.

He was not a good player last night. Georgie Mihailovich, a player I don't, I'm not a big fan of. Even he wasn't as sharp as I think I've seen him play in other settings. And even Jonathan Lewis, a player I don't rate at all, was worse last night than usual. So, and of course, Hazis Ferreira wasn't up to his level. Yeah, I just don't think there was any sort of, hole is better than the sum of its parts. In fact, the hole was worse than the sum of its parts.

And that's even after some roster decisions, which we can get into. Yeah, and I don't think that those two things, the poor player selections and then the underperformances are at all unrelated. For me, this actually feels a lot like the senior team sort of 2019 calendar year played out and fast forward over the course of an entire tournament. When you sort of get your personnel like so obviously wrong, it can kind of be parallelizing. to everyone. The lasting image from the senior team from 2019 for me was Christian Pulisic in tears on the bench after being taken off the field and the Canada loss. Very good players can look totally impotent if they don't have that basic framework to succeed. And here's the thing. We didn't even have very good players in Guadalajara, I would say. We had some role players, but no one on

that team is in the same Pulisic stratosphere, even like relatively, even compared to the other players there. Right. And that makes it all the more important. to sort of get that framework right. And Christ very obviously didn't do that. Yeah. So there you have it. Christ didn't do a good job. You heard it here first.

The timeline isn't going to be that long and it's not that interesting. So let's get in some other big picture stuff first. We'll get into the like who should have been on the roster in a few moments. But big picture, I have to credit Matt Hartman with this. He's a friend of the pod. It's been a guest on the podcast. That's a lot. We communicate with him regularly. He pointed out that, you know, the number of camps that Mexico has put together for all youth national team age groups over the last couple years is 40 compared to 14 for the U.S. And so they're just on the men's side. Yeah. On the men side. Yeah. So they're, they're just out camping us. And that, you know, that matters to some extent. It's not the biggest factor here, but it is a factor that we're not able to.

bring in players and just plug and play them in a system. We don't really have an up and down the age group system yet because we have, because there's been so much upheaval at U.S. soccer, we had all these coaching vacancies at the youth national team levels. And then we just, like, it seems like we just sort of like latch on to the nearest also ran MLS coach and hire them to run a team for a while. That's what crisis. I mean, that's not, I don't think that's unfair.

You know, he had a couple unsuccessful steps. stints lately. And here he was, and he needed a job, and he got it. And same is kind of true of Anthony Hudson, coaching the U-20s, Rafael. Vicky, is how I'm saying it. Yeah, Vicky. Not as much of that profile, but kind of in the same, cut from the same cloth coaching the U-17s. And there's just not a lot of continuity, so we don't have a big player pool that's familiar with what they need to be doing. And that's, that was kind of an issue here. And it's kind of, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I'll say, I would agree with you that there isn't that system, that plug-in-play system yet.

I think it's clear that we're moving that direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just simply haven't had the, quite literally the time to do it yet. So, you know, we've just sort of settled onto this pressing scheme, that 433 press. And our possession has been a little bit more stable since Burholder has taken over. But they're just haven't, like you said, the camps haven't been there to sort of get the guys integrated into that scheme. Right. And you could say, I mean, the charitable way to say it is we have not had enough time. The uncharitable way or maybe even the more, you know, you could argue the more realistic way is we just haven't had the commitment and the, you know, the management savvy to get it done. It seems like those jobs were open for such a long time, even after Burrhalter was hired and everybody was complaining about it and just nothing would happen. Right. I remember that sort of like there was just attrition. Like we had.

guys in those positions, in those youth coaching positions, and we sort of just waited for them to notice that they weren't being pursued further. Yeah. And like finally we're just like, okay, I'm gone. And then once all of them finally quit, I think Tab might have been the last holdout. Then I was like, okay, now we will, now we will start filling these spots. Yeah. And it's not, this isn't some kind of like sky's falling bit, but it's something to keep in mind as, you know, despite this incredible generation of talent we have coming up in the 18 to 23 range, most of them not available for the Olympic qualifiers because they're too good and they play for clubs that won't release them for it.

Despite all that, we have not really established a system up and down the youth ranks and we still need to do that. And we're, you know, USSF doesn't have a ton of money to play with at the moment. because the men's team doesn't produce as much revenue as it used to back in the good old days of the 2000s. And then there's this, you know, the dismantle of the Development Academy is another thing to keep an eye on. MLS Next is ostensibly the replacement, but nobody knows if it's as serious about player development as the Development Academy model was. So, you know, keep an eye on this. Keep an eye on this space, as they say.

We don't want this talent, like the Raina, the Raina Pulisik-Dest, McKinney Adams' generation to be a one-off, you know? Right, right. That would be disastrous for my mentality. Yeah. I've convinced myself that this is the new normal and I can't go back. No, there's no going back to what it was. The only way to go back is to just quit paying attention to the sport. So, yeah, and no doubt there were challenges.

There's a lot of caveats. COVID was a huge challenge for everybody, including U.S. soccer. You know, the heavily litigated nature of USSF is also, there's just upheaval and problems around that organization that obviously have an effect on all of this. But we've got to get it, we got to get it sorted out. We got to get the men's youth national team sorted out, and we got to figure out this MLS next development model.

But should we, in the meantime, should we talk about this one game that that sort of stands for all of our frustrations? Yes. And I also should say there's not like a direct line between any of what I just said in this game last night. Here's the lineup. Here's the line up. David Ochoa, Engole, Herrera, Glad, Kessler, and Vines across the back, Perea at the 6, Yul and Dodson in the eight positions, and then Georgie, Ferreira, and Lewis across the front.

Honduras had Guti and Goal. Melendez, Daniel Maldonado, has. name will come up again, Garcia and Decos across the back line, Edwin Rodriguez and Arazzo across as the double pivot in a 4-2-3-1, and then the band of three was Reyes, Rivas, and Luis Palma at former Real Monarchs player, and then Juan Carlos Obergon at the 9, and RGVito's player that's Rio Grande Valley. So, timeline. Here we go. Not a ton of chances to talk.

about. Yeah, not a ton of anything to talk about. It's just not great soccer from the U.S. I think everybody was complaining about it on the internet and the complaints were justified. You know, it was not pretty. I'm telling you, it was that 2019 parallel really stands out for me. Yeah, it's a good parallel. I hadn't really thought of it until we got on the phone together. So the Honduras goal comes in first half stoppage time. I mean, they had their chances. You know, that's a couple close, close shaves. But here's a free kick from distance that they go short down the right wing. Rodriguez plays it down the right wing.

It doesn't come off and it comes back to him. And then he just pings a gorgeous ball at the back post. And my favorite part about this goal, you know, just from a clinical perspective, is the run from centerback, Danielle Maldonado, who comes from very deep as the U.S. line is stepping forward and he gets him behind and meets the ball and heads it across for Juan Carlos Obrugan and Obrgan kind of wills it with his knee and his heart past the goal, past Achoa into the goal and it rolls in. Yeah, it's honestly hard to sort of figure out where

we went wrong and honestly it looks like an inefficiency that you could try to game on set pieces for that once the ball gets cleared out originally because, you know, of course our defensive line then is going to scramble up field to make sure that Honduras can't camp out directly in front of our goal. But for anyone who's as deep as Maldonado is, you can get a running start going the other way. While all of Honduras's strikers have to backpedal with our line, he can just be on that runway blazing in behind. And if the ball gets hit to the right spot, he's either going to score or create danger. And he made the exact right choice, headed it back across for a nice scrambled home finish. It was a pretty goal, really.

It was, that ball was really, really nice from Rodriguez. And it was the last moment of the first half, a sense of impending doom then set in because it's not like we were generating chances. So I'm just going to say, I still thought like, okay, well, that sucked, but this isn't, we're not going to repeat the last two cycles. Like, surely we're getting one back. We have some players, we can do this. I really did still feel like it was things were not.

I guess I'm always kind of optimistic in that way. Like there's a full half of soccer to go and we have a chance to do this, but I guess I wasn't quite as optimistic as you. Well, my optimism didn't last long. Because it didn't take long in the second half for Honduras to score a second goal. And this is the Achoa Howler. What a shame because without him, we don't get past Costa Rica and get out of the group. But this one was bad.

Dotson nicks the ball off a Honduran attacker and it falls to South Sato in our our in our half. Salseda just blasts it off a guy and it skitters to Herrera in the back. And Herrera plays it backward to Ochoa and he's just too casual. Takes an extra second. And Luis Palma, his former teammate with Rayal Monarchs, pounces and intercepts the pass and the ball bounces directly off his foot into the goal. Yeah, it's tough because Ochoa wasn't even actually under pressure from Palma. Like, Palma had no intention of like really taking the ball. He was just sort of standing there to to disrupt whatever Ochoa wanted to do.

There was no real intent to take it or do anything like what actually happened. And Ochoa just slightly miscalculated or slightly mis-executed. And now it's just something that he's going to have to try to shake off. Yeah. Hope he can shake it off quickly. I think he will. And I'll definitely say that I don't think it will, if he does go on as a professional, it won't really stick with him.

Sean Johnson had a howler a few cycles back in the elimination game. and that's how we failed to qualify for the Olympics that year. And it really only comes up when we're talking about Olympic qualifying. It hasn't just attached itself to him for the rest of his New York City career or when he plays for the national team. I'm glad to hear that. I didn't know that because I do still think Coachella is the player on this team most likely to, well, with the best chance of becoming a senior national team regular.

You could argue about Ferreira and you will. I mean, they're probably going to be in the national team for a while. But, but, I mean, Achoa, Achoa has the skill with his feet. Funny thing to say after a howler like that. But he does. Remember, Zach Stephan in 2019, because I'm just going to keep going back to 2019,

had like three straight games where he gave the ball directly to an opponent. They just didn't happen in extremely high profile elimination soccer games. Right, right. But he does. He does have, I think he has good skills with his feet. and he did a lot of good, like, coming out and getting big and snuffing out chances. I think box command of the box and shot stopping, pure shot stopping are still questions for him as a, like, you know, if we're talking about him being a national team goalkeeper, but he's got a bright future.

I hope he does. I mean, I'm going to be, I'm really cautious with him right now because he's still not a starting goalkeeper for MLS. Yeah. Let's see where he lands this season. Yeah, fair enough. And then we got one back. 52nd minute, Jackson Ewell breathes life into the match

by tracking down a Perea interception. Pera intercepts it from a very casual Honduras side in the buildup, and it nicks it forward to Ewell, and then he takes a touch to the inside and hits a rope, upper 90. He was pumped. He was saying, let's go, guys.

Let's LFG. So all of my optimism had evaporated after the Ochoa situation. I'm going to call it the Ochoa unpleasantness. But then as soon as you will hit that and got us back to 2-1, even though that wasn't like some incredible chance that we, you know, created a sitter or anything, I was like, okay, my optimism was back and somewhere we're going to steal one more goal and at least send this thing into overtime

and at least like put ourselves in that situation. So I had the optimism again. It was a roller coaster for me. Yeah. I mean, and the thing is we did get some chances to equalize. We just didn't finish them. The one I want to mention is, one of the ones I want to mention is Lewis's freeheader at the six on a ball that just pops up and hangs in the air.

He comes flying at it. I think does everything right to meet the ball and then just heads it right at the defender who's in the middle of the goal. We can argue about how much of the goal was open for him to, to aim for, but there was a fair amount of goal there for him. And the goalkeeper is diving behind the defender that ended up clearing it off the line. So the goalkeeper was in a suboptimal position for making a save. I'll give it to you.

It felt like there was a crowd of bodies there, you know, of a mismash of defenders and goalkeeper that he had to try to navigate through. I mean, what do you do? It's a point blank header. It's a very good chance. Yeah. the XG is probably like 0.35. And then there was a, can you talk about the Testman created chance?

Yeah, so Testman comes on with like 15 minutes left. The injury replacement Tanner Testman, who didn't start any of the three games, and within that time creates the most dangerous chance of us for the game outside of that header, which is like he did that little shimmy. And we talked about this, too, this ability he has because of his ridiculous,

size, he's just such a massive human being. He just takes a couple of steps towards the end line. He's on the left corner, the left side of the box, and he just sort of gets around the corner. He gains the edge on that defender whose puny strides just can't keep up. And he just clips a ball across. And I think it's Jonathan Lewis, who's six yards out in front of the goal. And Lewis somehow contrives to actually knock the ball away from the goal.

So another Lewis chance, like that's what Lewis is there for. he's not really there to be like a great buildup guy. He's there to finish chances. And this is another one that went begging. Yeah. Wouldn't be so hard on him about that because, you know, we're generally not hard on people for missing chances if he were doing more in the other phases of the game. But he wasn't.

He had a very rough outing last night. And basically, I think the whole tournament was not good for Jonathan Lewis. So, so, oh yeah. And then Cardoso had a very, he had a very rough out. a header almost at the death on a cross. I think from Herrera, Herrera was just pumping crosses in like a championship fullback. And Cardoso couldn't get his head right, you know, and it just kind of bumped over. And then that was that. We were, we were eliminated. Yep. And, you know, the world came crashing down. No, it's not like that. Let's talk about who we would have, who,

roster selections, who should Christ have brought that he didn't bring? Yeah, so this was the big deal, right? This was as foreseeable an issue as we could have, as everyone predicted it was going to be. So when the initial camp roster came out of the 28 guys who went to Guadalajara, something that was really interesting to me was that Yule and Cardoso and Perea were all on it. I guess somehow I'd been like, oh, I'm sure they'll have to bring Cardoso to Europe to play with the senior team. because there just aren't enough spaces for all those guys to play on one team. And Pereo was sort of the guy we'd just convinced to switch over to us.

So I guess I was just expecting him to be part of the Olympic group. But then no, all three of them make the team, which seems crazy to me because it's a 17-player roster. You can't afford to bring three number sixes on that roster. You can barely afford to bring two. Like you pick Jackson-Ewles your guy and that's who you run with. And that's not what we did. We did this ridiculous thing where we bloated up our roster with six. and then Christ says that you'll be surprised.

All these guys can actually play as eights. Johnny Cardoso used to be a striker. He got cute with it, right? He got cute with his roster. And if you get cute with it, you kind of have to deliver. And you know me. I'm not like, outcomes the only thing that matters. If, like, we dominated Honduras with Christ's guys and just had a ton of bad luck in front of goal

and then lost on that same Ochoa Heller, like, okay, that sucks. But Christ would have been somewhat vindicated by the level of three, play. But that just simply is not what happened. We didn't dominate at any stage in the tournament. No. And essentially, like, that's all, that all becomes a Jason Christ issue. He had, he had obvious other selections.

He didn't pick them, got cute, and found out. Yeah. So obvious selections replaced one of those sixes with a more defense to offense-connecting player. I think you're, you've been calling for Keaton Parks, publicly, privately, privately and in the confessional booth. Right. Williamson was the one everyone was talking about,

but I still think it's crazy that Keaton Parks just has not gotten a look. I mentioned it before. I think his only camp has been from March of 2019, like a U-23 camp that they had in Europe. And that was before he'd even played for New York City. So he is, since he's been playing an MLS and starting and looking the part, as far as I'm concerned, of a good player to link defense and a defense and attack, just has not, like, no U.S. soccer interest in him whatsoever.

So I'd convinced myself that it was, like, New York City's issue and they weren't letting Parks and Sands ever, like, ever attend camps. But we could have been bringing him to U.S., like senior team camps, too, on some of these off occasions. I don't know, man. It might not have worked to bring him in at the last second at the 11th hour, but Parks is the one for me that doesn't make sense that he just has not been included at any point. Yeah, I mean, it's not like there was some huge.

amount of cohesiveness and continuity with the roster anyway. I'm bringing them in at the 11th hour. Probably would have been fine relative to... It's a great point. What was it? Like Paul Kennedy, just going back to the thing about youth national team camps, Paul Kennedy tweeted out that what they had 20... I don't think I said this already, did I?

The 21, 21 games for the Mexican U-23s that played in this tournament for that, you know, that core squad compared to two for the U.S.U23s. And again... That's brutal. It is brutal. Again, there are some reasons for that that are out of some people's control, but do we prioritize the Olympics or not? I mean, it's kind of like, that's the question.

Yeah, it's tough. And honestly, like talking specifically about the number of games, I honestly think that could have been the decider. Like if we had just had a couple of games with our 20 group of guys ahead of the tournament, that could have solved some of these issues. You know, we had, he had a lot of camps. But when you're in a camp, you're sort of in this bubble. you can fall in love with the ideas you have and they're going to work in camp because

like if you put georgie as your eight in camp with all the other first team guys that you have they're going to beat the second group of guys you have because you've put all your best ones around him uh but then you do that in a game against somebody else's first team and you kind of just get hit in the mouth and you're like this does not work and that's what happened georgie started out as our eight so we had all these camps then we go into guadalajara and georgie's our eight and it looks terrible and we dump it and never go back to that like that's something that we might have found out with one or two friendlies ahead of time. And that could have solved some of our roster decisions. Like that could have made it be like, okay, you know what? I was wrong.

This isn't working. Let's bring in Keaton Parks. Let's bring in Eric Williamson. Cardoso's not an eight. Let's do what we've seen working with people's club teams. And we didn't get that chance. A couple more people that I think probably should have been brought. You mentioned Williamson. He's a player who can drive a game forward, who can score goals and make a final pass. He He's no Iniesta, but he brings some attacking edge and plenty of defensive chops. So I think he could easily have been there over Cardoso or somebody like that. And then, you know, Matt Doyle got to tip the cap to him here. He's been talking about Obesay needing to be there for as long as I can remember.

And his argument was, go ahead. I think he probably wants a Boba's say with the senior team to be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But even, but when this roster came out, he said, I wish we had a boba say there for set pieces and for aerial threat. And he's, you know, he's decent enough at everything else. And, you know, that, that I find myself really pining for that, especially down the stretch in this game. Soto had a tough tournament. We all know he, you know, he was the guy at fault for the Mexico goal and the one zero loss there. But he also just wasn't sharp in general and was not an aerial threat. And it didn't feel like when we were pumping the ball into the box, trying to get a goal late. against Honduras that we had any chance of doing that. We didn't have the personnel for that kind of game. And a Bobese would have been nice to be able to bring a Bobesei on. So that's another one. And we can go even farther than just, I mean, we had a lot of the wrong guys.

We also had maybe one of the, we ended up maybe with one of the right guys in camp, who we just misused. And that'd be Tanner Testman, where he finally makes the roster because of an injury. And then we don't use them. We don't start him in any of the three. games and it's not until the last 15 minutes that he gets on against Honduras and within that time he creates an incredibly dangerous chance and it's like okay this is this is one of the eights who could have been driving the game forward that we just sat on the whole time going back to the

2019 parallels that was Sebastian Legette for me it was a guy that couldn't get on the field over Christian Rodan and Michael Bradley but then as soon as he did it was like why wasn't this guy the guy the entire year why why were we giving Christian Rodan a thousand minutes to to lead to nothing when we had somebody who can move the game forward. Yeah, totally, totally. And I think, you know, we should also mention the wingers that, you know, in this system, the wingers are supposed to come into the middle of the field and be essentially attacking midfielders. And we see that with the senior national team.

Pulisic and Raina yesterday. They're ostensibly wingers, nominally wingers, but they're coming in. They're kind of floating all over the front, you know, the attacking. area picking up the ball and and playmaking and it works really well it works really well with rayna and pulisic at least against northern ireland and we didn't have any of that in guadalajara we didn't have benjie michel jonathan lewis are not that is not their game and it may be georgie mhalovitch's game in the abstract but like i said earlier he did not play up to his level even and i don't think I'm not a big fan of his game anyway.

Right. It should have fit Georgie. It should have fit Salcedo, but it would have fit both those guys on the left side, neither of them on the right. So you have two guys from the left side to do it. But totally agree. Again, it's that thing where if you're going to have Lewis and Michelle, then you probably need to actually bring like true tens to play with them rather than all the defensive midfielers that we brought.

So instead, again, we kind of like we're in all these different directions with our personnel choices. And talking about Poole's Sick and Raina, there are guys we could have brought who are more sort of center attacking mids than wingers, and that would be like the Raina description. Even the guy like Gianluca Busio, who you could nominally play as one of those wingers,

but could press really well in the front on defense and then could, I think, fairly comfortably operate in those half spaces. And for me, that's what it is. You just need to be comfortable operating that space. You don't necessarily need to be elite, but you need to at least be able to solve some issues on the fly once you receive the ball there. It'd be better if everything was running so smoothly that everything was just Bing, Bing, Bing. As soon as you get it, you know where it's going.

But at some point, we need in a sort of choppy event and a choppy age group that doesn't get a lot of time to play together, can't impose the system. You need guys who can receive the ball and just slow things down and can kind of let the team take a breath as we get into the attack. And we didn't have, I mean, Lewis and Michelle are not those guys. Definitely not, yeah. I'm not clamoring. Just to be clear, I'm not clamoring for Gianluca Busio. I don't know that he would be, I'm not confident at all that he would be any better than Georgie Mihailovich on that right wing.

But we needed those, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is to build a team, you have that kind of a player, essentially more of the attacking mid than the Jonathan Lewis out and out winger. Yep, yep, yep, yep. I was disappointed that Saucato didn't play better, you know. he had some nice moments. We talked about it in some of the other recaps, but he was by and large, very, very sloppy.

I guess we can chalk it up charitably to him not getting much action in the last six months, being hurt a lot of it. Nine months, yep, since August. Okay. He got hurt in August and has barely played since then. I think it's pretty telling that when we needed that goal, when we're down one for the last 20, 30 minutes,

the guy that we actually dropped in to be the lock-picking guy was Jesus Ferrer. We dropped him into almost like the attack. midspot and ran Soto up top and ran UL at the 6. And I think that that kind of illustrates like, oh, after all was said and done, like Christ recognized that's what we needed to have was a UL at the 6 and some kind of a a player comfortable in that space in Ferreira. And we should have been building like that from the start rather than resorting to it

at the very last minute. Yeah. Stock down or unchanged for basically everyone on the roster. I mean, I know it's all on Christ, and I know the players play below their level because of the roster selections, the personnel selections, as the point that you've made here. But still, I mean, just basic soccering was not great from even Hases Ferreira. And I mean, Soto was a big disappointment. I have to, you know, I admit, I'll admit right here, I was not upset that Soto was included over a Bobesei when the roster came out. I was like, that's fine.

You know, Soto, I want to see Soto in this tournament. But in retrospect, I'm like, yeah, we should have definitely had a Bopase there over Soto. I didn't like, I'm just going to say I didn't like Soto from the beginning. I didn't think Soto gave us anything in the senior team showings that couldn't have been offered by anyone else despite his two goals against Panama. I was actually really hoping that Pepe was going to make it on. Yeah. I don't know that he could have done any worse. Nobody would have done worse, I don't think.

I'm not, that's not. I don't mean worse than Soto. I just mean he wouldn't have made our team any worse. Our team couldn't really have been any worse. Yeah. And I'm not trying to be mean to Soto. I mean, he's a great dude. He's been on the podcast before.

But he's got a ways to go, I think. Best of luck to him. So anything else on this game? Just again, the failure is basically like a local failure in that it's, again, I'm putting almost all of it on Jason Christ. Jonathan Lewis, I know he didn't finish those two chances in that game, but he is where we think he is. It's not like we had Jonathan Lewis on some pedestal

that he was going to come in and be our fourth winger on the senior team depth chart. So it's just a matter of like, okay, these guys didn't take the opportunity. And because that didn't happen, we now don't get to enjoy watching our guys play in Tokyo, which would have been great. Yeah. And it will cost some guys. There will be some knock on effects.

for auditions this summer. I know you aren't necessarily that bothered about that. Yeah, I don't, I don't, so my thought is there were going to be these three tournaments this summer, Nations League, Gold Cup, and obviously the Olympics. And the nation, we know from what Burrhalter said, or at least he's strongly indicated, that Nations League is going to be the A team. So it's a real chance to try to beat that Mexico press. That's how I'm thinking of it.

You know, if we can beat up, if we can be Honduras in the semifinal and Mexico gets to the final, then we'll really get to prove the concept against a full strength or close to full strength Mexico team. So that's going to be the A team. And then we're going to have these two sort of auditioning sessions, Gold Cup and the Olympics. I don't know that we need two auditioning sessions at this point. You know, we have like, we have a solid 14, 15 nailed on World Cup roster members, you know, assuming they stay healthy.

So you use the goal cup to sort of winnow that. eight, that list of eight, nine, ten down. That seems like enough to me. And also it's going to be good for my marriage for there not to be any Olympic games to watch and recap. Olympics were going to be awesome because the way the tournament set up is all the men's teams play on the same day and then the next day all of the women's teams play. I think I might actually have that backwards.

Women play first than men. So it'd be like women, we'd get to watch our women play one day, then the men's team play and then there'd be a day off and then women's men's day off. I mean all summer long for the Olympics would have been awesome. Yeah. But yes, it would have taken a toll. I don't even know what the time zones are for that. Are we talking middle of the night stuff?

Yeah, we're talking middle of the night stuff. On the game runs every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, I think you think that there's like a big opportunity lost here audition-wise? I do in the sense that like we have, I think we have a couple of log jams just in a couple of positions. And sort of these youth teams or even the Gold Cup teams are like any good pyramid scheme where

you need some good filler at the bottom to really help the guys at the top. And I don't mean that in like a super condescending way because if you're going to the Olympics, your consolation for being one of the filler pieces is that you're going to get to go represent the United States at the Olympics. But there would definitely be players on that team who are not really in contention. and I mean, as we just saw in Guadalajara, who weren't really in contention for the senior team in the near term and probably ever.

But we need to fill a roster out to help a couple of the guys who might be in contention like the Jackson Ewell like Sam Bines to get their look. And because of a couple of position-specific log jams, I think we kind of did need that tournament. Okay. Like, let's take Stryker, for example.

I know Sergeant in my mind is, basically locked down the top spot, but we have a lot of relative lack of difference between a lot of the other options. And without the U20 World Cup that got canceled, that's like Peppy and Hoppy could have gone to that one. And then we have like six or seven Olympic Age forwards between Nico and Soto and Aconola and Abobese and Ferreira and Dike. And there just aren't enough spots to put them anymore between nations,

League and Gold Cup. Yeah, but I mean, you look, you look forward to like a World Cup 23 and you can only carry three strikers at the most. And it's going to be sergeant. And it's probably going to be Jazi Zardis. And that's exactly, that's exactly kind of what I'm saying is Zardaz definitely sets the floor for that sort of, or he's the barrier. He's who you have to beat out to be the non-target or the non-combination, the non-possession

striker. if we decide to carry one of those. I think he's just on there because, you know, Burrhalter trusts him. I don't think he necessarily fits what we want to do as a striker. But he's like the minimum you have to beat out. So it sure seems like a lot of the guys that we talked about have the potential to beat that out relatively soon. Maybe I'm wrong. And the bar, Zardas's setting is much higher than I think.

But like a DK or a, I don't know, Akanola, it seems like that's attainable. I guess the question becomes, is it urgent to find that out ahead of qualifying? Probably not. Yeah. And I think if we bring four strikers to the Gold Cup and then you get to see some, you know, some strikers besides Sargent in the Nations League. I don't know. It seems like a lot of opportunity there. Well, you can't.

Like Gold Cup is restricted. You're only going to bring 23 guys to Gold Cup. So I don't think there's any way you can bring four strikers there. I'm thinking you could bring three, maybe four, to Nations League, because that's going to be, I assume, like a loose roster rules. Like you can, as long as you just name 23 on the day, but you can fluctuate from game to game. And we'll have the friendly against Switzerland before it,

and an additional friendly that we're supposed to still be scheduling for like three days after the last Nation's League game. Oh, yeah, okay. So four games there. So I think we will see a bigger roster for that, that span for that window for the Nation's League window. But I still just don't think you can necessarily look at all of the guys you want to look at. Okay.

Fair enough. Fair enough. There is loss here. There is loss and there is sadness. But I'm still feeling good about the player pool overall. You know, like we said earlier, our best players are our best players under 23 are not available. We're not available for this tournament. How do you feel, Greg?

The same. And it's not just that our best players weren't available. it's how many there were. And that was the thing we went on about in March of 2020 when we got the list of players who were going to go to Guadalajara before the pandemic. We did basically a show on it where we said, it's crazy the number of excellent players we have not going.

And that's almost the real way to measure our talent pool at this point. In the two previous cycles where we failed to qualify, each of those rosters was almost like our best players. There would have been like two or three guys left off because they were too good, too important, too valuable to their clubs to attend qualifying, like a D'Andre Yedlin, Josie Alcadour, I think wasn't there the year before that,

the cycle before that. But it was two or three guys. Otherwise, everyone at that qualifying event in those cycles were like the guys who we were putting our hopes on to sort of be the next stars of the national team. And very clearly that's not the case here. Like it was a completely overwhelming, underwhelming group compared to the guys were seeing play

every weekend for their club teams. Underwhelming in some ways compared to the roster that we had a year ago. You know, that had included Pomacall and Aronson and Ledesma. Aronson's now kind of scintillating with the senior national team. And I think that is always going to be the case because there's essentially like a quality ceiling or cap on how good you can be and still attend Olympic qualifying. If you're too good, you will have already been sold. You'll be in the position that Josh Sargent is in. in and you know you're not coming you're too good you've surpassed the level where you're still

an MLS regular you're too valuable for a team to keep even even Brian Reynolds has been sold on so we don't have him for this camp because just by potential he's like too valuable to stick around and we can't bring him so we're always going to have once you once you get past that cap you can't play so our qualifying group every player will essentially always be underneath this quality cap and then it's on us to it should still be good enough that cap is not so low that like we can't put a team together. And that's where it comes down to getting the right person in charge to give those players the framework they need to succeed.

But it's not a, it's not no longer the indictment on the player pool that it used to be. Yeah. Okay. That's a nice positive note and very reasonable. Let's, let's close on that. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.