Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #319: Saudi Arabia v USA recap

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

The last friendly before the World Cup is another stinker, pretty much. We talk about some hopeful reasons that these games aren't predictive of how we'll perform in Qatar, but also give full-throated voice to the doomsday sentiments, and then work our way through the action of this game, mostly the first half.Join Scuffed on Patreon for as little as $2 a month: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedPatrons get a private feed for the Monday Review, which is, among other things, a run-down of club action for national team players every week with Watke and Vince. Patrons also get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalogue of historic recaps we're working on. Here's what we have so far.#1 Czechoslovakia v USA, 1990, https://www.patreon.com/posts/historic-recap-v-67067301#2 USA v Colombia, 1994, https://www.patreon.com/posts/historic-recap-2-69083229#3 USA v Iran, 1998, https://www.patreon.com/posts/historic-recap-3-70575704#4: Mexico v USA, 2002, https://www.patreon.com/posts/historic-recap-4-72235898 Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the scuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer. The U.S. drew the kingdom of Saudi Arabia zero zero at an empty stadium in the southeast of Spain on Tuesday. It's difficult to imagine going into a World Cup with less momentum. No goals in the final window, very little real chance creation, no evidence that we will ask difficult questions of any of our opponents in November. There are some mildly optimistic ways to think about what will happen in Qatar and we will get into those, rest assured, but I got to say, Greg, it feels a lot like it did after we lost to Panama a year ago when you said essentially no weight should be given to the long-term project that Burrhalter was building. Is that unfair today? No, I think it's totally fair. I think,

I think like the dominant theme going into this window after, you know, the roster release and some of the controversy around that was system. And we've been talking about Greg Burhalter and his system since since his first January camp of 2019, when we've been. We've been talking about Greg Burholter and we saw the inverted right, right fullback come into the middle and place in our mid. And ever since then, we, you know, we constantly talk about the system and it's capitalized in our voices. But the thing is, like, there isn't really that much of a system, right? I mean, the system itself is not particularly rigid or specific.

So it almost starts to just blend into at this point. We're just talking about profile, right? So when we talk about we want a forward that fits the system, there was nothing about either these two games in this window that showcased like what that sort of platonic system forward does. You know, if the idea is Burrhalter prefers a forward like Ferreira who can come into the midfield or, you know, come in and combined, he never did that in these two windows, right? He's not doing it. So if the system isn't actually what we're doing on the field, and it's hard to even call it

the system. Like his system is basically just, uh, it's an aspiration. It's an aspiration. Yeah, and even then I'm not even sure, but it's like we're literally just talking about what's our shape in buildup in possession? It's at a 325 or is it a 2.35? And that's, you know, like if you're saying that's a system that we're beholden to, like that to me isn't really a system, right? It's it's that's stuff you can announce on a chalkboard two days before the game. It's like, okay, we're playing and we're going to try to do the 325.

And if the press comes out of an extra player or one fewer player, then we move one of those three up. Like none of this is detailed, complicated, super sophisticated stuff. It's just, it, we're, I mean, at this point, we're just talking about our possession shape. And so, uh, so yeah, so I guess, I guess that's all a way of saying like, it isn't, it didn't look very good in this window. It can look better, uh, in a month. And, and, you know, we're talking about the, the comment I made about this was after that Panama away loss. And our next game was Coastry get home, and it was one of our better games. Like, you can turn this around because it's not all that.

We're not doing complicated stuff, despite all of the emphasis that the narrative puts on the capital system. Yeah, you know, I mean, one thing worth noting is every time we've had a really, really low point under Burrhalter with sort of our backs against the wall, the next, the next performance has been pretty good. remember we lost in Toronto against Canada 2-0 came back and crushed them in the next leg of that Nation's League tie you know obviously a little bit different stakes and level of competition there same thing happened after like you said after the Costa Rica game

yeah so I mean that gives me a little bit of optimism yeah the optimism is that we don't need the system to come to fruition we literally just at this point I mean it doesn't have to be Greg Burholder doing it but we just need at this point a coherent approach in a game where the players sort of line up roughly with what we're trying to accomplish on the field or what the opponent is sort of allowing us to try to accomplish the way they're set up and then and then we just hope that the talent and the variance play out the way we need them to on the day I you know people are thinking a lot of different ways feel in a lot of different ways people in the fan base that is today and I I thought I'd try to like pick out two sort of pessimistic ways to look at it. And I have three optimistic ways to look at what's happened and, you know, what will happen? What does it predict about Qatar?

The big, so let's start with the pessimistic ones. The big doomsday take, and it's not a new one. I mean, it's been out there basically since Jay Berhalter was still the chief marketing officer at USSF. Is that Greg Berhalter is just incompetent. He's not up for the job. There have been some moments. against an apparently, I mean, now we know an apparently pretty weak Mexico side, but still Mexico, moments against Mexico, and here or there otherwise, where we've looked pretty good.

But for the most part, I would say, we've slogged our way through soccer games under Burrhalter. And now we're leaving off Brooks, John Brooks, and Tim Ream in favor of Aaron Long at centerback. We favor Ferreira and Pepe over, for one, for one, Sergeant, Josh Sergeant, at least in minutes in this camp. And then even more, Jordan Pfeck, who is the, you know, he is the starting number nine for the best team in the Bundesliga right now.

And I got to quibble with best, but continue. The point, the point. Right now, right now are the operative words, right? They have the most points. There you go. That is an accurate statement. The team isn't playing. playing the U.S. team that isn't playing with clarity or confidence and really hasn't consistently

ever. And now we're less than two months from the first World Cup game. Burrhalter was a mistake. Now we're paying for it. I think a lot of people are feeling that way right now. For sure. For sure. And that comes with, you know, what Burrhalter's mission was, you know, his stated mission, which was to disorganize the opponent with the ball. And now in our penultimate or our, you know, our window, our preparation window for the world. World Cup, we play a game where we generate like one and a half shots over 180 minutes, right? Yeah. It's abysmal in the chance generation process.

And that's what I am all about is you have to be able to generate chances and deny your opponent chances. That's what we're keeping track of. So it could be where we don't score goals, but we were peppering the frame for 180 minutes and that just happened. This was not that. There was not an X-G number to be proud of. here.

Less than one, less than one for the two games cumulative. Oof. Oof. So, yeah, so, I mean, it's very easy to look at that and be like, he, it was all snake oil. And if we lay the, if we lay a September window-sized egg in Qatar, I don't think there's any way around that. Like, he couldn't do it. He couldn't get the team organized because, again, I know we're missing some players,

and hopefully some of those players come in and do help us. But we have good players on the field, right? We had solid players on the field. And to generate so little with these players is, I mean, in part, like, it's not all on the manager, but I don't think there's any question that we lacked, like, any kind of coherent play in the game against Japan. In Saudi Arabia, we were still bad, in Spain against Saudi Arabia. We were still bad, but we were bad farther up the field, at least.

That is worth something. We had some clear ideas. We had some clear ideas in this game. Very clear ideas. Clear ideas of how to get the ball up the field, which is, you know, we played what Saudi Arabia gave us. And then very few ideas on what to do once we got there. And if you've been listening to our women's national team recaps, like the themes there were totally present in this game against Saudi Arabia. And the extreme difference is that while the women get those chances in like overwhelming, overwhelming volume.

where they might not be very efficient. We still didn't get them in that kind of volume, right? Like the women get up the field anytime they want, they just have the ball in the final third. We got there reliably, but it was like, you know, we had to earn it a little bit. And so once every 20 minutes.

Yeah. So once we're up there then to waste a chance with some super inefficient decision or execution, just like hurts more. It's like, oh, what a, you know, what a waste of being in a good position. Yeah. Yeah, our crossing in particular was just not effective.

So the other big doomsday take these days is that the kids are overrated. You sort of alluded to it. The kids are overrated. The big clubs where our guys play or have been playing, have been eating suboptimal performances from them from these young American players because they prioritize long-term development, which is great. but it means we may have an inflated view of how good some of these players are right now. This is an idea from Bob Morocco. I got to cite my sources here.

So he's not arguing that the kids are overrated necessarily. He's just saying this is a possible reason why we have all these kids at these big clubs. I keep calling them kids. They're men. We have these guys playing at big clubs. But this is a reason that maybe that's not quite as much of a, predictor of how good they're going to be for the national team as maybe we thought it would be. And it seems to me that this is at least partially the case.

But in any case, I think other people would go further like these guys aren't any good. Pulisix is a squad player at Chelsea now more or less. McKenny plays a lot at Juventus, but he hasn't been playing particularly well all season. And the club is doing very poorly, especially by their standards. Dest was run out of Barcelona. He's very much a second option at Milan, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Rain is never healthy. Adams and Aronsen are straight up system fits at Leeds for an American coach.

But despite all the excitement over that club, including on this podcast, they're very much fulfilling specific roles and doing that adequately in a way that doesn't necessarily translate to the national team. And then we got Jedi, Eunice, Ream, and Scali. They're the guys starting consistently in Europe for a good club. Scali just had to beg his way out of the field for Burrhalter. Jedi's hurt, obviously, Eunice is hurt, Reem is not even in camp. So maybe we're just not even that good.

Forget Burhalter, we're just not that good of a player pool and not that good of a team. I mean, I'm okay with that. I'm okay saying that we might absolutely overrate how good the players are. And I try to like stay ground in the sense of, you know, we can be good relative to our own historic pool. while still recognizing that, you know, the players that we're super excited about, the real national teams have those players by the dozen collecting dust back home while they're winning their trophies. So that is a real thing.

But what it goes back to for me then is like we do need to recognize that and we do need to say, and Berthelter essentially said this before the window. Like we aren't the most talented team. So we need to be cohesive. We need to be coherent. We need to have a clear plan with everyone. pulling in the same direction. Yeah.

And that is exactly what we did not see in this window. Right. So the doomsday here is like, yeah, we aren't the best. We are not going to be the most talented team in our group. You know, I don't know when will be which games we will have a like overall talent edge. But we, it is imperative that we have a clear plan and a clear like willingness to execute that plan from every player on the field and all the way down to the 26th player. And so that's the big worry here is that we didn't see any evidence that that was going to be the case in this window at least.

We've seen, you know, other games where we have looked very coherent. And so I think, yeah, the big question I'm sure we'll get into it with the optimistic alternatives is that Jedi unison way I come in and save the day. Yeah, that's the next one. Because, I mean, if you could say, well, no, Burhalter's okay. He's not that bad. I mean, nobody's saying he's like a brilliant. soccer coach at this point, but maybe he's not so bad. And yes, maybe we're not, definitely we're not a soccer power in terms of the talent that

we have at our disposal. But we have enough talent to challenge a good national team from England and maybe beat them on a good day. The issue, so people who are thinking that way, and I would like to think that way, I want to be thinking that way, is that it's all good. So these are the optimistic takes. It's all good because Eunice Musa. solves a lot of our problem against Japan

and some of our problem that we had against Saudi Arabia of chance creation just because he's so individually good at getting the ball and carrying it forward. Obviously, that would have helped us against Japan. And we talked about that in Japan recap. The other one, like you just said, bring Jedi and Wea in.

Jedi provides some forward thrust on the left and a lot of defensive stability. Wea, I would say, will make us 25% more effective in the final third. It's huge. I mean, these are big differences if you can get these upgrades. And, you know, obviously there's no guarantee we get these upgrades because injuries happen. So maybe we get one of them back or two of them back, but we lose somebody else.

You know, Jedi comes back, but we lose deaths. So it's still going to be, you know, Yedlin on the field. And Yedlin may not have been like atrocious yesterday. But to get those little upgrades in multiple positions can go a long way, especially when, again, the system itself is not some special savior. Like, we don't, we clearly are not at a place where you just plug and play and it's like, oh, well, because the system is such a well-oiled machine, firing on all 14 cylinders, I don't know anything about machines or cylinders.

Every engine has 14 cylinders. Then, you know, it doesn't matter. We can survive these injuries because we're so, we're such a, you know, prepared unit. And we always have our personnel lined up with what is going to. going to actually take place on the field with our player selections. So since we know that's not the case, then it really does come down to like, okay, well, can getting three or four of these guys back be enough of an individual upgrade in those spots?

And also like a collective upgrade. Like I'm sure you're, you know, Tim Wea will make the players around him better. We see how McKenny combines with Wea in World Cup qualifying. And it's different than what he's going to do when DeAndre Edlin's hugging the right side line. So, you know, there are these, these cumulative effects. of upgrading individual players. And I do have like some real optimism that that can play out.

Me too. Me too. I think it's, it's not, it doesn't make us a World Cup contender to get these players back, but it makes us a lot better than we were yesterday, I think. Some other optimistic takes.

And these are kind of weird. Well, one's not weird. The second one's weird. But this one is the chaos of the typical world cape. I'm sorry. The chaos of the typical world. Cup game state works in our favor. No, we cannot disorganize an opponent with the ball in a sterile European stadium environment or a hostile Central American one for that matter. But that won't matter

when the whistle blows against Wales. It'll just be a war out there, maximum intensity, lots of like duels and individual brilliance will take over. And the dice is kind of going to land where the dice lands. We just got to hope that, you know, it lands in the right place for us. And that's of how it's going to be no matter what. That's the historic recaps talking, right? A little bit, yeah. Where are you watching it's like, okay, well, we weren't brilliant in 2002. We weren't playing brilliant football, but we sure did, like, sneak up on Mexico once

with a late run from Claudio Reno wingback, and Mexico crumbled a bit with some other choices. And yes, that can totally, I mean, that can totally have. Nobody could watch that game and say that we had 11 better players than Mexico did, you know. but we won two zero so yes i like the i'm not nearly as doomy and gloomy as i think the the overall mood is at the moment just because again uh like i i know it this this can happen like we could go to guitar and have this window play out three three in three straight games and be like well then this journey we have been on uh may have been may have been the wrong choice for our for our lives

for whatever disposable time we had but it very much could just be you know we go out there and we look like a competent soccer team and Tim Wea carries the day and Jordan Pfock scores on a one of our three corner kicks

and we sneak three points out of Wales and we back our way into the second round that makes me want to play a clip from Burrhalter he was kind of cryptic He was asked in the post-game press conference, you know, what clarity he got from this window. Let's listen real quick. Yeah, I think we got some clarity. You know, we talked about it today with the group and with the coaching group.

And, you know, I think things became pretty clear. What things? Things. Which I mean, he's being kind of cryptic there. I think he's probably talking about the player pool. you know, who's going to Qatar, but he's not going to, he's not going to drop that news in the in the postgame press conference. That's my take on that. Yeah, I think so too. I think, I think if it, if it were a lot of positive things, because you learn both, right? You learn

positive things. You learn positive things. I feel like you would have had no problem going into it. Like we learned that, you know, this avenue of attack or possession is a really strong, you know, he could definitely do that. We didn't have a lot of those things. No. And if it's negative things, a good coach isn't going to lay out like well we what we learned is we absolutely cannot trust mark mackenzie on the field so he's he's no longer in contention for a roster slide guitar you're i mean like he's not going to say that out loud to the press uh that would be bad coaching so uh so it's it's probably just a matter of like some some people maybe eliminated themselves uh some some it could be that some styles of play have eliminated themselves or at least with certain first personnel groupings. And so again, I get that that just sort of fueled the doominess and the gloominess and a little bit of sort of the outrage because it feels like such a dodge. But yeah, it makes sense that if we've got a lot of negative information out of these windows.

Which we did. Yeah, you're not going to just outline it in public. I don't air that out. Let me give one more optimistic take before we get into this rather not optimistic performance. This one fits under optimism, not because it's like so good, but just because it argues that these matches are not predictive, kind of like the last one did. It goes like this.

The kids would have played better with more energy and more belief in front of a real stadium crowd, maybe home fans on the East Coast than they did in these empty stadiums in Europe. Now, obviously there's the travel considerations and finding an opponent issue that may explain why we played in Europe. I mean, the travel considerations do explain why we played in Europe, right? But the good news is we won't play like that when the whistle blows in guitar in front of a full stadium. And I think, you know, somebody made the point on the scuffed discord after the game that when Gio Raina went down injured, which has, you know, that's been a saga.

His hamstrings have been a saga. When he basically subs himself out 30 minutes in or 25 minutes in, really, that may have taken the wind out of the sales of the entire team because it's just kind of a sad thing. you know, that compounded with the fact it was an empty stadium sort of might explain the listlessness of the overall. I mean, listless is a little strong, but it wasn't, might explain the lack of energy and the performance, I guess. It wasn't listful. It wasn't listful. No. It was both matches. And I don't know how much, you know, the Raina thing put a damper on it. Like, obviously that wasn't the case in the first match, right?

No. First match, we were just listless. So maybe we were ready to bounce back in match too. But the other thing that played into it, and this is not an excuse, by the way, but like Saudi Arabia were very, very listless as well. And so, you know, you can't use that as an excuse to match that lack of energy. Like you've got to, you've got to be like, oh, we are going to punish them. If you're going to come out and play like this, we're not just going to like play even slower. Like we're going to, we're going to like exploit your laxadaisical play here.

And we're going to, I mean, you got to take a. with a shed at that point. And we just, we just didn't seem interested in doing that particularly. Like there was a lot of, you know, again, we'll get into it in the chronology,

but a lot of these balls we were hitting up over the top well to gain the ground that we gained, you know, the ball's traveling 75 yards. The players have to cover that distance too to join, you know,

whoever's receiving the ball. And that's where, that's one of the areas we were just lacking. Ball goes up to Yedlin way up in the corner. And like, a cost does not working hard to get up there. You know what I mean? Like, we aren't working hard.

Even G. I mean, before the injury. They aren't, They aren't always working hard to join and to really be like, oh, we are going to, this is going to be a stampede of attackers. And score a mother freaking goal. Right. It was very much just like, okay, balls up there now.

And everyone sort of trotted at the same pace. And that was like, that's why we were bad once we got the ball into the attacking third, one of the reasons. Yeah, I noticed that there was a Yedlin cross. We'll get into it later. But Yudlin Cross that gets cleared out to the top of the box. And then Acosta has a left-footed shot. and maybe this is the one you're thinking of. But Raina had played a really nice one, two, with Yedlin to lead up to that.

It was a difficult return pass to spring Yedlin down the line. And I noticed that Rana was just sort of was veering off towards the sideline, kind of admiring his handiwork. When if he had, you know, if he had, as soon as he played the pass, just started drifting towards the top of the box, he, that ball comes right to him. He settles it and he has time to do something with it. it as it was he was a little bit behind Acosta who was not also also was not like on the spot

and Acosta had like a left footed first time shot from 25 yards which I mean 99 times out of 100 that's not on frame you know it's a low XG chance yeah that was exactly it and I remember that play as well and what I remember thinking I was like what we want to have up there once that ball goes up field so we don't just have to hit you know an aimless cross because we need a triangle We need people up there to triangle and do a little bit of soccer. And we never got the third man up there. It was always just at best, like two players. And at times, no one would join it.

And it would just be Ariola up there having gained some ground. But like, he has no one to play soccer with. Ariel is not going to do a bunch of people. One to be one. Tim Wea might. So all he's going to do is fire him all in. Yeah. So that, I mean, it was, it was like clear that we just didn't have the full commitment once we gain the ground to keep playing out of it.

The other thing that could, you know, work in that situation is to cross it to a forward who's very good at heading a ball into the goal. Who could that be? We didn't bring that guy, so we didn't do that. Let me play. We crossed it to worse headers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peppie's not bad, scored a goal with his head just a couple weeks ago, but he was bracketed by centerbacks. And let's be honest, kind of little brothered throughout this game.

Let me play a Burrhalter clip on confidence. and what he thinks, you know, his opening statement in the post-game press conference on what he thinks went wrong. I think it was a positive step for the group, the intensity. He'll get to what he thinks went wrong. You know, against a tough opponent, a compact opponent. Happy with that. Not happy, I think, with execution. I think it comes down to a little bit of tightness, a little bit of lack of confidence and anxiety.

And I told the guys, you know, I feel for them. It's a difficult situation to be in. Everyone's fighting for roster spots. And instead of coming out and really performing like the team we know we are, we lacked a little confidence in that. I think that hurt performance. There were certainly spaces to take advantage of today, and we didn't do that enough.

Let me just before you respond, Greg, let me just play one other clip because Jeff Carlisle from ESPN asked him to drill down on what execution he didn't think was up to snow. enough. I think it was a timing issue. We had a number of good runs behind the back line. Maybe the pass was off a little bit. The time was off a little bit that didn't lead to direct goal scoring opportunities. Maybe the touch was off and then we couldn't cross it when we're in good positions. Maybe the cross wasn't as accurate as it could have been. So like we were we were just off on a number of plays and I think that has to do with the confidence of the group.

One thing he doesn't bring up is that what you just brought up was that there wasn't there weren't enough people joining into the attack. Yeah, and Burrhalters talked about the crosses all the way into like early in World Cup qualifying about how like we didn't get enough early crosses in. And like, well, I understand that early crosses are more valuable than crossing in general. Like once that touches off and the early crosses no longer on, which again takes really good timing. You really need DeAndre Edlin to take that ball first time to be able to hit an early cross into

your streaking striker. If that doesn't happen, you shouldn't just surrender. the field position, right? You shouldn't just surrender it and just be like, oh, well, plays off. I'm still going to cross it because that's what we do here. And that's what the sort of frustrating thing was. It was clear that we were like going with the long balls. You know, Saudi Arabia offered no pressure on our centerbacks or anyone deep with the ball at their feet. So we could just stand back there and watch our wide receivers downfield making these routes. And it was fun to watch that. As a fan, you get to do that too because with no pressure coming on the centerbacks, you know, usually when there is a

little bit of pressure that tension exists and so your eyes are sort of trained to follow that tension when there's none as a as even somebody watching at home you can kind of drift with with your attention and watch these rotations right and watch uh peppy drift just a little bit towards one sideline and then mckenny sprint into that space and and the key here is it's not always going to be the first guy it's on so defense will react to that while there's still no pressure on our centerback and so then it's not on pool sick is now drifted into the space mckenny's in and for just a split second, the defense lets their guard down during this rotation, and then Pulsick will go, right? Or the Serginio deaths will go, and it's like, oh, now that's on. And so we would either,

you know, miss that sometimes. You're always going to miss some of those runs, but we were finding them often enough. So again, it was clear that this was something that we were focused on for this game. And so the frustrating part was apparently no focus on what to do once we had done that. Like the actual patterns that we executed once we got up there were non-existent. Yeah. Yeah, because we actually executed those diagonal balls pretty well. I mean, Zimmerman was pretty well keyed in with that ball. Actually, Yedlin played a few of them that were pretty nice.

Tyler Adams played a couple who's hit it to either side. But once we received it, yeah, there was nothing. And that reminds me of, you know, Matt Doyle posted a clip of a of Serginio Dest dribbling up the left sideline and then playing a pass to Pepe's feet and Pepe is getting smothered but he does manage to lay it off

towards the center of the top of the box just into a pocket he just lays it off into a pocket which is you know that's what he had that's the option he had at that moment and you want to see Christian Pulisic making that run I do at least saying like okay that ball's that ball's maybe probably going to get to peppy i'm gonna i'm gonna make a run at the top of the box and he never does it and i think that's this is a little different than us doing the diagonal and not knowing what to do once we get on the ball down there but it's uh it's it's it's an i guess another example of people off the ball not just right off the ball but like maybe a few steps away from the ball not really joining in and getting after it yeah i think that's fair i also think in that particular case uh

Again, we were doing these rotations, right? And McKenny was clearly becoming a forward or an attacking player, similar to the way our vertical ass-based merchants would tend to do. And in this play, like, Pulisic got dropped back and McKinney had gone up. So they've switched spots. And at that point, like, the run is going to probably need to come from McKinney as the more advanced player. Poolstick would actually be like the late arriving runner. He's in the late-ariving role.

And he might have been able to do it too if he'd been a little bit more, if you'd anticipated this a little bit sooner. and again broken hard early break hard up field early uh i just want to see somebody break hard early off the ball like once when's the last time we saw that that was about what was missing right and so again the hope there is that this is that that we're just getting friendly uh timing on our break on our on the hardness of our breaks some soft breaks i mean tim way is tim way a breaks hard off the ball he does and i i know people are going to be like well you guys are just bells you're just you have a Timway agenda and maybe I do but he does he moves off the ball really well

should we do the lineups yeah let's let's talk about who's actually in this game we probably mentioned everyone at this point already yeah I'll give the Saudi Arabia lineup they were technically the home team is al yami and goal al-hanam al-am al-armri abulahi and abdulahmid across the back line al-hassan no shahahili was the number six and then al-hasaan and al-da-wels Sari were the other midfielders. I'm sorry, Al-Janjay, Al-Jan-J, Al-Birikhan and Bahabri were the front line. And Al-Birikhan and Bahabri were probably the most dangerous players for them. What we kind of talked about here with their shape is, and this was kind of really interesting.

And I don't know if we'll see this again through the rest of this, you know, two months of the cycle that's left. they played a really high line, which is how we were able to hit those balls in behind, but they, again, put no pressure on our, on our back line. So it was this very strange setup. But again,

I don't think too many teams are going to employ that. So I don't know, I don't know how even... You call it a midblock, right? Is that what it was? Yeah, but I mean, it's a high line. Like, what I'm expecting from Wales, I don't think they're going to really come out and press us,

but I don't think they're going to offer all that much space behind either. So, like, it was a really, it was a really compressed, mid block, right? Super low line of confrontation, super high back line. And, and that's why it was. The upshot was it was basically impossible to play through on the ground. Like, there was, there was no room to to play to somebody's feet in between the lines because the lines were like five yards apart, five yards behind the half line, you know? Yeah. And again, no reason to unless, unless you really wanted to commit to like that training session idea of a friendly,

Because again, we had no real issues eventually hitting that long ball into somebody. And the long ball execution was pretty solid, especially in the first half. Second half, we got a little bit like just too, I don't know if I want to say greedy, but just like, oh, well, I should hit this long ball. And it didn't matter whether or not the timing was there or the, we created the little, like, napping situation where we get one or one weak side defender to fall asleep and so we can hit somebody in behind. we were just hitting it to nobody, hitting it to like double coverage.

So second half, I thought it fell off quite a bit. But in the first half, yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty simple stuff. Yeah, we do like a couple quick passes on the left side. And then we did, I thought, a decent job of switching it quickly to somebody who could hit a, hit a ball to the other touchline. All right. the U.S. lineup was Turner and Goal, Yedlin, Zimmerman, Long, and Dest

across the back line. Just don't understand why Aaron Long is starting in these games personally. Maybe you can explain it to me, Greg. Adams at the 6th, Acosta McKinney at the 8th.

Acosta gets the start. I think Luca Deloetore was not great against Japan, and I don't know what choice Burrhalter has in this camp other than to throw Acosta in there. I thought maybe Acosta could pull out a good performance, pull it out of his hat in this game. He didn't really. And then we got Raina, Pepe and Pulisic across the front line. Pepe gets to start over Ferreira and Sergeant, who at the end of the day only had 45 minutes in this camp.

Yeah, the long one is an interesting one. Maybe Burrhalter didn't know how Saudi Arabia were going to play. But again, it just goes back to like if the number one criteria for inclusion for our centerbacks is to be able to play a high line, it's just a silly number one criteria unless you're going to commit to full Red Bull ball soccer because you can't always determine whether you're going to get to play a high line, especially if when a team lets you have possession, you want to try to do like deliberate buildup, which Burhalter does, right? I don't think there's any chance Burrhalter is going to fully give up on like this kind of deliberate build. buildup and Long is so, so, so ineffective in it, especially left centerback. He might be a little bit better if he could be the right centerback, but he can't if Zimmerman's playing. They've like never done that through going back to 2019 when Zimmerman Long play together.

Zimmerman's on the right, Long's the left. The universe of passes that Long can't make when he's playing left centerback is, is a, I mean, it's, it's most of the universe. He can't, he can't hit any of those long balls. It's a non-starter. He did hit one, he hit one long ball successfully in that game. He attempted like three and the other one, one of his other ones was like the low light of the game. Yeah, it was pretty, it was him and he and Acosta kind of competed for the low light, but that one was, I think that one was clear.

So he's not going to attempt them and he shouldn't attempt them, right? It's not, it's not in his skill set. But he also can't hit like basic rhythm passes around the back with his left foot. Like he won't do it and he probably shouldn't do that either. So you're playing him there. He can't keep the ball moving out to our left fullback. He can't hook it around the corner as our left fullback advances up the field. Right.

So you're putting him in the spot for any kind of deliberate buildup where he just simply can't execute what like even a basic centerback should be able to do. Not even like full on John Brooks distribution, but just like the basics that he can't do. And if you're not able to actually get into your high line, then he is basically a. he's hurting you. I mean, he's hurting you by opportunity cost in a big way.

Oh, yeah. I mean, no doubt. So we saw all these balls that Zimmerman's hitting. We're talking about the timing. It's like we've mentioned this before. It's not like people are only getting open when Zimmerman has the ball.

There are people who are getting open doing these movements and these rotations when Aaron Long has the ball too. But he can't hit them. So it's like we lose half of our ability to ping these players in by playing a guy who can't do it in the centerback. So, well, seeing some things like, well, we don't need Brooks because Zimmerman has gotten so much better at this. It's awesome that Zimmerman's gotten better. It would be fantastic. It was like, oh, thank God, now Zimmerman doing, improving of this gives us two centerbacks at the same time being able to pick these soft spots in the opponent zones. But we don't. We're back. We're still just handicapping, handicapping ourselves by just giving ourselves one centerback who will do this.

That's my Brooks play. Brooks gets two games for Benfica between now and the World Cup. He should be on the play. What about Tim Ream? For me, Tim Ream would probably be an able John Brooks stand-in if Brooks isn't playing. And I know, you know, people are going to like, people always kind of bash the Tim Ream. The people were asking for Tim Ream because it's like, oh, well, nine months ago you didn't want him on the field at all. And it's like, yeah, we probably didn't want him on the field as much when we had John Brooks doing it. But if Brooks isn't playing and we're seeing just total Keystone cop stuff from everyone else playing, like Ream totally makes sense.

You know, there was also, there's also new information about Tim Ream. He had never hung in the Premier League before. He had played in the Premier League a few seasons and they got, his team would get relegated every time, usually like on almost like historically bad defenses for the league. So this is new.

What Ream is doing right now is new. And so, yeah, like if the choices are like the clown show that we've kind of been seeing at left center back through this, window, then give me at least like a guy who can ping a decent ball against good opponents. I think, I think Aaron Long's situation has changed too. I think he's a great, for one thing, he's a great story of like sticking to it and making a good professional career out of, you know, humble beginnings. He was a USL player and he worked his way up. And I think he was actually a better player two years ago than he is now.

I'm not saying he was a better pass or anything, but he's, he did deal with a bad injury and he's now back from it and that does have an effect on people. So I'm, I just want to throw that in there as a sort of sop to long because I don't hate the guy.

What about Chris Richards? I feel like he would, his situation is a bit complicated because he's not playing much at Crystal Palace and also he's hurt. I don't know how he got hurt, I guess, in training. but he can he can make those passes you know uh i'm not saying he's brooks level passer but he can hook

it around with his left foot to the fullback who's advancing up field he can find people between the lines uh i think he's we mentioned waya jedi and and musa as players who will make a big difference for this team i think richards could as well and hopefully burrhalter has him if he's not going to bring Raymond Brooks, which it doesn't look like he is, hopefully as Richards sort of penciled in as the starter next to Zimmerman. Wouldn't surprise me if he already has that. As is thought, you know, before Richards got injured in January, it sure seemed like it was going to be Richards, Miles, and Zimmerman is sort of the three in the minutes.

And so wouldn't surprise me at all now that Miles assert that it was a clear two for Burrhalter. But it's tough again when there are no minutes to be found at all, whether it's by injury or even once he gets back to Palace healthy, there might not be minutes for him. That's a tough spot to be in as a coach to put in a 21-year-old. What's Richard's 21? I'm just going to say 21. Roughly 21, yeah. A 21-year-old centerback who's not playing soccer at the moment. Like, that's a big ask.

You know, if you want to turn to John Brooks or Tim Riem, when Tim Rine was playing for us, he wasn't playing in the Premier League. He had been benched for him, but he was still playing for us. Like, that's a little bit of a different story. The dude's, you know, he's 39. He's got a ton of. He's not 39. I think he graduated like in Greg Burhalter's class. They were the same class.

They went to the same high school. He's got, like, he's got some experience, right? And John Brooks has this experience. That's why for me, like Brooks plays a couple of games. He's, he's fit. He's in for me if it's just pure soccer decision. So Richards is just a different story, right? I mean, based on what we've seen, I probably would roll that dice with either Richards or CCV.

Again, but those are, you can't say it's not a dice roll at that point. Yeah, we weren't rolling dice this badly two months out, but that's where we are. Okay, let's get to the chronology. There we go. First thing that happens is a chance for Saudi Arabia 20 seconds in. They kind of cut through our right flank. and a cross from over there skips through, kind of cut back cross,

skips through and it's met by Al-Hassan number 15. And he hits a good shot from Zone 14. Turner saves it down to his left. This is literally just a throw-in. Like we just got done badly on a throw-in. And it was like it was maybe just us being a little too eager. It was Yedlin and Acosta down on our right side, just deep in our half.

And they both just like chase a player, one player up towards the thrower. And it's the most basic movement for the other Saudi Arabia guy to just run behind D'Andre Edlin to the giant space at the end line. And it's just a very simple throw at that point. And the guy just whips it across. And we're kind of all kind of hustling to battle stations. And it hits a nice window and decent smack at the goal.

Yeah. Pretty like not that difficult of a save, I guess. But a save nonetheless. It's an early, it's an early ding against. Edlin for me. Because again, he's supposed to be, again, he's the veteran here, right? He's the guy with World Cup experience. So if he's the experienced guy who's supposed to do all these little things right, like giving up that ground, that, that pitch control mistake right there, like, that's a, that's a warning light. Yeah. I did not, I was not impressed with the Edlin very much in this

game. He had some, some moments. Second minute, uh, I clock a missed connection from Dest to Ricardo Pepe. And I don't know if you noticed this, but I felt like it was on Pepe because he, he's sort of, he's coming back towards the ball, but he doesn't take a very useful approach angle for Desk, considering the window that Dest has to pass into. So Desk's pass misses Pepe completely. Now, I think it could also be, I mean, there were, there were like three of these from Sergenio Dest, and maybe it's because he's just not playing very much, and his, his rhythm is just slightly out of sync. But I do think, um, In this case, Pepey wasn't moving into the window that he had to pass into. Yeah.

And what you're hoping is that we have dozens of these kinds of passes into our forward checking in, at least in the game where we can at least try to play this way. Again, this might not have been that game because of how compact Saudi Arabia were. And it may just have been the better decision most of the time to use Pepe's checking back as the decoy and then look for that McKinney or that vertical run over the top. But yeah, I agree this was just a, I don't put too much into it for you. either Pepe or Des. I feel like we have to because we had so few chances to actually gauge what

Pepe did. And that's still the open question, right, is whether or not anyone's doing enough to make their case for Stryker. So we really have to magnifying lens it on each little movement and thing. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's just Desk does all this difficult work down in the left corner. He did this a few times to get out of a situation. And then he has, you know, he has these small windows to pass through.

And it was peppy in this case. There was one where Adams wasn't, you know, kind of moving into the window. That was a, it's a moving window, you know. It's not just in one spot. Adams wasn't moving into the window after Desd did like this really good work to get out of a situation. And then Adams misses the pass and it ends up being a chance for Saudi Arabia. But anyway, yeah, we got a lot more to talk about here. That's a good point though, just because that's something you get from death.

on the left. I don't think he does all that if he's playing on the right, but he's basically cutting in against pressure as a way to solve it. Yeah. Cutting into his right foot. And then he did find several little passes to essentially beat Saudi Arabia's first line of pressure when they're in the limited times that they actually tried to pressure us. Yeah, it's he, I thought Desk was fine, you know, and you get to see that.

That's an interesting point that he doesn't do as much of that on the right side. I never really thought about that. but it's true, I think. Fourth minute, Raina waltzes around a guy on the counter deep in our half and then tries to play Pepey in behind and Pepe's a step offside just inside the Saudi half. I mean, the magnifying lens is saying here that Pepey should have stayed on side. I mean, especially in retrospect, we didn't have a lot of chances to score. He can do a better job at timing his run here.

my magnifying glass is saying forwards should try to push that line when they can and that you're going to get called off sides i think i think john muller had a great piece on i think it was muller could have been one of the other clever nerds um just that like one of the key indicators of forwards in in good form is actually like the volume of offside calls they get high volume of off sides means you're really getting played in behind a lot which is a good indicator that uh you're getting on the ends of through walls a lot. So again, if we had a bunch of these chances, PEPI would stay on side for a few of them, and that's what we're looking for. The magnifying lens, really for me, is just the presence. We talk about presence of Giorina here.

Yeah, he's so good. What a difference maker. He will be in the hypothetical where he's healthy at the World Cup. Yeah. Yeah, that's coming up. Still 20 minutes out from that on the timeline. And fifth minute or right at the end of the fifth minute, beginning of the sixth minute, we get a lovely combination play from Pulisic.

He plays it to McKinney. McKinney bounces it back to him. Pulisic plays it to Pepey, and Peppy flicks it in behind for McKenny. Pretty cleverly. I thought it was a nice pass, but McKinney's way offside. Just, I guess, that goes back to timing, to quote Greg Burhalter. But that was a lovely bit of combination. maybe the prettiest thing we did all game just happened to be completely moot.

It was good. It was good. The buildup starts with Zimmerman Hig and nice switch over to desk. And then this is what we want, right? We want our best players cooking together. And we got a little look at it here. Just need to do this again. Same with that random ball to pipe here.

We just need 10 of these situations a game. Right. In addition to several other avenues of attacking. So like we need like 40 good. things to happen. A lot of AVPs in there. Seventh minute, I just noticed that Pulisic and Dest did well to win the ball back. Pulisic intercepts a cross field pass with his head,

ricochets behind Dest, and he corrals it and turns and races upfield and pushes it to Pulisic, who draws a foul. I just saw that was good solid soccer from them both, showed they were both kind of keyed into what's going on. Seventh minute, a good ball from Zimmerman to Pulisick. So now we're going to start talking about this revenue stream of hitting it over the top. And Pulisic squares up his guy and then hits a harmless left-footed cross over the area

that Yedlin collects. And then Yedlin plays a pass that's a tad too hot for McKinney. And I don't know if this is McKinney not moving, not staying light on his feet, or if it's Yedlin just not playing a very good pass. But McKin only gets a touch to it, reaching back toward his goal and gets blown up. He sort of lays on the ground for a while, Saudi Arabia racing the other way, just not sharp enough from Yedlin. and McKinney probably both.

And I thought McKinney was going to have like, you know, he was quite poor against Japan. I do not think this was the bounce back performance from him that we kind of were, I was kind of hoping for. I didn't think he was very good in this game either. So I'm going to put a little bit of this on Pool Sick too because I feel like his,

his delivery wasn't what the situation called for. Like he wasn't hitting this with his left foot into like, any windows where there were any U.S. players. He couldn't really drop this on anyone's head. So for me, this is another one of those, like, I think back to Rahim Sterling when he was sort of just becoming the attacker that he was, where he was hitting his peak. It was when he learned to, like, dance at a guy. And then when it was shut down, if there wasn't anything there, it's okay to just sort

of stop right there and pull the ball back out, right? Hulcic has Sergenio Dest arriving late. There are no numbers in the box. I mean, we have three guys in the box, Saudi Arabia have six. So it's like, at this point, look and it's not on but we have gained all this valuable ground bring it back to Sir Gino Desk

to let him look at the whole box and see what can happen and so this was one of those things where if you want to call this early ball the one he chose it's not on at all we're not early anymore Saudi Arabia are back like we've got to be willing to pull out and play a little bit more soccer yeah good point it was not on and even if it had been on it wasn't a good ball

anyway it was way over the went way over the goal I mean, over the area. Good ball from Zimmerman in the ninth minute to McKinney. So another one of these diagonals, and he takes it down and cuts inside. So cuts his guy to the inside and has a shot from the top of the box, but it's very tame on the ground. I think he will do better most times he takes that shot,

but it wasn't particularly dangerous once he took the shot. I hate the shot I don't think that's any surprise we so again this is one of the best situations we got to in the entire game right we have McKinney and Pulisic and then Peppy with them 3B3 at the top of the box

like for me taking a shot from 22 yards like past a body is like a surrender like I feel like we have to I think you have to press that advantage as far as you can and not take like an off balance shot. So I really needed him to try to work with Poulsick. He could move it on to PEPI and keep moving after that. I mean, the defender on McKinney's going to ground.

So if he can move this ball to PEPI, even if McKinney can't get back in the play, like it's 2 v2 now. Yeah. So anyway, just a big example. Pepe will play a quick one too there too. I mean, he loves that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

So again, this isn't like an unforgivable decision or anything. It's just a matter of like over and over and over again. We made what I sort of considered a suboptimal decision in these moments. And they don't present themselves all of that often. So we really, that was the biggest thing for me in this game was to see if we could clean up these kinds of decisions once we get the ball into these danger adjacent territories. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you're not going to like the decision on the next one. either. It's in the 11th minute, another good ball to McKinney. This one over the top from Tyler Adams.

He runs onto it, but scores up his guy and tries to float a right-footed ball into the box. It gets blocked slightly and just sort of turns into a Texas leagher to Yedlin on the other side of the field. We try McKinney's side again with another diagonal and he just dribbles out of bounds under duress. Yeah, I didn't like this one at all in part because, again, McKenney, you're the guy here. the guy running closest to you in this situation was Christian Pulisic. So it's like, you two have to do this. Like, you don't hit the ball over to D'Andre Edlin to make him do it. It's D'Andre Edlin.

Right. Like, you guys need to do this. You, you step up here and you two solve this two on two at the corner of the box. Like, don't, don't just, don't give this away to, don't hand the ball off to somebody else in this situation. Love the, the key on this play to initiate it was one of the Serginio desks, um, dribbling in from the, from the left sideline in to beat Saudi Arabia's pressure. Saudi Arabia had brought three up to try to play with us a little bit. And Desk just sort of does a little retreat dribble and then cuts in a little bit,

creates a little window to just hit a nice eight-yard pass to Tyler Adams, who's all alone. He didn't have a window to him when Desk first got the ball, but by that clever little, you know, desk know-how, we free up Tyler Adams to see the whole field. So those little things go a long way. There's a desk giveaway a few minutes later, 12th minute where he receives a long pass

and just lets it roll under his foot and out of bounds. Just want to mention it because if you watch the game, you probably remember that. It was not good. Happens, whatever. 13th minute, a little misconnection between Pepe and Raina in the center circle. So it's kind of a moment of transition.

The boss pops up for Pepey. He tries to nod it down to Raina going forward and they can't quite sync up. I just don't think we're synced up in general. Like sometimes we are, but not consistently in rhythm with each other on the team. I don't know what that's about. I can't explain it. Let's talk about the big Saudi chance here.

It's in the 13th minute. I mentioned it earlier, but Dest is doing well to break the press in our corner, our deep left corner. And he tries to play it to Adams. Adams isn't moving into the window. I think the way Dest assumed he would. And the ball goes past Adams. It's just a fairly simple pass, but it goes past him.

Across the top of the box, trickles to Al-Biri Khan. He squares it for Bahabri, and he touches it wide a few times and has a left-footed shot that never looked like it was going to go in. And I got to say, Saudi Arabia, despite how depressing this performance was, it wasn't like Saudi Arabia looked like they were going to score either. No, Saudi Arabia looked like they didn't care to be there. which is just again it's the nature of some of these friendly so um no they weren't you know if we want to talk about our lack of commitment to join the attack like soviet Arabia didn't look terribly committed to joining the attack or joining the defense 14th minute a little bit of a chance for the u.s zimmerman plays a diagonal to yedlin and he combines neatly with reina who springs

him down the line this is the one where we're talking about reina veering off to the touchline Yellen's cross falls into the mixer So it fell at least into a dangerous area But gets cut out A cost of tries from distance And hits it over And it's I feel like it's at this point Where you're starting to be like

Man Zimmerman is hitting some dimes Yeah again he's under no pressure Like this isn't pressure And he gets to wait for whichever wide receiver It's like making the free route Which everyone breaks free So these aren't like high level of difficulty balls But it's promising to see it

The combination play here is good. And I'm actually going to give Yedlin credit here. I mean, I want to say credit. This is the right pass. I think this is the right time to cross. I guess if you cross every time you get it, then occasionally you're going to get it right. But this was the time to do it, right? We had like, I think a three on two in the box at this point.

Did we? Yeah, this is a pretty good chance right here. So we'll take this one. We just want to, when we're in the film room, be like, this is the time to do it, these other times, not the time to do it. Yeah, and it was McKinney up there too. So we've got McKinney, Pooleysick, Peppie's making a near post run. Pepey brings his guy out.

If we get it over that first runner, if we get it over Pepe, it's Poole sick and McKinney 2 on 1 at the penalty spot. Okay. 15 minute mark, we get that long giveaway. We talked about where he tried to hit a switch and then just passed it to the left wing for Saudi Arabia. Bahabri, I think it was.

Kind of embarrassing. 16th minute, nice bit of buildup and a good diagonal from Yedlin to Poulosik from right to left. And Poulosick takes a horizontal touch just like McKinney did to try to cut in atop the box. And he gives it away. He just runs into another defender. Doesn't get a shot off. And this is one where maybe Pulisic could have touched it over to PEPI on its second touch instead of trying to continue whatever he was attempting to do.

But the fact remains like when you look at this, as Yedlin hits that ball up field and it's going to Poulosik. sick at the top of the box. By the time like Pool Sick is taking the second touch, Pool Sick and Peppy are still the only players in the frame. Like no one else is up here joining with him. So it's hard to be like pool sick can't be so selfish and just lose it here.

If he's going to soccer with people, in this case, he needed more people to soccer with. Yeah. I don't know if he's going to soccer even if he is joined by a bunch of people. But I guess we can assume he would. 17th minute, a decent set piece to Poolisic. from Raina looked like he was trying to catch them by surprise because Zimmerman was still walking up to set up in the box and then so Pool Six sort of meets the ball unmarked at a

acute angle from the goal tries to head it in and miss is comfortably maybe I mean Stu Holden said on the broadcast maybe even had time to take it down and have a hit I don't know maybe pool sick isn't going to be our strongest header but it's this is a smart play like this is a smart smart piece of soccer from Giorina Yeah. Nice little run in the 18th minute from Dest and he plays it to Pepe's feet. Back to go in the box. This is where Pepe gets kind of little brothered but manages to lay it off roughly to the top of the box and nobody, not McKinney, not Pulisic, is making that second run.

And I think Dest is kind of trying to make the run, but he gets knocked down off the ball. Yeah, is this the Doyle clip? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we could have gotten a foul for the guy cleaning Dest. out and not letting him continue his run. Referee was letting a lot of things go, which is fine in these conditions. I need, we need our boys to toughen up a little bit anyway.

Do you really think that? So long as, yeah, I really do. You can't expect favors from the referee. Like you got to, you got to take it yourself. No one was really doing like leg breakers up until Yedlin got his leg broken. So. Yeah, that one was bad. So, so yeah.

I don't know. This was one where I just felt like the rotations had led to, everyone kind of being slightly off of their marks. But I do want to say, you know, I'd kind of given Pulisick the pass, there were a lot of times where the got, when the upfield player would rotate backwards, right, to, you know, get that circular motion where they come back and then the wide player, whoever McKenny then runs into the vacated space ahead of them and then they circle back. I did feel like the player checking back too often once we hit that ball up field.

Again, we talked about this. But you could see they would just keep drifting backwards, right? they would be like, okay, well, I'm out of the play by coming back to create the rotation, now I'm done. And that really was where it needs to be like, you create the opening, but then once it's up, you've got to, you've got to start joining again. And the guy who was doing it the best is everyone's favorite player, Paul Ariola, which is probably not that much of a surprise.

Yeah. 19th minute, so don't worry, this timeline is going to thin out a lot as we go, but still got quite a few things. 19th minute, Pulisic bounces it off McKinney and gets. a crisp return pass down the line, runs onto it. And I thought this was the right choice, in my opinion. Tries to fizz the ball across for Pepe. Pepe, Pepe has a little, I think he has a little room between him and the goalkeeper for that ball to get in there and for him to tap it in. But the ball isn't good enough. It's a little bit behind Pepey. It's cut out for a corner by the

centerback. I think that's exactly right. And I think it's tough. It's not an easy ball to play, but it's the right ball and we just didn't quite get the distance of the pass right. It just needs to be another foot and a half, two feet away from the centerback, but it can't be any farther from that or it's the goalkeeper's ball. So that's the window he had to hit it in. If he hits it in that window, we've got a pretty good chance there for our guy, Pepe. Yeah.

It's a really nice combination from him and McKenney to the quickness of it. And yeah, it was good. 20th minute, Raina chases a dead. diagonal ball into the corner and exerts himself considerably to win a cage match and recycle possession back to Adams. I kind of wonder if he strained his muscle here. I mean, he was really, he was really reaching around with both legs because after that he kind of, he did kind of quiet down. I mean, maybe I'm making all this up, but it's, it's five minutes later that he has to be taken off. In any event, again, perfect example of the presence on the ball.

that you get from Gio Raina because he just makes this look easy. Yeah. He absorbs like, I mean, he takes a shot. The guy comes in, not a dirty one again, like an upper body shot by that defender who arrives. And it just barely phases him. And then he takes another shot and actually goes to ground. And even while he's on the ground, he is like maintaining control of the ball and the entire situation with his body strength and positioning and leverage. So it's, it's good to see this kind of thing happen because this is the kind of thing that will play.

in a World Cup when, you know, ugly soccer is necessary. And it's like this is, this is, uh, Giorina showcasing his ability to like ugly soccer in the most positive way. Right. I mean, yeah, we'll talk about his injury in a second. Poor giveaway from Zimmerman with his left foot in the 21st minute doesn't come to anything. So, so it's okay. 22nd minute we get some joy for Yedlin in the right corner.

But for the second time, his cross is dealt with easily by the side. Saudi defenders, did you think he should have crossed on this one? Yeah, this was probably his worst decision to cross here. This is him and Raina. Raina just sets him in into the corner by himself. And then if you freeze the frame when he makes his choice, we have three attackers in the box. And Saudi Arabia have seven.

So it's three on seven. This is a surrender. This is surrendering. We're not going to get reliable goal scoring chances out of this, even with Pfok in the game. And we didn't bring our guy to, you know, specialize in these situations. You have to, like, give up the cross here and be like, we're not ready yet. So you've got to wait for a Costa to join in.

You got to wait for Raina to come play again. You're under no pressure. So hitting this ball is a mid-rage jumper early in the shot clock. Okay, 24th minute we get a chance for the U.S. Pulisic dribbles well down the left wing and tries to tuck it in to McKinney and the box right in the corner of the box. And Kenny can't really handle the pass, but it skips through and kind of spills to Adams at the top of the box.

He takes a touch to his right and hits it pretty well on the ground, just wide of the post, kind of a worm burner. And probably our best chance of the game, unfortunately. Yeah, this was close. And we did most of the things right here, right? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I like the instinct to try to combine with McKinney there.

It didn't come off. And it's just kind of lucky that it fell to Adams out there. But you put the defense in that kind of under that kind of pressure. You are going to get opportunities at the top of the box. Right. I think we're kind of just saying the same thing. That's what's going to come down to is we do need a little bit crisper execution. And then we do need more of these kinds of things in volume.

Okay. We got a Nacosta giveaway in the 25th minute in the right corner where he just misses Yedlin, and that sort of seems emblematic of the game in retrospect. 26 minute, number 27 chops down desk moving from the left line. Raina takes the ensuing free kick and it sails through. And at the next stoppage, about 2640 on the clock, Raina asks for a sub from Burrhalter. He says, Greg, and then he does the, you know,

what is it, the water wheel moving motion, the paddle wheel. And then he kicks a ball out of bounds the next time it comes to him and he came off the field before a half hour was gone. I blacked out basically when that happened. And I'm somewhat comforted by the report of it being precautionary, which has been repeated a lot since the game. But I'm still worried. and I think he is worried.

Just looking at his face during the game, Giovanni looked worried. So, like, it being precautionary is good, I guess, but also at another point, it's like, what does it matter? If, like, we know that he's going to play for 40 minutes and then have to come out for a precautionary tightness, then he's not available, right? Like, whether he's, you know, in the training room because he's out for eight weeks or whether he has to come out of the game, because he's got tightness. It's the same effect. So it's worrying, to say the least, because he just can't get through any kind of a return to full play

without this kind of even minor setback. So, you know, okay, good. Maybe we can get 15 minutes from him in Qatar. Yeah. 15 minutes three times, so 45 minutes. Yeah, we'd take it. Yeah. I mean, we got to prepare ourselves for that eventually.

sexuality. Areola came on for him and did his thing, which is to bring a lot of energy and effort and joining in the attack after recycling back into the, in the middle of the field, rotating, that is. But we lost a lot of our cutting edge without Raina, I thought, because he is our most cutting player. And the game suffered in his absence. We generated three shots in the rest of the match. And the best one was off a sloppy Saudi Arabia giveaway. So I don't even even know how much we should talk about the rest of the match, but I guess we do, we do have to talk about it. 33rd minute, we get a McKinny giveaway in the middle, in the middle off a throw-in.

So he just gets, just kind of gets blown up. And I thought he was not good. I know I said that already. I just didn't think West McKinney, I don't think Wes McKenney's looked good in either of these games. That's part of the perfect storm of this whole thing is, you know, he was good against even away at Canada, that game we lost. 2-0.

McKenny was bossing big parts of that game. He was bossing nothing yesterday. I thought he was, and I think that, that, you know, we don't have Musa. We have desks who looks maybe a little bit out of form, out of rhythm. We don't have our first choice centerbacks. We haven't figured out the striker position. Raina comes off injured and McKenney has probably his two worst games in a long time. I guess that's the perfect.

Anyway, should I go back to the timeline or do you want to respond to my stuff? I thought McKinney was okay in this game. And I thought he was effective getting deep. I thought his runs were effective in either creating that, you know, depth for himself to receive the ball from Zimmerman almost always or for us to force the defense to, you know, react to that. And then in the recycling rotation, losing track of the next guy who would make the forward run. So I thought McKinney was okay. On this play in particular, I hate to throw into him.

Like, I know this is like a youth soccer thing. But Tyler Adams, you're the defensive mid. If you're taking the throw in, you're clearly out of position. Don't throw the ball horizontally to another center mid. Like, it's really the worst ball to deal with for a center mid because you just have to wait for it to get to you. And it's a fairly long throw. And so the whole time you're getting collapsed on from all sides. So I hate the throw in already.

And then. Fair enough. And then Tyler Adams does a really poor job in recovering here. Like, he tries to make up for it all at once. I'm not saying he even is saying it's his mistake. McKinney does lose it and McKinney can do better. We put him in a bad spot. But Adams' recovery, I think he gets all wrong.

So he runs to like the outside of the play here. So like I hated that Adams made his recovery run the way he did and chose to control the areas of the pitch that he chose to control here. Sorry, did you already finish the actual sequence? No, no, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but you, but, You help us. Well, that's plenty of good. I mean, the, after McKinney gives it away, he chases Al Birrikan down to the corner somewhat ineffectively. I guess Adams was chasing as well.

The Saudi striker finds a teammate with a pass to the top of the box wide open. Desti McKinney both hold another attacker on side as they're trying to get back. And that attacker is played into the Man City zone. He cuts it back. Only a Yedlin, a desperate Yedlin block and a slightly wayward. pass in the scramble prevented a goal there. Yeah, so this one for me, once McKinney's lost it, this is on Adams because his recovery run is just, it doesn't make any sense.

Like, you freeze frame it when Saudi Arabia finally have the ball deep in the corner and we've got three guys there. McKenny is tripped and is falling down. Death sort of has the path to goal cut off. And Tyler Adams is like behind them and off towards the sideline. Like he's not doing anything. So two of our center mids are now completely out of the place. by Kellan Acosta has come over to help, which he needs to.

But Acosta gets sort of pulled over by the near post run once they kind of get beyond us. And that's why there's a huge spot in the midfield for Saudi Arabia to hit their window. And that's the guy who delivers the ball in that creates all the problems. Okay. So anyway, just seemed like an Adams awareness thing. And he's had a couple of those in this window that are, again, enough for me to worry about his his lockdown effectiveness where we kind of started

to take that for granted. Everything's going to be solved by the return of Eunice Musa, including Tyler Adams' defensive awareness. We get a good switch in the 35th minute from Acosta to Yedlin

and he's offside by at least two yards with the whole Saudi backline to look at. Come on, man. I don't understand that. And yeah, we're actually doing a good job of playing over their block, but we can't do much with it, which I guess we've talked about a lot already.

That was the game for me. I mean, that's the whole game. We did well to take what Saudi Arabia was giving us, and then once we took it, couldn't do a thing. Yeah, I appreciate McKinney that McKinney made good runs down the channel, but, you know, if he can't, if he's not doing anything with him, I don't know how much I can make those runs, you know? It'll come. It'll come. It'll come. That's where bringing in Tim Weya, that's where it's going to, we've already solved it. We've got Musa coming. We've got Wea coming. That's our solution. That's how we're going to keep ourselves afloat for the next month and a half. Okay, I thought we had a decent little spell of being on the front foot late in the second half.

We went a corner on one of those diagonals from Adams to Yedlin. Corner kick falls to Adams. He tries a left foot at half folly from just inside the box and it's blocked off his foot. What did you think of Pepe? You think it's impossible to grade him in this first time? half because of everything? Yes. I mean, he was fine. Again, the way we were attacking meant that he wasn't going to be the focal point. You know, we weren't going to be playing it into his feet where he would settle into

pockets in the zone. That's not what was on. What was on were these big switches to Yedlin or McKinney running up or even pool sick at times. So that's what we did. And that's what we should do. And then the decisions to cross it over and over again just means that if that's the plan. If that's what we're going to do, then PFOC should be our striker. If that's not the plan,

then we should stop doing those things. So, um, none of that's on peppy or, or his performance. It just, it's, I don't know that he did anything to change his case one way or the other. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I, I've sort of given up trying to figure out what Bertharthor's going to do next, but I think he lacks that pitch presence that you've been talking about the last few weeks, uh, where you can sort of wrestle, wrestle control of a game from chaos. He's not going to do that

much the same way he says Ferreira's not. I don't think. Like in an individual, I'm talking about an individual sort of physical battle primarily. And I, you know, given that we don't have any sort of reliable way of creating chances anyway,

I don't know, we need that. We need that from somebody. What do you have for the second half, Greg? I feel like I've been talking a lot. I thought mostly no one's going to like this the guy who was like doing the most in the second half for me was

but he still wasn't doing that much right I mean he was like doing a lot of the early work well and he was making good movements and we were finding him in like good spaces but then it was sort of the same thing either his actual execution once he got in those spaces was not great or usually like he didn't have a lot of help because we weren't committing with energy

players around him we don't have to go through all of his all of his involvement but but that's kind of what my takeaway was I thought our our balls over the top got less effective I've already mentioned because it seemed like we were less discriminating with when and where we hit them I did think we needed to do a better job of ignoring the first runner I feel like we got into the habit of just going like oh the guy's going I'm going to hit it towards him even if again Saudi Arabia's defense was accounting for that runner and we hadn't you know

created the opening yet I thought a ton of time times when it was where we would hit that ball usually to like ariola. We were hitting it up to ariola a lot and it's like he's not he doesn't he is not a target winger you guys like don't hit that ball up to him. But his movement was doing a decent job of like occupying Saudi Arabia's defense. And then it should have been over to scally or over to Yedlin. Like we should have skipped ariola and just hit it done a big Hollywood switch over to the right flank even if it's not getting the guy in behind.

That's what was on. And then we could have attacked from there. but we kind of kept hammering on that deep ball forward, more vertical, rather than using the vertical run to open up the width. It's boring stuff. And again, some of the stuff that we've spent all this time on just won't exist because that those vertical fly routes just aren't going to be on

against the team that sits a little bit deeper. And there'll be less on against the team that's putting more pressure on our quarterbacks. We've really gone heavy on the American football analogies in the last couple weeks. I was going to do an American baseball reference and do some talking about how teams can just run a shift on air long because he can't make so many passes. But I left it out.

I thought that would be too. I mean, no one likes baseball. No one likes it. No, a lot of people do. We have, let's see, nothing really super dangerous from Saudi Arabia in the second half. There's a brutal tackle. I mean, there's a dangerous tackle from Abdul Hamid on DeAndre Yedlin,

which we mentioned. Probably should have been a red card, but not in a friendly, I guess. The big chance for the U.S. comes in the second half. I guess this is the best chance we had of the game. There's a giveaway from Saudi Arabia. Ball trickles to Ariola, and he squares Ferreira at the penalty marker. I thought Ferreira did a nice job to control this quickly and hit it well, kind of on the volley, but he hits it more or less right at the keeper.

That's in the 61st minute. Yeah, that's his MO, right? Like he's got a very clean set and shot. Prep touch shot, and we got another look at it there. We had a few of those giveaways that we created. We created Saudi giveaways. And again, Areola was kind of the guy on the spot there. We get another one later where Ferreira sets up Areola,

with a nice little touch into the box. But yeah, by then it felt like both teams were mostly going through the motions. The one other thing I think we should take away from this is Joe Scali came on at the hour mark. So that's when Ferreira came on, Scali came on, and McKenzie came on. And I feel like, I don't know if you were doing a hypothetical earlier when you said that McKenzie's done played himself out of the World Cup or if you really think that. But it seems to me that Scali and McKenzie are kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum. I thought Scali played really well. He at least provided some energy, some ball security,

a little bit of forward thrust for us at right back. It looked like, honestly, a better player than D'Andre Edlin in those limited minutes. And then McKenzie just can't iron out the mistakes. I mean, there was a particularly bad giveaway in the 64th minute, you know, three minutes after he comes on. And I think he had a couple. others as well. So in the one thing he didn't offer in this, he didn't give us any of those positive passing moments either. So that's got to be his bread and butter. If he's going to justify the risk

of his mistakes, then we've got to see that improved passing. Otherwise, it's like, okay, well, Aaron Long won't pass the ball at all, but fewer mistakes, I guess. And again, that's only in the hypothetical where we're creating the false binary where those are the only two choices available. Yeah, boy, I hope that's not the binary. Lockyer Zimmerman. Well, yeah, Scali was good. Brennan Erinson came on and played center midfielder and did not look like a very good center midfielder.

I feel like that's worth noting just because we are still talking about what our central midfield contingencies are in the event of injuries. And if Luca Delo Tore ran out of leash, which seems premature, and we tested out Brendan Aronson there, that didn't look like a good fit in this game. No, and yet their Taylor-Twellman was in his bathtub shouting that Brennan Arrinson should be the starter at the World Cup. Stu said it on the broadcast.

Oh, did he say it too? Yeah, I mean, he was a little bit more like reserved, almost like reluctant, but like, yeah, yeah, he's got to be in the, he's got to be in the starting. Oh, yeah, he did say that. So I don't know. I don't know what's going on. What's going on? Yeah, I guess that's it for the chronology on my end. We're almost an hour and a half in here.

The positive take here, I don't know. guess is that we're, well, why don't you give us what you, sort of the, the positive scenario? The positive scenario for me is that our defense remains organized, you know, almost all the chances we give up, ironically, we're from bad giveaways from the defense. So we can cut those out by just being like, hey, you guys don't need to play as much soccer because the soccer you're playing isn't getting us anywhere. Don't play soccer, just defend. I don't think we're going to do that. So the next thing, would be choosing different players to play in those centerback spots.

But overall, our team defensive structure has been sound since Burrhalter took over. That can get you a long way at a World Cup. Our goalkeeper's outrageous. If he plays like that in Qatar, that can get us a long way in a World Cup. So we then just have to hope that our offensive woes are at least improved by the return of some players who are our most effective players offensively in World Cup qualifying. I don't think that's a reach, right? Tim Wea and Jedi Robinson, for me, were by far the most influential attacking players

through World Cup qualifying. So it's not a reach at all to say adding them back in is going to make us a better attacking team. Yeah. Just maybe not the team we thought we were promised by Burhalter when he became coach, you know, this like flowing attacking soccer that I think we all kind of thought was possible. probably not possible at this point. I'll say Berlter saying that in his press conference in 2019

did not make me think that it was a sure thing. So I'm not like, oh, man, but yes, like. Because every manager says that kind of stuff, basically. But we don't look any, we don't particularly look any closer to it. System-wise now than we did in 2019. So it's very much contingent on, seems to be, if it's going to be successful, it's going to be contingent on two or three players,

uh, returning to the team. and getting us back into a more, I don't even want to say, just a more competent attack. Yeah, Moose is going to give us more hold on a game, more of a foothold in a game, an ability to sort of move the ball forward. Wea and Jedi are going to give us some cut and thrust,

which we don't have much of. That is about the only thing we can cling to, possession-wise, attacking-wise. But it's good to point out that the defense is sound, I also think Dest and McKinney are going to probably be play better. I mean, Dest didn't play badly. But McKinney, I think I stand by McKinney being pretty poor in this last game. But I think he'll play better at the World Cup.

The other thing to cling to again is that we just focus more on playing against the ball, which you can do. You can sort of commit to playing against the ball in a game. So if we go that route, that's another way that we've shown. and we can play at a decent level. So that's sort of the other optimistic or the other reason for cautious optimism. Okay. We'll end with some cautious optimism.

That's a good place to end. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's never as bad as you think it is, never as good as you think it is. Isn't that what everybody in every industry and every sort of vocation says? 2017, October 2017 was as we thought it was. That's true. I'm just saying, like, I know we're going to the World Cup.

But I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, the World Cup is a party. But if we do, if we have 270 minutes of the last 180 minutes, like, that would be pretty bad. I guess, you know, on a technicality, it'd be better than missing altogether, but only barely. It's true. It might be really bad. All right. I won't ask anybody to sign up to the Patreon today.

Thanks, everybody for listening. and we'll see ya.