Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #196: USA-Canada recap (WCQ2)

Episode Date: September 7, 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. Okay, two points from two games. I still think we'll probably qualify for the World Cup, but at this rate, mathematically, we will not. We won't do it at this rate.

One point of game is not enough. We kick off in San Pedro Sula tomorrow without Weston McKinney. More on that later. Desk's hurt. Rain is hurt. Adams is on 180 minutes. Yedlin is on around 130 minutes. And we're not creating much from the run of play. So Greg, how are you?

How are you doing? What did I say last time that I was cautiously disappointed? I think today I can just say that I'm disappointed. Fully disappointed. Fully disappointed. Why can we not create danger and score goals from the run of play? Just like the most damning question you can ask a soccer team. Because, well, one, teams have decided that we can't and are at this point happy to let us try.

I think that was Canada's master stroke here from John Hurdman was to just give us the ball. If you saw people talking about how we dominated possession, there's definitely a difference between a team that allows you to have the ball and a team that you dominate despite their attempts to try to take the ball from you. Canada was definitely the former where they just said, here, have it. Good luck. And they'd sort of kept their shape very well and just sort of shifted the amoeba around.

And we never asked any real questions of them. And, you know, I'm going to basically say that I think one of our big problems here is patterns, patterns into the final third, patterns to get into the final third. And then I still think we have issues once we actually get the ball in there. I know others disagree. But in all of our competitive games, that for me has been a huge problem. Like what do we actually do when the ball gets into the final third? What kind of coordination is there and it's been lacking. What I kind of compare it to is like your kids youth soccer team.

they've decided that it's time to start learning how to play the ball out of the back. This is, it's 2021. This is what soccer is. But we're only two weeks into the season. So we only know how to set up our backline's shape. And we have no idea what to do besides pass the ball around our back line. We're trying to keep it. We're playing the right way.

We just don't really know how to actually progress the ball up the field. And that's kind of been borne out. That was our, if you saw the pass map again, we've got the dreaded black horse shoe of death. around the back. So this is, this is what we're seeing. This is our reality. Three years into the Greg Burhalter project. We can't say, we need to be done with the abstract conversations of should we be trying to play this way? Like, this is what he's been trying to do, and it's not there. We can't keep saying it just takes time. Like, the time is, the time has been taken. Unless a switch magically flips after 30 months and suddenly it takes exactly 30 months and then

you'll be very good at it. We're in the games that we need to be doing it. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it is pretty damning to say that we're like a youth soccer team that's two weeks into learning how to play possession soccer. But I mean, and people are going to take that as like, you know, as a burn. But I mean, it is true. And excuse my voice, I was at the game on Sunday. I'm very hoarse. I was shouting a lot. I'm very hoarse. The thing is we don't, we don't have good off ball movement in the middle of the field. so that there's rarely do you see people checking to the ball purposefully and creating space for each other so that you have like a second run or a third run and and then even when we do have options to play the ball are even when we did have options to play the ball our execution on

Sunday was not super great I didn't think um so should we change should we change the way we play well to a degree we can't right I mean we Burrholder has clearly shown that he's now willing to do the sort of all-action midfield, press teams that want to keep the ball, get out in transition, things that we weren't doing in 2019. Those avenues were open to us in 2019 as well. We didn't even try to take advantage of them. Now we are. So that's been the progression of Burrhalter so far.

But what's happened now is, you know, Canada, again, Herdman recognized this. You go back to the Gold Cup final. We looked, we played Mexico even, even as far as chance creation goes. And it was kind of a flip. We gave Mexico possession. We said, you can have it. We're going to be. work our tails off to hit you in transition when you give it away,

when you make a mistake. And we did that and we played them XG for XG, you know? And Herbman said, okay, well, all of the U.S.'s chances came in these transition moments on their press. We just won't try to play with the ball to let them, to give them that revenue stream. So we can't create many chances off the press if teams aren't going to let us have it. It was the same with Honduras and Nations League. There were no press moments because they didn't keep the ball long enough for us to press. So we should keep doing those things,

but if the other team isn't going to have the ball and we're going to have it for 70% of the game, we also need to be able to figure out ways to break teams down. Yeah. Outside of set pieces and the press. And we did. We scored a goal on the press on Sunday night, so that's a good thing.

Oh, man, if I were Herdman, I would have been irate because they were having such success with their block in their shape, and then they finally give the chance away. We'll talk about in the chronology, but it was just like a throw-in. They throw it to a centerback who just gets the ball trapped under his feet, one of their three centerbacks, gets it trapped under his feet, and Aronson does well to pounce on that weak touch in a way we go. So if I'm Herdman, like everything's been going well,

we're not giving you any looks, and then to sort of hand them that opportunity, man, that would be frustrating. And Herman did sub-Scott Kennedy off immediately right after that. That's the hook right there. So I just want to thank some people for, before we get into this grim chronology, the lineups and everything, just want to thank some people

for their participation in the scuff tailgate on Sunday because that was a lot of fun and I was worried about it before it happened. It turned out to be really fun. So thank you, Jonathan, for tracking down the hot chicken, hard to do, and you did it.

Thanks Vince for handling the playlist. Thank you, Alex, for manning the grill and bringing all those brots and hot dogs. Thanks, Tudel for bringing small-sided goals and getting some games going. Thank you, Ryan, for helping me with the live show. Thank you, Eric, for being the world's greatest type man. Thank you, Kevin, for making the Moscow, the Moscow mules, especially the tequila ones.

My wife told me on the drive back home that he was cutting those limes with a butter knife and hand squeezing them in his hotel room, and it showed. Those drinks were delicious. So that's DFB Hipster on Twitter, if anyone was wondering. Big appreciation of all you guys. And everybody who came out, Ian, John Lukens, everybody. I was looking through the photos. Did Weston McKinney attend your tailgate? Was that the rationale for the, is that how he got suspended? No masks in sight. No, yeah, he, he, there was a baby named Weston there, but West McKinney himself was not in attendance.

Okay, so we can at least rule that out as a possibility for, for the suspension. Yeah, and let's, let's just get that out of the way before we move on to. West McKinney was not in the lineup, not even in the squad. He's heading back, he had, he was heading back to Italy because, uh, well, we don't know exactly why. He said it was, uh, he said it was he, he said on Instagram that he, he violated COVID protocols. Landon Donovan went on Grant Wallace podcast and basically said he was, you know, the devil for what he did, but didn't say what he did. And I mean, he's, Landon Donovan was very dramatic about it. And I'm kind of don't appreciate that given that we don't, he didn't offer any facts about it.

And so the rumor mill is going crazy. And I think it, like I said on Twitter this morning, I think it's time for some reporters to break the story. You know, it's a big deal for the men's national team. is news. Let's hear what the news is. The implications of the news may be damaging in some way, but like as journalists and I'm like an old school newspaper reporter over here, old man bells, they, you, you can't game out the implications and decide whether something is newsworthy or not. This is newsworthy. We need to know what happened with Weston. Somebody's got to break that story. That's my position. I'm sticking to it. Because obviously it's definitely not just contained to

within the locker room. You can't just say, like, oh, well, maybe the information they're keeping that tight seal on it. Yeah. Like, obviously, Donovan has it. A lot of the other reporters are sort of hinting about what they know about it, or hinting that they know what it was. Right.

I just aren't, you know, going to share it. So, yeah, so we are just, we're left to be like, okay, well, we'll just play with Weston McKinney indefinitely. Yeah. One of the leaders of the team kicked out of the squad in the middle of a World Cup qualifying window that's not going well. that is not going well. So let's, oh, and then, oh yeah, let's do the lineups.

So Matt Turner, in goal, Dest, Miles, Brooks, and Robinson across the back line, Adams at the six, Acosta and Legit at the eights, and then Aronson, Pfeffach and Pulisick across the front line. Raina was hurt. Raina suffered a hamstring injury against El Salvador, so he wasn't there. That's a big loss for us because we are basically, depending on hero ball from Pulisic to create danger in this game. And when you lose Raina, you lose about 50% of your hero ball capacity.

Yeah, you still have Pulisic and maybe a little bit of Des, which, you know, death didn't give us a whole game of Hero Ball either. And then no addition to Raina. So we knew Rayna was out. He wasn't in training the day before the game, which was, you know, circulated. We knew he wasn't there. So there were questions about whether he'd be in. He wasn't.

And we didn't bring a replacement in for him. So we were going into this game with No Raina. Way obviously dropped out before camp. Pool sick had not played yet because he just got over COVID, and we elected not to replace Giorina in the roster. Is that Jesus Ferreira's music playing at the Velasquez household? It's always playing. Any issues for you with the lineup, though?

Not really. Not really. I mean, I don't have a better idea. And I thought, I thought Dest outside of one moment looked very good at right back. Robinson looked quite good at left back in my opinion. So if we're looking for positive data points, you know, those two as the right back and the left back, it seemed like it was a pretty solid outing for both of them with that, with the exception of that one moment from Des, which we'll get into. All right.

I've got my Adams. I'm still wearing my Adams as the eight hat. When Acosta's going to play in the game, I want to play Acosta at the six. And I want to run Adams a little bit higher up the field. But I think I'm in, you know, I might be on a one-man island for that, for that take. Yeah, I don't hate it. I just don't feel much about that take at all. Okay.

Canada was very, well, I won't say that. Canada was difficult for the U.S. to break down. That's an excellent way of putting it. Here's how they lined up. Bojohn and Goal, Alster Johnson, Derek Henry, and Scott Kennedy across the back line as a three-man back. And then wingbacks were Lareya, Rishi Lurea, and Adikugby. and then Eustachio and Mark Anthony K were the central midfielders

and then we got Hoylett, Laren, and Davies across the front line. Davies has the danger man on the left wing. So let's just say right up front, Canada rotated for us. We wondered if they would. Davies obviously is the big name. And Eustaccio, I think, deserves mention here for starting both Honduras and the U.S. But they took a point at home against Honduras, so a disappointing result for them. They still dropped Buchanan and Jonathan Davis.

from their lineup to play in Nashville on the road. So there was a bit of rotation for Canada. And then I just want to say, I love how you put it where you said that it was hard for the U.S. to break their shape down. Because, and I think I've heard this theme in a couple of different reviews too, we don't know if the U.S. was good enough to break them down

because it felt like we just didn't try to break them down. We very much played very timidly, made timid decisions, not a lot of bravery to go into their amoeba, just pass around the outside of it. and Canada was happy to shift side to side and let us do that. Yeah. Lack of bravery, lack of execution, and lack of even, like, an attempt to do it for big portions of the game. We're just banging the ball long from our centerbacks.

So let's, we're way late with this podcast anyway. Let's just get through the timeline, the chronology, and move on. So I don't have much in the first 10 minutes, but I did see that Pulisic. was fouled in a dangerous area after Anthony Robinson poked the ball away from somebody in a high press. And then we got two poor set pieces from that. Cool stick on the set pieces, right? Yeah. So, you know, it seems like we've had a lot of trouble just getting, you know, solid service from set pieces.

You know who's hit a couple of good set pieces for us? Is that Kellan Acosta? He has any, you know, he took a free kick from the top of the box in this game that didn't go so well. But, yeah, he has hit a lot of good set pieces. Ninth minute, Adams and Desk corralled Davies in the corner. And it was good defense and it was notable because the crowd appreciated it so much that, you know, everybody was thinking about Davies and worried about him. And I thought, well, two things.

I thought Dest was, I've got one thing. I think you have one thing. Dest was pretty good at corraling Davies in general. But so like, let's just note that. He had the big mistake in the 14th minute. But otherwise he was, I thought he was fine against Davies. He also had some help, right? Yeah, that's the big thing.

So even though I was on my Acosta as the sixth tip, and I think Acosta could do this too, but we don't know, whereas we did see that Adams as the six gives you that supplemental support to help Corral an Alfonso Davies, which is not easy to do. And so you could say it's not good that we have to use a whole player to help our right back to contain Alfonso Davies. But I think that's just the nature of building redundancies

into defense. And as redundancies go, Tyler Adams is an excellent one. Yeah. Yeah, he was he was good at that both sides, really. Ninth minute, I noticed a good run from Acosta, and I'm going to, every time I saw some purposeful offball movement, I was ready to be excited about it. So Acosta makes a good run from deep and behind. And this is an example of the execution not being good enough. Desd tries to deliver him a ball over the top, and it just doesn't get enough air under it and it gets cut out. It looked like it was kind of on. I mean, I don't know. You know, I'm not putting all my chips on Acosta, receiving the ball in behind,

and then like making something happen to score a goal, but at least it was a try. So 10 minutes in, you were taking any small victory you could get already? Well, you know, 10 minutes, yes, but also 20 minutes in, there's that clip going around on Twitter of Brooks and Burhalter and Adams, you know, sort of talking over what was going on in the game. And Brooks looked exasperated at like the 8-19th minute. He puts his arms out and we'll try to get into more of that.

So 11th minute, an errant pass from Brooks. Hoylett plays Laren in behind. Laren is, you know, he takes a shot from a kind of a tight angle, not the worst angle, and it's just weak and he doesn't even really test Turner. Danger adjacent, he was. Like, very clearly had no intention of actually scoring on that shot. Like, he was fulfilling an obligation just to make sure that a shot was attempted. Yeah. He made his way, you know, Laren did make his way to danger in this game,

but he was danger adjacent for a while. 14th minute, we get this huge error from Dest, which is going to, you know, stick in a lot of people's minds. He misjudges a ball from Borhan, the goalkeeper that is just a, he just wallops it towards Davies on the left wing. And Desk has a position. He has every opportunity to get between the ball and Davies, but he kind of overruns it and then he kind of swings at it with his right foot.

And Davies just steps right in, happy to receive the gift of a free pass into the box and squares it for Laren or actually cuts it back for Laren a little bit. Whose shot is palmed wide by Turner. A good save. Yeah, and I couldn't tell for sure if this ball was going on frame. I think it might have been going a little bit wide. I'm not sure how that is reflected. If that's the case, not sure how it's reflected in his magnificent stats to this point. but, you know, just the actual, you know, technique and physical ability there, again, shows that Matt Turner is a good one.

We got a good one there. Yeah, he's, he, he, he, he'd feel good with him in goal, honestly. And then, go ahead. And then, Davey's, I'm just going to do my little Davies bit here. This, if, if you aren't, if you're listening to this podcast, I've, I assume you know Alphonse of Davies pretty well, but if not, just a great introduction to him because this long ball, when, when the camera pans over to show, you know, desk getting underneath. it. He has such a massive advantage over Davies positionally that most of the time this is such a nothing play that if it's not Davies, the winger probably doesn't even chase after it. It's one of those like there's nothing here. Leave it for them. They'll reset to their keeper or whatever.

But because it's Alfonso Davies and he does decide I'm going to go after this, you can see the body language of everyone change. And the fact that it's Davies coming after him probably contributes to Desk's misplaying of this ball. And then once the mistake is made and and Davies takes control of the situation, you just can't take the control back from Alfonso Davies. It's almost impossible, certainly without any redundancy. So here's that situation without an Adams helper and just being one v one,

that we don't want to see a lot of those over the course of 90 minutes against Alfonso Davies. Yeah, you can't get the ball back from him without basically conceding a penalty or getting a yellow card. The next thing I've got in the timeline is Robinson dribbling about dribbling straight ahead, about 30 yards on the left, and the crowd just started to go wild to see somebody move in a vertical direction with the ball.

And then he just tapped it to pull a sick who cut in on his right foot as he did most of the game. But it just gives you an idea, the enthusiasm that was greeted with gives you an idea of how limp we looked in the attack. 18th minute Brooks hits a diagonal to Legette and it goes out of bounds over his head. So we're just not, if our, plan was to hit diagonals and try to

disorganize the opponent that way. That wasn't even working. It wasn't, we weren't executing on the basics of that pattern. I hit my notes here, I'm saying, we just need some kind of coordinated, even ad hoc coordinated movement in zone 14 and zone 14 adjacent areas because it looked like,

to me, like Aronson and Pfeck just didn't know what to do. They're just like hanging out with the centerbacks. Nobody's checking the ball. So then you don't get any. any, you don't get that second, like I said, you don't get that second run. You don't get that, you don't make space available to anybody else. That was one of the big things I noticed to was this tendency for everyone to race away from the ball. So we finally make like a progressive pass.

A lot of times it would still be around the amoeba. So it might be to Serginio Dest out on the wing. We've hit it to him with a little bit of time to look up and see what's in front of him. And what he would see would be Brennan Aronson running upfield, Jordan Pfeck running upfield. Pool sick is nowhere near him. The eights are probably a little bit behind him in the play still, legit in Acosta. So there's just, he has nothing to do but try to advance the ball on the dribble and do basically Serginio-Dest hero ball. And I kind of go back to, we don't know what the instructions are from Burrhalter in the camp.

But publicly, publicly, Burrhalter has made a huge show of talking about verticality. And I almost feel like if that's now overemphasized to the point that, you know, everyone's running away, it's such a departure from what we had seen through 2019 in possession where even though it was just Jiazzi Zardez, he was always sort of coming back into midfield. We saw it with Jesus Ferreira in 2020. Leggett was a false nine against Wales. But since that Wales game, there's been a ton of emphasis on verticality. And we haven't been seeing the forward come back and get involved the way that we used to.

And I don't know if, I don't know if that would help solve things for us. But it didn't look good to just have everybody drifting away from the soccer ball all the time. Yeah. I mean, you've talked about that piston action, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, coming back to the ball, that provides the opportunity for the verticality from the other guy. If everybody's, if you have comprehensive verticality, everybody moving away from the ball, then it's just everybody's going for a jog with a centerback, you know, going for a jog with their friend.

Right. No, no, like the defense, you're not making the defense make any kind of decisions. They already start out goal side of you. When you run at them, they just keep dropping back and everything's, everything's just fine for them. They'll let the midfield clean up everything in front of them. There are a lot of instances of this where there's nowhere, where, I mean, it often falls on Aronson, I think. He's the one I think of as the one who's most likely to check back into that space. And he wasn't doing it. And I don't know. Yeah, I mean, we've talked in the past

about how U.S. players in general don't have that sort of team-wide collective instinct for movement that you see from, like, Mexico, for instance, a team that we did beat twice this past summer. But they, you know, that second run, that third run, they seem to happen sort of naturally, organically for them and they don't seem to happen for the U.S. So I do,

I am a little confused in my own mind. Is it like, is it all Burrhalter's fault? Is he, is it partly the player pool's fault? How much can he, how much can he dictate

that that kind of thing happen in these games without it being sort of second nature? I don't know. Right. And I don't think that he can necessarily ever build to like a true 11-man harmony.

like you want to have and like maybe Mexico does with with the way they're you know brought up in the game. But I sure think we should be able to see three and four and five man patterns at least where there's that harmony. And we talk about how, you know, it gets, when you don't see that, it almost gets difficult to diagnose what the problem is because it is, it's five people doing little things not quite right, rather than just one person having a shocker. So you can't just say, oh, well, this guy has been almost.

Sometimes we have the one guy having a shocker. but more, it's just like, no one's doing anything particularly terrible. Like you don't look at it and say, you know, Brendan Aronson just making horrible decisions out there. It's like, well, you need one person to key this movement for the next man and the next man. And so it does get hard to diagnose and we might fall into some sort of lazy critiques like, well, they're just young and, you know, it's concaf and it's really difficult qualifying. But I kind of don't buy those.

I feel like it has to be on the coach a little bit after a three years, three years into the project. Like we should be able to see some level of like development in these areas. It shouldn't look like we're two weeks into a youth soccer season. Right. Okay. Let's see. Robinson gets a shot in the 21st minute after Legette wins the ball high. So another opportunity created from the press.

Robinson's shot draws a little bit of a save from Borhan. 23rd minute Acosta intercepts a poor ball out from that Canadian goalkeeper. Slips it to Pulisic, slips it to Am. Aronson. Aronson gets little brothered off the ball. Like you were talking about patterns in the final third, even when we get into the final third patterns to get to goal, there's just nothing going on here.

It's just like two or three guys in the middle of the field. It didn't seem like they had any idea what to do. I mean, these are tough moments. It's hard to score goals in soccer. I'm not going to try to make it seem like it's all easy. But, yeah, we need a little bit more of an idea. Which Polisick himself said after the game. We need new ideas at times, he said.

Yeah, and people are reading that as a Burr-Halter criticism, but I don't think it's necessarily that pointed. It can definitely be just team-wide. Like, if you're not all sure what's going on, you'd need some better ideas. Right. I mean, the man plays. It's played with so many good players. Anyway, clocked a couple wasteful moments from Legette. We don't need to get into them too much.

Let's skip. Let's skip ahead. No, no, I got to have one. And I don't have the timestamp on it. But there was one because we talked about. these transition moments. And we talk about bravery. And there was a really bad one for me where the ball sort of, it didn't fall.

I think somebody played it into his feet. So we'd won it and it was transition. He got it played into his feet, 35, 40 yards from goal. No one around him looks up and has to his left, right at the top of the box, he has a Costa and Pulisic. It would been like a forward progressive diagonal. And he like looks them off. And that's the one that's like, I'll end up clipping that one because that's the mind-blowing

one where as a team and legit in particular in this case, we must. be brave and we must actually go. Like go. We have the advantage here. They're not set up in their block, which has been very effective for them. Go, get in that space, force the issue. If we give it away on, you know, because it's low percentage, that's fine. That's soccer.

But you have to actually press your advantage there. And instead he like looked it off, circulated it to the right. And, you know, we just kept the possession. It's about pressing even the slightest advantage. You know, if we have one, if we've eliminated one guy somehow by taking the ball from them when, when they're in possession, then we have to go. Like you just said, we have to go. And I just didn't feel that sense of urgency from Leggett.

And I know that's been a criticism of Sebastian Leggett all over the internet for months. And we've even criticized him a little bit for that this summer. But yeah, definitely that. And I had, I clocked a moment in the, which I will skip later, but in the 35th minute where he receives the ball, I think from Dest. And so Desk Pass cancels Davies. and Legette receives it from Dest

and then he could turn and dribble into 40 yards of space. 40 is probably an exaggeration. Let's say 25 yards of space. And he doesn't. He's just, he's too worried. He's too worried about losing the ball. So he's just pirouettes this way, pirouettes that way. And then ends up tapping it back to Dest.

And boy, oh boy, me and the people I was sitting with in the stadium were like, dude, you got, you have to take that opportunity. It's not like we're swimming in chances here. And I don't know if that's because he's an eight and he feels like he has to be more ball secure rather than when he, in the past, when he played higher up the field. And it was his job, you know, specifically to run, you know, put that pressure on defenses. But in any event, we need more of it from that position. We can't be that safe. Yeah.

Well, I noticed it was Richie Ledesma's birthday yesterday. You did. You just happened upon that. And it happened to think it was worth mentioning. All right. Where are we at? 26 minute, Dest works a couple guys up the line. It's some very good Sergenio Dest hero ball

and then slips it to Aronson. And Aronson gets it out wide and whips a ball in, headed on goal by a Canadian defender. So I almost got an own goal out of it. Charles a good save from Borgeson. Worth pointing out that Dest was, pointing out again that Desk was outside of that bad error, quite good in the first half.

And he worked Davies in this moment too. Yep. And that's when we eliminate those defenders, I'll even kind of take a little bit of issue with Aronson's decision here. We eliminate those defenders enough to take out their whole left side of their defense and we slip Brendan Aronson into the box. We can't just stop playing soccer there. And this is where I start to have issues with our patterns in the attacking third

once we get there in the box. And again, I picked up on this even back in the Switzerland game. Like we're too ready to just be like, okay, now let's hit it into the mixer. Rather than, you know, the dominoes have already started falling here thanks to the technical ability of Sergenio Dest, Aronson can make another domino come out to him,

and now they would be fewer dominoes. I know this is technically not how dominoes work. You want a lot of them in the time. You don't want fewer. There would be fewer Canadian defenders in the box. Oh, no, go back to the dominoes, please. So, but death started it, and then we just stopped the falling too soon.

And we got, you know, the best possible outcome there was the chance we got with, a little bit of a lucky bounce off Canada. But I just wish we would continue to play soccer and continue to repress that advantage that we have rather than being like, okay, we have a little bit of a window. I'm just going to whip a fire a ball into the box. Yeah.

Into the mixa. Take a few touches, see if there's somebody arriving at the top of the box and cut it back to him or something, you know. Drive at the near post, yeah. Okay. 27th minute was a good example of Aronson and Pfeck occupying the same space. Again, it's desks with the ball this time higher up the pitch, attacking the corner of the box from the right side.

And I noticed this, I think you clipped it already. Aronson and Pfeck occupying essentially the same space with centerbacks on each of their shoulders. And neither of them checks back to the ball, which is a problem because Pulisic is making a very good near post run, I thought, you know, really coming into the box, arriving in the box, as his old boss, Frank Lampert would say. And Aronson doesn't check away to draw the center.

back, to draw the center back away from that space, so he doesn't make himself available to death. There's really nobody for Desk to pass to. And also, he doesn't vacate that space to make it available to his teammate. So it's like that standing there as you're, as somebody else is dribbling is driving me nuts. And I don't, I can't understand how our national team is, is like that so much. Right. You, you can, you just look at their hips, right? Both Pfok and Aronson are just standing in the box, hips facing the goal. Like what, what, what's the expectation there? Are you just waiting for him to shoot and score him to rebound? A cost on that sequence is actually making a good run from behind

to try to like full speed get to the corner to attack that space, which again, it's a decoy. It's just to draw a defender two or three steps in that direction to again pull them out of the middle even slightly. But yeah, you need, Desk needs some kind of a backboard there. Somebody show your hips in your body to Desk so that he has a little backboard to combine off of if he needs it. But we just, we never, we never looked like we were ready.

to give that option. And that's, that contributes to why we're doing so much hero ball because, I mean, what other option did you have there besides hero ball or fired into the mixer?

Yeah. Or turn and pass it backward to Miles Robinson. Yeah. It's an appropriate sigh. 31st minute we get Pulisic doing some hero ball dribbles a few guys on the left

and hits a sharp ball across the top of the box for the Jet, who I think makes a good decision to try to hit it first time. It doesn't make good contact. It gets deflected up and over for a corner. 32nd minute on the ensuing corner, there's a counterattack, and John Brooks gets a yellow card for taking out Davies,

which is probably wise, I think. Got to do it. Can't let them get out in the open. No. 36 minute, a good chance for the U.S. Robinson bangs a ball. I mean, not Juga Bonito by any stretch, but Robinson just kind of lifts a ball into the box from the left side. Pfeck battles for it, falls to Pulisig,

who sort of battles a ball. for it again and then it comes back to Pfeck and he runs onto it at the corner of the six yard box flashes a shot just wide it did look like the far corner was there for the taking and it was a decent you know a decent chance I mean a scrappy chance but still a decent one I don't know yeah Pfevok had had the guy sort of draped on him and just managed to get the shot off nice little lunge at the end which I think was a good good technique for any forwards watching like that's actually a good technique so you don't have to take those three prep steps to get your feet right okay 40th minute we get a big chance for the u.s brooks lofts a ball wide right legit brings it down and slips it wide

to erinson after some uh you know some good work to bring the ball down and and uh i don't know pirouet i guess slip it wide uh erinson plays a good low ball into the six for pulisic who's making a good run at the near post and uh pull a six shot it rings off that near post so Very close, but not a goal. And I'll give, I'll say here, the difference between this Aronson ball in and the last one is this didn't feel like a hopeful ball in. This was legit cutting people out to free Aronson. And then Aronson had the path for that direct pass on the floor to Pulisick and Pfeck, who somehow both had like the position to get to it. And it's just, that just shows the difficulty of executing that at high speed.

Yeah. But that one spot on from Aronson. Yeah. And kind of a weird diagonal from Brooks. It's not like one that's going to go in his highlight reel of diagonal balls because it was a little short. But Leggett was able to get to it before the defender. So we've talked about the back shoulder throwing football. This was almost like a little bit different where he almost like put it so close to the defender,

like putting it between a wide receiver and the cornerback that the cornerback gets the big guys thinking he's going to get it. But it's like just bad enough to be excellent because he can't quite. So Legette actually takes it at full speed on his chest, which is not usually how you would take that ball. So well improvised from Legit and sort of just trying to capitalize on that little uncertainty surrounding that whole play. Yeah, yeah.

All right, 41st minute desk goes down with an injury, which is not great for this game or the next one. And Yedlin comes on. And there's a legit volley in the 46 minute that I clocked just because he hit it well. and it was a decent idea. He hit it. He made good contact.

He missed the goal by, you know, four or five yards. And the half comes and goes. No, no changes from Berhalter. He rarely does make changes at the half. Would you have liked to see any changes? I don't think there were necessarily personnel changes. You know, there were definitely instructions, I think that needed to be given to show like a change in how we were trying to possess through the block.

You know, if he wasn't expecting Canada to be that, I don't want to say reactive, but that willing to concede possession, there were things we needed to clean up of how we attacked it. There maybe one style change would have been Sergeant for Pfok in that game. And you could even make a case that Sergeant would have been a better fit to start this game entirely than Pfok. Because, again, Sergeant is more comfortable coming back, to my mind at least, to come back and be a part of the possession in midfield. If Pfok can do that, he certainly wasn't in this game.

And we haven't seen too much of that from him, generally. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying Sergeant is amazing at it, but I think it's fair to say we've seen more evidence that he can do it at this point than we have of PFock. I wasn't going to, you know, I wasn't going to call for Sergeant to come on at the half while the game was happening. Of course, retroactively, I could say now, maybe it wouldn't make sense. But you could have also just, again,

you could have also fixed that with instructions, with halftime, like, okay, we need more, one of you, you guys got to coordinate this. Somebody needs to be flashing to the ball carrier rather than everyone just showing them their butts. There needs to be somebody flashing to the ball and then there need to be people arriving towards the guy flashing to the ball

as maybe not towards him, but arriving in a way that gives that person flashing to the ball an option to pass to. And honestly, we never saw the ladder because we never saw the former. We never saw anybody, we rarely saw anybody, of the ball, so we don't even know if that would have happened, if the second part would have happened. But we did get a goal in the 55th minute. And it came off the press. Erringson wins the

ball off of Scott Kennedy, slips it to Pfeck. Pfock's pass to Pulisic is a little behind him, and Pulisic has to come back to get it. And he gets wrecked by Mark Anthony Kay, and it is a foul, but the ref plays advantage. Yeah, great, great stuff here from Mark Anthony K to be honest, or at least half of a great play, the right decision to come in and wreck pool sick. And this isn't just like, oh, wreck their best player. This is these transition moments that tons of modern soccer is built around preventing is as soon as there's a transition moment, open field, gets really hard to defend in these

moments. Just foul them. Just foul. Reset your block. Bunker. Have we already talked about Bob Morocco? No. On this recording.

Bob Morocco has made a great point that in, in 2021, what we think of as normal defending would have definitely been considered bunker. defending 10 years ago because you're just leaving one striker up everyone else defends. So it's all about like eliminate these full speed running downhill situations for the opponent. And that's what Mark

Anthony Kaye was trying to do. I don't think he was trying to win that ball. He was trying to wrecked Poulosick. Unfortunately, he wrecked the ball directly to Tyler Adams who very readily played it forward to Jordan Pfeck so that the referee recognized that we had something going here and let play continue. Bellsie'd keep taking it from there. Yeah. And then from there,

So it wasn't a real crisp sequence from Pfock up until this point, but then Pfok receives it from Adams. He plays it to Costa. Acosta drives down the left channel and then taps it to an overlapping Robinson. And then Robinson plays a good firm ball low to Brennan Aronson, who is unmarked arriving in the box and he slides and stabs it home. And it's one zero. And it was pretty, I thought, pretty cathartic, you know, even though it came, it was a goal that came off the press, there was at least a passing sequence that ensued from the press. and it was nice to watch and see the joy was short-lived though. Yeah, and people are saying we need more of this kind of passing and this kind of ball movement.

And I just don't think that really scans. There were no opportunities, almost zero opportunities in that game for us to get that kind of ball movement. Because again, this came on a throw-in where they came into a threw it to their centerback and he just basically tripped on the ball. And then his recovery touch was loose and Aronson pounced on it. But it was us attacking three centerbacks and Kay coming back into the play. So this, you know, situation almost never presented itself. We can't just make Canada open up and allow us to have this kind of space.

So I'm glad we exploited it at the time it showed up, but we still need to focus on how we break them down the other 90% of the time. Yeah. I mean, good on Aronson for not just for winning the ball, but for providing the final touch. And, you know, good on Acosta and Robinson for what they did in the buildup and Pfok and Adams. But it was a broken play. to use a, you know, to use an analogy from football again, from American football again.

It was, the Canadian players, a lot of them stopped when Pulisic was fouled. So there's, I think there's a little bit of a caveat on this, even as a goal scored from the run of play in the press, it, I don't think if, if, I don't think if the, if that foul happens, Canada, you know, Mark Anthony Kay doesn't stop moving and it doesn't happen in the same way. It was Pool Sick actually on the ground sealing K off because Kay fouled him But Pool Sick's body like prevented K from then closing down where the ball went next to Adams Who could then hit it into a passing lane That was open because Kay couldn't pursue

Yeah And we don't need to you know we also don't need to apologize for scoring this goal Like this is the whole point like when teams make those mistakes Punish them ruthlessly Which is awesome to see us do It just also shows that You know for like Herbman for Canada for teams we're going to play after this,

I think that even shows more the importance of, don't give the U.S. these kinds of moments. At all costs, give them the ball upfield and make them break down the block. Yeah, and I don't know if Herdman put his fist through a wall when that happened, but he sure did sub-Kennedy off for Kamal Miller. That was the next thing I had on the timeline in the 58th minute.

So basically as soon as the goal celebration settled down. 60th and 61st minutes, a couple of dangerous corners. Pfeck flicks went across and it's headed over by Henry. Then Yedlin fires a ball across and it's spilled by Borhan, but there's nobody there to clean it up. And this is another little Nick against Pfok for me is if he's going to be the scrappy opportunistic keeper, I want him challenging for a ball that's sprayed in there or just whipped in there hopefully. I want him challenging it and getting to it if the goalkeeper spills it. And he's just kind of, you know, hanging out with his friend Derek Henry in this moment.

I mean, that's harsh, but it's, it's, he, he wasn't, he wasn't on his toes. Even, even if you're the possession forward, we still want you doing that too, right? I said, to be honest, you want any of your forwards doing that, even if they're the possession forward. Yeah, you want, you want, you want, you want your forward doing that stuff. Yeah, for sure. So 60 second minute, this is the Canadian goal. The, really took the air out of the, this international window so far, honestly.

And it's, uh, it could be, it's not, so it doesn't come from counterattack. doesn't come from anything super complicated that Canada does. They're just working the ball around the back to their wing back on the left side. And he plays, plays it down the line for Davies. Yedlin is, I think, maybe picking daisies. The camera angle doesn't, the camera work on this goal. You don't get to see what Yedlin is, how Yedlin is responding to Davies before the ball is played. But anyway, he's, Yedlin's way behind the play by the time Davies arrives at it.

And he can't, like you mentioned earlier, you can't get back in front of Davies. once he has the ball, and he just shrugs Yedlin off as he comes on him, comes on to his right shoulder. And then Davies just plays the ball, plays a sharp ball across the face of goal, and Kyle Laren taps it in. Nobody's marking him. I think Brooks seems to me Brooks should have been marking Laren or should have been tracking him a little better. Well, like right off the bat, I think we have to ask, could Matt Turner have done better here? I don't think so. Okay, fair enough.

I also don't think Matt Turner could have done better. We have to ask because we haven't seen Matt Turner give up a goal in so long that we haven't been able to ask that question. But I just wanted to establish right here whether or not any of this is on him. Yeah, Brooks should have done a better job of tracking that runner. It's tough because they are getting into that space where you don't follow him all the way into the goal. You do eventually, like, stop. and, you know, then there's a lane that a pass can't go through because it would be the goalkeeper's ball.

It's just Brooks stopped too early. And this still goes back to, you know, what we were talking about with Mark Anthony Kaye blowing up Poulsick. You try to blow players up and foul them before you get to this situation. We just never even had a chance to do that. Can I go back a little further into the build-ups to this? So it was Canada had been attacking, kind of had a sustained attack that. they'd come down their left side, they'd gotten a cross in, we cleared it, and it ended up out on the right side. They kind of went in again and we cleared it again, but it was out on our left side of the field,

Canada's right. And it was just kind of a lazy switch of play across their entire back line, one man at a time, didn't even skip anyone. And we were just really slow to shift from left to right as a team. Aronson went in, and this is a communication thing for me, but since we were all still on our left side predominantly, because I think people think of this as a transition goal because of how wide open our box was for this to happen. But it was just because we were still so predominantly on the left, they're lazy switching around the side. Aronson didn't seal off the centerback so they could just play it out to the sideline.

That means Legette has like 45, 50 yards to cover. So he's doing that, but even he isn't respecting how open that side of the field is. So he cuts off like the pass into the middle rather than going in to actually close down Canada and prevent them from advancing vertically. And Yedlin's the same. Yedlin's, like, still high up the field, and it's just like it hasn't registered to anyone.

Adams is nowhere near this play, even though he's our guy who should be, you know, moving side to side as well. I'm not putting this on Adams. So I'm saying that's how slow we were to shift from left to right, that by the time they hit it to Davies in behind, it looks like a transition moment because we're so exposed. It does.

Yeah, it does look like a transition moment. And I guess initially I put that all on Yedlin, but I hadn't really considered that we were so slow to switch as a team. Well, Yedlin, it is on Yedlin. I mean, he takes a poor angle and he, like, is too high. He tries to, as they're hitting the pass, he, like, cuts ahead of Davies, upfield, thinking he's going to, like, cut off the pass down the line. And those three steps, again, that's all it takes.

Now you're never going to catch up to Alfonso Davis. And Laren, it's not like Laren did anything super sophisticated in his, arrival in the box either. He just ran across the face of Brooks towards the back post. Brooks just kind of kept running back towards the goal like he said maybe stopped a little bit early and

there it is, one one. Maybe we'd had possession so much of this game that we just had lost track of how to stay tight as a unit because again we were just so open, so spread out between Legette all the way at the sideline. Tyler Adams as the nominal closest center midfielder to him still at like the center vertical line of the field.

We were just all over the shop for 15 seconds, and that's all it took. 65th minute. Buchanan comes on for Hoylett and David on for Laren. So that's three Canada subs before we make a sub if you don't count yelling on for the injured desk. And then six. Kind of a terrifying sub, too. I don't know how you felt, but I was like, oh, man. I think it was half spaces who had done his sort of analysis,

on us recently in saying after the Gold Cup, after the El Salvador game, basically like the U.S.'s style at this point is just to be airtight defensively and then score a goal any which way you can late in the game. And when Canada made these subs, all I was thinking of was like, we would not be the favorite team to get another goal over the next 25 minutes. Yeah, and I think if you like work out the run of play over the last 30 minutes, that's how it played out, you know. I don't think we're any more likely to score a goal.

than they were. Yeah, and Buchanan is, Buchanan was a problem immediately when he came on. He's a very good player. 67th minute, we get a decent chance, or Canada gets a decent chance for Kaye with a free shot at the top of the box. He's fed by Jonathan David from the left.

So David just kind of corrals a ball down in the left side, dribbles at Yedlin, but not really at him, and then plays it back to the top of the box. And, you know, it was, The shot went over the crossbar, but it's like, do we really want to give a free shot from 20 yards away at that point in the game? You know, we're about to get, we're about to lose to Canada at home in a World Cup qualifier. We've got Matt Turner. We have Matt Turner.

That's what we were banking on there. I'm sure that was what we were thinking. 69th minute, Adam starts a counterattack up the right side by, you know, by taking the ball from K, I think. he just wrecks Kay off the ball for a yellow card foul against Pulisick a few moments earlier. And Kay had been fouling Pulisic a lot. It seemed like, you know, referenced the goal we scored. He fouled him pretty cynically in that moment, too. So I honestly don't hate the, like, sentiment from Adams to, like, to do something to enforce,

you know, be the enforcer. But he was a little too obvious about it. And it killed our counterattack. Because I think we had actually a pretty decent attacking moment there, and it just gets it just gets wiped off. Outside of the goal, this was Aronson's best moment of the game for me. I wasn't actually that impressed with Aronson. I wasn't impressed with a ton of players. But I thought a lot of my concerns about Aronson were still present here throughout this game.

But this was an amazing. And of course, he's really good in transition moments, and this was one of those. But he hit a fantastic ball over, I think, did he free up Anthony Robinson? Is that who was running onto that patch? It was somebody on the left. I had to be Robinson, yeah. Which was just great, and I'm sure we had a goal coming off of it. So I don't love.

I'm not exactly sure how XG works, but since we were behind our XG for the window so far, that definitely would have resulted in a goal. Definitely. So I'm not happy that it broke up that play, Adam's decision. And then the other thing is like, I don't know. I don't want our players taking yellow cards. Like when you absolutely have to for a competitive, you know, reasons, like Brooks did to Davies earlier, sure take it.

But what that means is Adams is going to get suspended eventually in this window. The question is going to be for a lot of guys, it's for yellow card accumulation. The question for a lot of players is, are you going to get suspended for two games or one? So if you rack up these yellow cards cheaply, you could be suspended for two or even three games of the window. If you're getting one every two games. So I don't want us taking these yellows cheaply. Yeah. No, I'm not condoning the fact.

Sorry to me as cold. Yeah. Yeah. But I do like that he wants to defend Pulisic and he's going to make a, but he has to find a more, a subtler way to do it, I think. Seventy-fourth minute, we get a Brooks lofted ball, the Pfeck, and he has a chance to head it wide to Aronson in space. You know, he's like kind of at the top of the box.

Aronson's running free to his right. You know, he's facing away from goal, and he tries to nodded into Aronson's path, but he just can't execute. And then 77th minute, Herdman makes two more subs. Osorio's on for Davies and Hutchinson's on for Kay. So like who's trying to, you know, who's trying to get a win here and late in the game in Nashville? Sure doesn't look like Greg Burrhalter was.

I mean, that's, you know, that's harsh, but why not start making subs earlier? Like, it's not working. Let's do it. So my thought here is that basically Burrhalter doesn't trust the guys. the guys he had on the bench. Because I think, you know, depending on that level of trust, that is a perfectly legitimate reason to not make subs. Like if you think that there's just a significant drop-off in quality

to bring on Roldan over, you know, one of our wingers out there, then I can see not doing it. Like, yes, he's fresh, but a fresh Raldon also isn't going to run behind on goal. You know what I mean? So there is that give and take there. But I think that we did, I think like fresh legs in some places could have been more of a boost than whatever the quality gap was. Specifically like, I think like a Conrad for an Aronson could have happened sooner. Sargent for Pfok could have happened sooner.

Those are the two that come to mind for me, you know. Yeah. And part of this too is this game was we were in so much control of possession that also it's a lot less work. This wasn't a track meet where it's up and back and up and back and up and back. So I could see them thinking like No one's Pfok isn't necessarily Totally gassed at this point You know like our central midfielders aren't totally gassed

So if these are the guys we think are better I'm actually kind of saying You can make it you can see how You delay on the subs here There are knock on effects of course for adding minutes to these guys For the third game But as far as trying to Get those two points back in this game

I'm actually not as like Totally upset about the sub situation as I think most other folks are. Well, Burrhalter's answer in the press conference afterwards was we were assessing the performance of the players on the field and everybody was performing to the standard. So we couldn't figure out basically who to take off. And we don't know what metrics he's using

or how he's arriving at that decision. But in any case, he also acknowledged that it looks bad. It would look bad to some people to not make a sub until the 83rd minute. So 78th minute before our subs come on. Buchanan works our left flank after an errant pass from Aronson in the attack, leaves Robinson hung out to dry. Tejohn flashes a ball across the face of goal. It didn't really look threatening that he was going to score,

but he tried to cross it and it just flashed through. 83rd minute we make our Burrhalter makes his triple sub. It's Sergeant for Pfevok, Connor De LaFuente, for Aaron. and rolled on for Lejet. And I thought Sergeant was bright. Immediately he drew a foul, 25 yards from goal in the 85th minute. Pull six free kick went over pretty comfortably. I think Sergeant had a couple other nice little moments of coming back to the ball

and connecting play. But at this point, it's, it just feels like it's not going to happen. And 88th minute, Lurray and Hutchinson work our left flank again, and Lerae Zips a ball across the six. nobody crashing for Canada otherwise it's 2-1 and then 92nd minute

we do have a corner kick that Miles Robinson gets his head on but he can't get it on frame it was good defending by Canada again on that Miles kick and this is where I like I like to do the side by sides because if you think about his goal against Mexico his chance against El Salvador

where it's just him all by himself inside the six here I think they were both like him and his man both like dive at the ball his man has no intention of actually winning it he's just diving beside him like buddy, like buddy system, got his arm around his shoulder. Just, it's so difficult to successfully head a ball on goal no matter what, way more difficult with somebody draped all over you.

Yeah. I mean, the partisan in me saw that and thought, you know, they should call a foul on that guy for that. I know they never will, but. Yeah. My hope has always been for VAR to start calling those things because I just want more freedom of movement in the box. So if defenders know that the camera,

is going to catch him even if the referee doesn't and it's just a nailed on foul to wrap somebody up in the box. That's actually my big hope for VAR is that it opens up totally free movement in the box, which is, again, at this point, would be unrecognizable. We take for granted just how much like shirt pulling and wrapping up happens. That's the one thing that I wish VAR would solve for us. Yeah, the transition from what we have now to that would be a difficult one, I think, for a lot of defenders. So we've got Honduras tomorrow night. What happens if we don't win that game? What do you think should happen?

Like you're Brian McBride or Ernie Stewart. Let's be clear. There's almost zero indication that Burrhalter's job is in danger right now. It seems like he's basically got a free. pass but grading against the optimal if you're the if you're the guy in charge

and we don't get a win tomorrow night do you fire Burhalter so I honestly think that I fire Burrhalter if we have a Costa Rica like a 2016 Costa Rica level performance where we went down to

Costa Rica lost 4-0 and like the way we lost was just an embarrassment you know we can play like I recognize variance plays into these things and we could play a decent game of soccer and still lose, and that shouldn't be what spurs your decision. But if we go in and play an absolute horrendous game of soccer, then I think we actually have some sort of evidence to suggest that Burrhalter doesn't actually get more out of this group than anyone who, again,

just rolls the ball out and says, work hard here, fellas. So, which is, I know people think that's reactive coming off a summer where we won two trophies. but the evidence was there in those games as well. So the evidence that we can't put together any kind of like impressive or effective game in possession is there. We didn't do it against Honduras, we didn't do it against Mexico in the Nations League, we didn't do it all through the Gold Cup,

and then the big performance that we got against Mexico was very much driven by our off-the-ball work. So if there's a situation where teams have essentially found us out that if you just give the ball to the U.S. and then defend in a block, they can't beat you. Like, that is worrying. And, you know, do you give a guy another window to prove that that's the case or to prove that he can?

If the evidence to date suggests that it can't happen again, we, he's been the coach for three years with his stated mission to disorganize the opponent with the ball. Like, if it's not happening now, when, what would you say is the expectation for when that switch flips? Right. He just needs one or two more games and then it's happening. And there's big reasons to be concerned about this game against Honduras because of the construction of the roster and the way he rolled everybody out in the first game. We are right back.

One of our right backs is hurt now. We didn't call any other right backs in. We didn't make that decision. So Yedlin, Yedlin who's on a lot of minutes, you assume he's going to start against Honduras. he's not very good at soccer. And so, you know, there's a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about Honduras. On the other hand, we can win that game. You know, we can win that game.

Even if we play total, like total crap, we could win that game. Because we have some really good players, right? Like, we have to remember we have good players. After that Honduras win, where people were kind of like not impressed, us included in Nations League, the morning of the Mexico game when it felt like it was you know impossible to beat the juggernaut that is Mexico

some of us were still just like in our little chat's like look we have enough good players that we can beat Mexico in a 90 minute game of soccer it took 120 minutes but like we have good players you can just roll a ball out with good players and occasionally get results against other good teams or on the road can I do my Conca Caff away around now that got scooped yeah do it don't even don't even

talk about it getting scooped you've been talking about this For the weeks. Okay. I got a scoop. Okay. Yeah, I've been talking for a while about the, the sort of overstated,

uh, difficulty of actually getting results away in Concacaf. I understand it's difficult to play really good soccer away in Concafxcaf. But we have a history of getting results away. Um, and people keep putting up our total record, uh, of away Concaf games and saying,

look, like it's really hard. We look at all these games. We lose or draw. But it's, you almost have to separate it into two things. And this, the scoop is,

I think Paul Kennedy. basically published this this morning for soccer America. But if you separate out Mexico and Costa Rica versus the rest of the away field in Conccaf, like it's totally different. Against Mexico and Costa Rica since 1998 when the U.S. began participating in the hex after he hosted 94, Mexico and Costa Rica way, zero wins, nine losses, three draws. You want to say it's impossible to take points from those teams? Fine.

Like, I'm all foreseeing that. Like, we shouldn't expect points away to Mexico. away to Costa Rica. Even still, we know Costa Rica's a little bit down so we could start to be like, maybe we can steal one this year. I don't know. But historically,

I'm not feeling that kind of optimism right now. Historically, I get it. Those things are impossible. The rest of the field away in Conccaf in that time, and we're talking 18 games, we are eight wins, two losses, eight draws. So we're actually averaging over a point a game in those away fixtures.

The last cycle, which was the huge disaster if you take that out of it, because you say, well, why would we want to hold last cycle as the standard that we should be trying to reach? Take that away. And we've got eight wins, one loss, six draws in 15 games, exactly two points a game in those qualifiers. So it absolutely should not even be that the default expectation is a draw away. We're getting two points a game when we're not playing Mexico and Costa Rica. We should be expecting it.

We have a really good team this year. We're really talented team, I should say. El Salvador is one of the weaker teams. Honduras, middle of the pack, I think. Like, it isn't crazy. We can't just fall into like, what do you do? It's concaf away. You can't expect anything.

You should expect something. So that's, again, my big rant that we shouldn't just write off concaf away is like, you can't do anything. We have historically done very well away outside of Mexico or Costa Rica. Good rant. Good rant. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to argue with.

And it undercuts this idea that, okay, everything's fine. We just drew El Salvador. I don't think everybody's going to say everything's fine if we draw Honduras tomorrow night because that's three points. That's three points. Three points out of three games. And that's, I mean, combined with the loss or the draw to Canada at home, that's just not good. That's not even close to good enough.

And I think, you know, I don't like to, I think you're the same way. I don't like to be like calling for coaches heads. And like, for one thing, it doesn't matter what I say, you know, like, it's just like, I'm just like barking at the moon if I say that. But I sure, I sure don't have a lot of faith in Burrhalter right now. And I, and if we can't somehow scratch out a result and regroup for the next window. And when I say result, I mean win tomorrow. If we can't scratch out a win and regroup and come at it fresh in October, then how could you complain if he's fired? It's, I mean, it's game time, you know.

It's crunch time. We can't mess around with this. If he's not getting it done, we need somebody in there who does get it done. Setting aside, I mean, admitting that there's variance and like if Miles Robinson puts that header on frame, then we probably have four points right now. I'm talking about the one against El Salvador. But it's, you know, we got to get back to the World Cup. And like, it's not acceptable. to only have three points in the first window.

That's a lot of games out of the World Cup qualifying slate that are done and we're not getting it done. And part of Burhalter's job is to set the team up in a way that sort of overcomes that variance. We've talked about that too, where, you know, we all know the caveats that apply to single game XG, but even trying to like hide behind that is thin ice for Burrhalter. I think he actually said, like, after the Al-Savut. door game. You look at our XG, we should have scored a goal. And that's not really the case. You're like layering probabilities on probabilities here. It's like a, it's like a coin toss, right? So if you're, if you're, if you win a game, if you can get one one flip a tails of a coin toss, you don't set your team up so

you get two total flips of the coin and say, oh, well, we need one tails. It's 50-50. Let's just flip it twice and we should get one tails. Like, you can't just bank on that happening. It's very common to flip the coin twice and get heads twice in a row. Right. You don't. say, ah, well, we should have had one tails. You know, we did everything we could. Like, you've got to set your team up and prepare them in a way with the talent advantage you have to give yourself eight flips of the coin to get your one tails. Like you can't just bank on hitting your XG marks.

Like that's not really how XG works. Even in that, even as we already say, single XG is a bit of a myth. So that's where the rub is, right? How many chances are we building? How many chances are we giving ourselves to overcome this XG? G Canada, it was a dead heat. And you can't have your home games be a dead heat of sort of these big chances you're creating and expect that you're just going to win all of your home games. So that's still my, that's like my rant on people saying, oh, well, we could have won it if we'd just gotten this header.

Like you have to create more chances than just the three to be like, well, one of those should have gone in. If you think it's possible to do that, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not possible to create more chances against El Salvador. or I feel like maybe we could do that. And I mean, results do drive the narrative. It's like we were still critical of the, of Burrhalter through the summer. But obviously the criticism is softened even for us when we win trophies. You know, we're human beings too.

So like we're not perfectly, at least I'll speak for myself. I'm not perfectly consistent on this stuff. I was like, I was happy that we won the Gold Cup. I was happy that we won Nation's League. Those were fun matches. and my criticism was soften. But we're playing soccer the same way. That's not changed.

That's not changed. It's still the same kind of soccer. And what's really frustrating, and obviously the results aren't there right now, what's really frustrating for me is, or at least depressing for me, is I look around and I say, well, who do we need to put in what position

to like make this work better? And I'm running out of ideas. you know like I'm like well part of me's like well let's bring in let's bring in julian arrajo let's really get it we need with these a lockdown right back that's gonna that's gonna he's not gonna let that stuff happen against davies and out setting aside whether that's even really true or not which I don't know um that's my best idea you know it's like the whole thing's not working the whole the whole the whole program's not working right now in possession yeah in possession like that really is like

this, I want to say it's a narrow thing, you know, because our defense has been pretty solid. Like, I think that that's almost like an understatement. Our defense has been very good. And part of that is related to our ability to possess the ball, even if it's not dangerously. But we have to find a way to possess in a way that leads to chances because it's too easy for teams to, you know, game plan against us. If they can just say, give the U.S. the ball and they can't do anything with it. Right. our best chance to get points then is actually against Mexico because Mexico won't say that. They'll play, they're going to have the ball.

Right, right. Well, yeah, let's bank on six points from Mexico and everything's all right. Draws everywhere else six points against Mexico. Do we talk about Honduras? Because we haven't even talked about how, I mean, we're talking about our possession shortcomings. There is still a bit of like Burrhalter cuteness going in here. We thought we were past that, but we've gotten a bit cute. here through this window.

Yeah, so he brought Jackson Ewell in. That's his, that's his game time call up to replace McKinney. Well, let's talk about the, let's talk about the whole roster construction, because this has been an issue. We started out the window with 26 when we announced it, which I was fine with. We talked about it, like, fine to keep a tight camp because you can always add guys in later for emergencies. Well, Tim Waya got ruled out before the camp even starts.

Pulisic can't be at the first. We don't have him, we have him like as a last second COVID test taking guy in London to come in, but we don't bring any replacements. And some of these things you might need to start doing earlier if you need them for later, but we don't bring in any replacements for Wea. Raina gets injured against El Salvador, and we don't bring in a replacement for him. We lose Dest, and we don't bring in a replacement right away for Dest. McKenney kicked off the team. No, and then that's the one replacement we bring in. And so we go into this last game against Honduras with 23 players possible.

Because we brought in Sean Johnson for stack, Stefan. We have 23 players available and six of them are centerbacks. Like that's a crazy roster to bring into the last game of the window when you could have been bringing guys in throughout. Right. There's no, there's no restriction on this. He can bring in people whenever he wants. I mean, there's COVID protocols with players coming from Europe for sure. So that's it.

That's an obstacle. But I don't know exactly how much of an obstacle. Yeah, yeah. So it's just these weird roster handcuffs we're putting on ourselves because if Yedlin goes down, God forbid, like now we're, I mean, maybe he's already got his contingency, but it seems ridiculous to put yourself in a situation where it's like, oh, well, no problem. We'll just put Tyler Adams there. Like, if that's not where you want Tyler Adams to be playing, why would you leave yourself that as the only contingency plan you have for Yedlin being hurt? I don't know what their Yedlin replacement injury contingency is, but there isn't a natural one. I'm going to guess it's

Kalan Acosta, you know, which is baloney. Yeah, I was calling for more of a sprawly roster, as you put it, back in the, back before this roster was announced. Not so much because I thought we would need so many players, but it turns out we kind of did. We kind of did need, we needed three right backs,

three left backs. So maybe that's something we all learn from this window is that these three game windows are grueling enough that you need to bring a 30 man roster. And, um, yeah. Or just, you could have just been solving it in real time. Lose a man at a man.

Lose a man at a man. Like, why are we, I don't know. Yeah, I guess I'm thinking of the, I'm thinking of the European, you know,

the European obstacles like, um, but, but yeah, you could, you could solve it in real time. There's plenty of people in MLS. Like,

who would you bring in to play right back? I'd, I'd give, I'd send a big old fruit basket to Julian Rao. And, um, But Kyle Duncan and Herrera have reps And again, you're just looked You're definitely looking for like a break glass kind of situation

And maybe maybe Burlters run it through And it's like, nope, even in that situation I'm not breaking the glass and putting in Herrera Wouldn't do it. So no need to bring him in because that player is going to be Tyler Adams anyway or Kellan Acosta anyway. Then I mean, I guess, but We have that in a lot of places on the field.

We don't we're going to, we're really running a tight, a lean group here for this last match. Well, Honduras is going to, Honduras is, well, maybe, so maybe this six centerbacks on the roster thing is going to, is going to come to fruition against Honduras and we'll play three at a back, three at the back.

And rotate all three at a half time. Right. So I, but Honduras is going to, they're going to bunker, I mean, almost certainly, and force us to try to score by passing through them. And we'll get another chance to see whether Burrhalter can pull that off. And he can. it's totally possible that it does happen.

It's not... It's totally possible that the switch flips after 30 months. It's not inevitable that are good players do good things and steal a result at Honduras. Because I'm increasingly sympathetic to the Half Space's proposal, which is just... I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but, you know, just play good defense and do some hero ball. But the thing is, if Ray... Raina's hurt, or if God forbid Raina and Pulisic are both hurt at the same time, then, you know, we could see a lot of really ugly matches, because we're already seeing a

lot of ugly matches. Well, we know how this has to end with a Jackson-Ewell streamer. Didn't he get one against Honduras and Olympics? Yes, it was a very nice. So there we go. Jackson-Ewell-Streamer, bank it. Honestly, nothing would surprise me tomorrow night. Like, we could end up losing 3-0, we could end up winning 3-0.

I guess most likely thing is it's a one-one draw or a zero-zero-zero draw. Anything else? No, I mean, I know we're not doing like a lineup, but I feel like what's the point of trying to guess who's still standing at this point? Adams and Miles Robinson both on 180 minutes. Do you think there's any chance they get rotated preemptively? Because I would say, I'm saying no. I'm answering my own question.

No, I don't think they're going to get rotated. I think I think Greg is in. There's no master plan anymore. He's just trying to get a result here. Not a result. Not a result. I keep saying that. He needs a win.

He needs win tomorrow night. So I think we'll see Adams for 90 or as many minutes as it takes to secure the win. And probably 90 if we're not winning with Robinson. I'm going to press a year though. Why does he need a win? So he gets fired on a draw? No, he's not. Like I said, I don't think he's going to, I don't think anything gets him fired.

All right. And we can, we can still qualify for the World Cup on three points out of this window? We can. Okay, I'm just trying to find out. It puts us, I mean, you know, you can math, we could go several windows. We go two more windows without getting any points and still technically qualify for the World Cup by getting, you know, maximum more in our last two windows. Sure.

But like every time you only get three points in a window, your chances of qualifying for the World Cup do actually decrease. So. Yeah. I really need this win just to, he needs to prove that he can actually get a win in a real game because we've looked, suspect in a lot of games. And I'm sorry for all the people were like two trophies in the summer. How do you guys just like no one's talking about Bruce Arena's 2017 Gold Cup trophy?

The trophies were, you know, the trophies were nice. And I guess I should, I should mention one thing we saw from that B squad in the Gold Cup is like as you would, you know, we'd play teams for an hour. We somehow managed to stay in the game. And then and then we'd bring in like four,

four subs in the last half hour that were, you know, roughly on a same level with our starters. And then we just, we would just grind teams down. Sometimes we did it in, in extra time. And, you know,

it doesn't seem like, with Burrhalter waiting until the 83rd minute to make subs, like, where is that? Where is that strategy? There's no trust. Now that it's crunch time, God trust them.

Got to trust them to even start a couple of games, which we didn't do against El Salvador. Yeah. All right. All right. We're all bummed out, Yeah, we're bummed out. We're a little nervous. Everyone's a little nervous. Yeah. Let's see what happens tomorrow night. We'll talk to everybody on Thursday.

We'll see you.