Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #333: Ten turning points since Couva

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Greg and Belz on the Nation's League loss to Canada, the 2019 U20 World Cup, Weston McKennie's exit from FC Dallas, and seven other turning points since we failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.----Scuffed is an ad-free podcast. Support that and get exclusive episodes (more than 50 this year) by signing up for our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scuffed 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. Hey, this is Adam Bells. Got Greg Velasquez with me. How are you doing, Greg? I'm nervous, I'm nervous. Every week now, there are more red crosses on the playbill, and we have games kind of thick and fast this weekend, and yeah, I'm nervous.

I'm getting... I'm just nervous that somebody's going to get injured, basically. Yeah, I mean, people are making a big deal about this correctly, I think. I mean, there's always going to be injury misses for the World Cup. I think that's a running bit of people putting together all injury 11 for any of these big tournaments. But it is different in the sense that like a 10 day issue now, that's it. You're probably out for the tournament because the games go right up until the opener. So yeah, so it is a lot more nervous.

I'm really hoping that these red crosses on the playbill are essentially players. shutting themselves down for their clubs and just saying, hey, I'll see you in January. I'm going to train half speed for the next three weeks and let's all be professionals about this. Yeah, serious chance of that. And I guess the one that I'm most concerned about right now is Chris Richards, who doesn't seem like he's going to be on the field this weekend. So now we're looking at, I don't know.

Is he going to be on the roster? I don't know. And maybe somebody listening can answer this because you can have. injury or replacements, right? But what I'm curious about is if you can have not quite match fit, yeah, not quite match fit injury replacements where he's healthy. He's not going to, he's not going to fail any true medical tests, but if they're just like, you're healthy, but your, your touch is really rusty. So we put you on the roster to see how you would do, but now we're going to replace you. I feel like that was the Ulliana situation in the Olympic qualifying group way back in March 2021.

Yeah, did they send in a doctor to verify that you had an injury within the last 24 hours or something. The roster comes out Wednesday, Wednesday night on ESPN. Greg Burhalter is going to announce the, or one of the ESPN channels, Burrhalter is going to announce his 26-man roster for the World Cup. First game is November 21st against Wales. That's the Monday before Thanksgiving. And I just published an episode talking to a guy from Wales. I thought it was really good, a really insightful guy who, you know, feels like Wales kind of has to beat the U.S. if they want get out of the group and I mean I think we kind of feel like we have to beat whales to get out of the group so yeah that was my favorite line when he said whales probably sees it as a must win and so does

the US it's they both could might consider it their most winnable game which is both humbling and also like it is a winnable game for for us it's not you know it's not like we're in this situation where we have to get a result against Portugal like we we had to in 2014 so we can we can we can do this it's It's whales. I respect whales, but it's still whales. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a matter of, you know, us playing like we did, say, against Mexico and November instead of how we did against Japan in September. We'll see. We'll see. We'll publish an episode about the roster, which we don't, you know, we're just discussing it off air. I don't know how much there is really to say at this point, but we will do sort of a roster projection episode of some. some kind early next week right before the, right before the roster comes out.

So that we have all the information from the weekend. Hopefully nobody gets injured. Right. It'll be a good chance. It'll be a good chance for us to put our actual picks in writing ahead of time into the, into the record. We'll enter it into the record. But today, we're going to look back.

We're going to look back in our own way at some of the major turning points since the U.S. failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup with one nod to something that happened before that. And there's been, I think Paul Tenorio and Sam Staskel just put out there from Coova to Qatar, five-part podcast series. And I've listened to a little bit of it's good. It's worth listening to because they got access to a lot of primary sources and look back on sort of stuff that we all kind of know, but it's kind of good to get refreshed about.

Ours is going to be a little different. It's just going to be one episode and it's going to be a little more, I don't know, idiosyncratic shocking, I know. So are we the Armageddon or are we the deep impact? I do not. Oh, wait. Which one was better? It was, I mean, it was polarizing back then.

Because whichever one you picked, I think said something about you as a person. Were you the Michael Bay, big explosions, bombs, machine guns on an asteroid type? Were you the more character-driven, deep impact type? Boy, I think I remember Armageddon a lot more. Of course, there are machine guns on an asteroid. And it had the Aerosmith's song and everything. Yeah, I guess I hate to admit it, but I guess I'm an Armageddon guy. All right, fair enough, fair enough.

You're a deep impact guy. I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. All right. So the first thing, that was a turning point. happened before the World Cup qualifying failure, and it was Weston McKinney leaving FC Dallas on a free. And you have a, you have sort of a cute way of. This was, yeah, so the first event, we were breaking our own rules about going from Coova to Qatar. But it was the departure of the prodigal NLS sons, right?

And I don't know that too many of them are going to be returning. But Weston McKinney was the first one. It was before we failed to qualify. but he left FC Dallas Academy when he turned 18, signed for Shalka. So this was like your thing. You were following Weston closely. You were following Jonathan Gonzalez. And so you'd tell us why this was such a big deal.

You know, I actually wasn't following Weston closely until he was already at Shalka. But this one hurt MLS a lot because he, you know, other players have left MLS Academies for free before and since, but McKinney left, like you said, right after his 18th birthday, which was in August 2016. 13 months later, he was starting in the Bundesliga against Bayern Munich, and FC Dallas had gotten nothing for him. Everybody, most of the people listening to his podcast know this already,

but they got nothing for him. And it is really hard to find, like, on the record quotes from Dallas executives about how much it hurt their feelings and their hearts, but you know that it did. And then a bunch of other kids left MLS for free in the year or two afterwards. Because what MLS was doing, I'm not ragging on the league necessarily,

but what they were doing was they were offering Academy products, a homegrown contract that was usually three years with two option years. And those option years were for the franchise, not for the player. So essentially they were offering five-year deals at like 75,000 a year or 100,000 a year or 125,000 a year. And people started saying no.

Like, I don't want a homegrown contract with Rayall Salt Lake or the LA Galaxy at the league minimum. It's worth noting that by the 2018-19 season, before Bear Halter was hired, McKinney was earning $1 million a year at Shalca. I'm going to go try my luck in Europe. And not all of them have panned out, but the ones who left after McKenney, left include Richie Ledesma, Alex Mendez, Ullianez, Sebastian Soto. There are a few others.

And MLS handles young players differently now. I think it's very clear. Dallas has sold, you know, since McKenney left, Dallas has sold at least six players to Europe, including Ricardo Pepe, Chris Richards, Tanner Testman, Brian Reynolds, Reggie Cannon, and Carlos Grazo, who's not an American player. for somewhere around a total of $50 million. Philadelphia has also become a selling club. They sold Brennan Aronson and Mark McKenzie for close to $20 million combined.

And they have a few, I mean, Jack DeVries is over at Venetia. I don't know what the transfer fee was on that or if there even was one, but they have a few young players who are good candidates for a move in the next couple of years. So I think McKenney leaving and how kind of painful that was for the league brass, it was a catalyst. It was a catalyst for, they are ready for that. I mean, we, I mean, if you want to go way back, you talk about Taylor Twelman, but, you know, he had to move to Europe blocked by his club by the New England Revolution.

It was a, it was a different era back then. But even five years ago, it was, it was a different era than it is now, where I think MLS is now a legitimate selling club into Europe, which just happened to coincide with the rise of the scuff podcast. It's funny. So I'm sure you can dig into our arc. archives and find some of the ways that we anticipated this change because of we were watching these players leave. And it was, it almost just kind of highlighted a little bit of how naive

MLS and the academies were to what they were doing, like from the business side, because they built these academies, they invested in them, some of the clubs. This isn't uniform, of course, and it still isn't. Yeah. But they did this and it's like, they almost didn't realize that they were capable of producing players good enough that the market would be interested. interested in. And so it's like, okay, well, we built these good players. And then once they, once we see that they're good, then we'll offer them a contract. And just not realizing that once the player is already good, they're going to have other options and they're not tied to you. And some of them just chose to not play soccer at all for a year while they waited until they turns 18. But you definitely saw MLS be like, oh, oh, dear, this this model is unsustainable. We either need to cancel our academies all together and give up on this. or we need to start signing the kids when they're 15, 16 years old, when we're the only ones who know about them, hand money over to them and just roll the dice that they will continue to develop

and eventually become either good players for us, four players we can move along for a profit to reinvest into the program. I mean, the $50 million, the $50 million dollars that Dallas got from the transfer market for for Academy products, mostly Academy products, is nothing to sneeze at. I mean, that's a big amount of money for that club. And I don't know how many years it pays for the academy, but multiple years it would pay for their academy, which also has other revenue streams. I mean, it's more complicated than that.

They have pay to play academies, a network of those that help fund the, you know, so the professional academy. But yeah, you can just see how they how they wised up a little bit over the past two or three years. Playing the kids more in the league, which has competitive effects as well, a lot of times beneficial. sometimes maybe less so. But even just playing those players, I don't know if Brian Reynolds gets sold for $10 million if he's just on the bench behind Reggie Cannon. The three months he got playing for the league

solidified, I'm sure, the value that Dallas got for. Yeah, and Reynolds kind of, it didn't work out at Roma. He's on loan in Belgium, but he's playing now. He's doing fine, I think, doing more or less okay. And one last thing on this is I think people will, a lot of people will point to Pulisic going to Dortmund when he was 16 or 15. He was very young as sort of the main moment in all this U.S. development. And that's fair. I mean, I think that showed a lot of young players in the U.S. that they could be successful. Like there's a pathway to being successful this way. But I think from a league business standpoint, McKenney's exit meant a lot more because Pulisick was never part of an MLS Academy. Neither was Josh Sargent. that matter. And I think the ability for Pool Sick to do it at 16, same thing Raina had, same thing way ahead because of their, like because of their passports, right? Yep. I mean, that's also totally different. Because of the grandparents. Yeah. When you don't have that, you were effectively held

hostage by the league because if you, if you weren't going to sign for them, then you, and we were seeing players do this, you just had to wait until you turned 18. And those were crucial years in players development that they might have just been stagnating. And then just rolling the dice with a, you know, whatever, whatever contract they could, they could scrounge up moving over to Europe. That's a good point. And not all MLS clubs have sort of embraced this new way of doing things. I think, you know, we've seen the galaxy froze out Maricio Cuevas from even playing with

Los Dost, their second team, until he turned 18 when he moved over to, he moved over to Belgium too. So there's a, you know, there's still kind of a variety of approaches in the league to playing young players, developing young players and selling them. But there's enough of a track record for selling them that I think we can sort of celebrate that. And it has, I think, the effect of making our national team better, maybe not immediately, but over the long term. We're definitely hoping that. And we are hoping that the new tinkering, because the model isn't the same anymore, at least the actual matches that these kids are playing, continues to to evolve.

And there's new leagues and new competition formats every, every six months it feels like that are being announced. And so we'll still have to see what it truly ends up looking like and whether or not the level of play continues to like match up with what we needed to. But the business side, what I definitely think is that that cat is out of the bag and you're not going to get the two space back into the tube. I love that. And we'll get Matt Hartman, try to get Matt Hartman on the podcast after the World Cup to sort of give an update on MLS Next Pro. Spoiler alert, it's not going to be a cheerful episode.

That man is furious. It won't matter. We'll still be reveling in our semi-final performance from the World Cup. That's right. That's exactly right. All right. Why don't you take number two? All right.

So the second event from Kuva to Qatar is going to be the Serican premonition. And this was, you know, we crashed out of qualifying, in disgrace, on the final day. Bruce Arena wasn't technically fired, but I don't think he basically just had anything to do with that point because he didn't have a team to coach into the next competition. I think eventually he did technically resign. Is that, can we get a rule? I don't know. In any event, Dave said over as the caretaker manager. Grandpa Dave seems like a delightfully like easy, easygoing guy.

I don't know if that's the case or not. Maybe he's actually a drill sergeant. Could be. But he started picking, he started managing the team through this process. He, we had one friendly in 2017 after the disaster, like a month later against Portugal in Europe,

where we introduced a new wave of players with a couple of vets who had not been really involved in qualifying. It was like, it was almost like this clean break from the qualifying group. And that clean break continued for the entire, mostly, for the entire 2018. Real quick on that Portugal friendly, that was Wes McKinney's first cap and Tyler Adams' first cap. I can't remember who else got their first cap that. But those are two really important players who got their first cap.

Two players that I think some fans were clamoring to get a look in qualifying in 2017. Anyway, I interrupted. Not too much. There wasn't a ton of clamoring, right? It was really just anyway. Yeah, I mean, we don't have to get into what went wrong because that's, that's, that's a whole different thing. Fair. But yes, I mean, it was, it was, they were revelations in that game, right?

There was an excitement about seeing those two players in particular doing their thing and, and having success against a Portugal team friendly or not. And then that excitement continued for another probably five or six months before the Serraken, um, enthusiasm started to wane. And we started to be a little bit aimless and played a lot tougher teams. But it was an exciting time just because Dave Serrikin brought in so many kids. It was like it was very clearly an intentional, you know, choice. And what I'm really curious about, what I think would be fascinating would be to see the discussions and who was involved in making that choice, whether this is just a Dave Serrakin thing, which feels unlikely for a caretaker manager to have that much control over the direction of the program in its darkest hour. or whether it was just this big roundtable discussion between whoever about who was needed to help, you know, repair the image, the reputation of this squad. Yeah, I mean, maybe it was just, maybe it was just a simple, like, this is the practical, pragmatic thing to do.

We're going to, we don't have any, we don't have anything meaningful for a few years here. Let's, let's just play the kids. And like it, maybe that's what anybody would do in his case, in his situation. I don't know. It might. Because there wasn't, it wasn't like Brian McBride was involved at that point or Ernie Stewart. No, no. It'd be, it was, it was Dave.

It was, it was Jay Burrhalter. It was, uh, Samuel, yeah. So, but that's what I'm, I'm genuinely curious. I would love to hear, uh, somebody get Dave Serrikin to talk about the process of being the caretaker manager. Um, because it felt like, it felt like what he was kind of being charged with was to turn the page, right? Which, yeah, as we've talked about countless times was kind of the driving force of this entire, of our entire podcast because it was so clear that regardless of the outcome of the 2018 cycle in the eventual World Cup if we had qualified, we had to turn the page. The team was just super old.

There were no middle-aged players in the group. It was the vets and then it was pool sick. And so we knew this, we kind of knew that this had to happen regardless. And so the Sarah Caneara was like a peak at what might be in store. And it was exciting, especially for us and what we were talking about in our podcast. Well, tell us about that first, that lineup that he put on the field against Bolivia. Because that was the, that's the really, that's the one with the real premonition. Yeah.

So the Zerker premonition is that all these kids that he was just throwing out there, we had a pretty good hit rate out of him. Enough of a hit rate anyway. An incredible hit rate. Yeah. So the lineup against Bolivia, I want to say this was like a March friendly. May, May 2018. Okay, so we got May 2018. And he tossed out a lineup and I'll just go through the whole 11.

Alex Bono and goal. Eric Lehigh at right back, Walker Zimmerman, Eric Palmer Brown at centerback, Jedi Robinson at left back, central midfield of McKinney, Corona, Pulisic, Tim Wea on the right wing, Rubio Rubin, on the left, and Josh Sargent up top. And you've got six guys there that are. definitely in the world, well, I can't say definitely because I don't know where sergeant stands, but that's, that's six guys who could absolutely start a World Cup match for us in Qatar that had, 100%.

They had like no experience with the national team prior, other than Christian Pulisic. Right. I can't as if Zimmer might have had a couple of games here and there. Yeah, he did, but I mean, it was, it was, it's pretty wild. And I remember, remember feeling kind of sour towards Saracan. I think part of it had to do with some, his statements about Jonathan Gonzalez, who I guess, I'm going to have to admit, Saracan was proven right on that.

You know, he sort of was dismissive of all the controversy over Jonathan Gonzalez in the port in the Portugal, right ahead of the Portugal friendly. And then Gonzalez, after not getting called up, you know, committed to Mexico. So I was sour toward him because of that. And he did seem to represent grandpa Dave or not, a continuation of this sort of complacency of the arena regime, this sort of self-satisfied. older gentlemen from the East Coast. I don't know.

It just felt like, but you got to tip your cap on this in this lineup. And we won that game, 3-0 against a pretty weak Bolivia side. But Sergeant and Weyer were cooking together. If you remember, Zimmerman scored on a header on a Joe Corona corner. And then Sergeant added, and Wea each added a goal. Sargent was like him pouncing on a mistake by the Bolivian goalkeeper. And then Wea smashed one in from close range after a really nice. all across from Jedi.

So, you know, these are things that we could see in Qatar. We hope to see, you know, Anthony to Jedi for a goal. So. It could happen. It could happen in a matter of weeks. I'll just comment again, like, my takeaway through that whole era was like, these kids are actually really, really good. And I'm excited to see them.

And I was shocked to find out that I was kind of in the minority because at the end of the Sarah can run, it was like, okay, that was. was fun. Now let's play the, now let's get back to playing the old, the real players, which people were referring to, you know, as the older generation. I was like, I'm not sure that the older generation is the right generation at this point. Yeah. Yeah, we can, we'll be bathing in that vindication for many years, I think. Number three, you take this one too, Greg. All right. Number three is the disorganization of the opponent. And this is the hiring of Greg Burhalter at long last after an extensive search.

A year long, was it a year long process? 416 days between arenas, exit, and Berlter's hiring. Which, I mean, we'll talk about it. We had to hire. We needed a coach. We were going into that January camp of 2019, and we had to start having a plan. Christian Pool is sick. I know interviews have been like almost openly frustrated about the U.S. team just not having a plan

because you have an interim coach. He can't install a plan because he's not going to be the guy. So you needed the guy. You needed a plan. And the plan was Greg Burhalter. And Greg Berhalter's plan was to disorganize the opponent with the ball. Yeah. Yeah.

The thing is, I mean, so part of the frustration with Saracan is that the search was going on so long. Why was it taking so long to hire a permanent coach or a, you know, a full-time coach, not a temporary guy? But the search never felt like a real search. I don't think it's unfair to say that. Grant Wall reported that Julian Lopetegi, the former Spain national team coach, had expressed interest and was told his services were not needed. The fact that Jay Berhalter was chief commercial officer for, or chief marketing officer, sorry, for U.S. soccer, even if he recused himself from the hiring search, which is what everyone insists up and down, will always be a stain on Burrhalter's hiring. It just can't be helped. And it did feel like by the time he was hired, the reason we were waiting so long was so that he could finish his MLS season with Columbus, which I don't know, just kind of adds fuel to the fire of, it adds fuel to several fires, which we won't get into.

But there he was. He's hired. He has a plan. He was very clear about articulating what his plan was. and everything he did for those first several months seemed to indicate that he was going to try to execute on that plan. How's that? Good enough, I guess.

I do want to quote Sunil Guladi, who spoke to Jonathan Tannenwald from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019, after he was no longer the president. He said, here's what he said. We happen to have a situation right now where a senior official at U.S. soccer is the brother of the national team coach. We'll see how long that continues because U.S. soccer is in a CEO search. Ideal? No.

Do I think that Greg got the job because his brother works at U.S. soccer? No. I think that's frankly unfair to both of them. Ideal from a perception point of view? I get it. So he's saying it's not ideal from a perception point of view. So I don't know. I wanted to find something official from somebody who is close to that.

And Sunil Gulati basically was the U.S. Soccer Federation, I don't know, from the, from he was, he was a big part of it from the early 90s on. So, or at least a big part of the, of major league soccer and then became a big part of US soccer. So I don't know, I guess. It's never going to, it's never going to die though. You know, the, the charge of nepotism is never going to, is never going to really go away because you can't really, you can't really prove one way or the other.

No, and that's the whole, that's a whole reason nepotism rules exist because you, just the perception of it is, is the thing. Right. I'll say this. I don't feel, I didn't feel strongly about Burrhalter's hire one way or the other, about his actual ability as a coach. I think it's really difficult to ever see a coaching hire as a home run or a flop in the moment.

I think, I think that's why a lot of times, like getting outside consultant firms to guide your search is kind of a scam, because it can be so hit or miss and so difficult to predict. So when Burrhalter has announced as a coach is like, okay, well, let's see what he actually does as a coach. He could come in and smash it and execute on all of his objectives or he could come in and be a disaster

and we will have to, you know, reassess as we go. But like you said, he came in with the idea that we were going to disorganize the opponent with the ball, which is a, I've said this before, I think it's a really nice turn of phrase. I like it. We haven't really nailed that down yet. There are some things he's done well, which we'll get into a couple of them.

One thing I like about him, I like to write off the bat and continue to like is how generally speaking, open he is with the press. You know, the interviews with Bobby Warshaw have been quite good. I think in the way he, you know, his willingness to talk tactics and detail. And I think he, in general, is like that when he talks to reporters. And I appreciate that about him. I do too. I think right away, after some of his first games, he sat down with like,

almost like in a chalkboard situation with Taylor Twelman. I think he did it with some of the extra time guys. That's right. And I love that stuff. I mean, that's so awesome to see from like nerd soccer nerd stuff point of view. None of that means that he's going to be able to actually execute it with his team to get them to do those things on the field. But just having those discussions is, that's pretty good gravy for me.

Yeah. It's good gravy for you and it's good for the game, I think. for it's good for the discourse in general. I mean, you know, discourse, discourse has other challenges maybe, but all right, let's move on to number four, which is what, Greg?

Okay, so number four is the non-lost generation. And this is where maybe some people were starting to come around a little. That's still probably too strong. I think the skeptics about, you know, the youth, about the kids,

they've earned their skepticism, right? They earn their skepticism because every year for every cycle for for infinity, we've been talking about the next, the next rising stars of the U.S. And we just went through an entire cycle where there were, there was exactly one star and it was Christian Puliswick. And that might even been two cycles. Mixed Discarood was the rising star in the 2014 cycle, Julian Green.

Yeah. So we, we, people were right to be hardened and reluctant to do, to accept that the kids coming up really were different this time. But I think, you know, you and me truly believed it. And I'll remind everyone again, like, my original role in the show was to be the skeptic and to listen to you hype up all these kids that you were posting clips of and just be like, hey, that's great.

It's really cool that this kid is doing this for this youth team. He's not going to make it. None of them make it. You know, and that's not even just Americans. Everyone in the soccer pyramid fails. that's why it's such a pyramid shape. There's five kids that make it for every 200 that don't. And the U.S. doesn't have that many,

still doesn't have that many kids, that many irons in the fire. So anyway, the 2019 U20 World Cup was another chance for us to sort of see what some of those irons could do. And more importantly, sort of just see what the level of the pool was at that age group. It's not about these kids, these exact kids on this roster will hit. It's the level. of the pool is playing at a level that that suggests some of these kids will make it and some of

their peers will make it even if they didn't make this final U-20 World Cup roster. And you have names like Brendan Aronson who wasn't on that roster. You had other guys like Tyler Adams who was already, you know, above that level. Josh Sargent was eligible, but already training with the senior team. So watching this U-20 team in that World Cup, compete through the group stage and then advance and then knock out, you know, world super power. France was a big moment for a lot of people in their, probably in their like U.S. men's soccer fandom. Totally.

I think, I think it hooked. I think it hooked a fair number of people, at least of the sicko vintage, you know, to, um, yeah, I think if we were enterprising or if I were enterprising, I'd go back and clip all the times you said he's not going to pan out because there would be a lot. There were, you said that a lot. Or, you know, he said something sort of noncommittal that. made it clear that you were saying he's not going to pan out. Well, a lot of this came from the 2017.

Yeah, it was 2017, right? Right after we got knocked out, those U-17s, the guys who would eventually make up this U-20 team, were playing in the U-17 World Cup, right? Tim Wea and Andrew Carlton. Yes, yeah. And they were really fun to watch. Yeah.

And so you were excited about those guys, and I'm over here being like, Bell, he's not going to be any good. Tim Wea is not going to be any good. Like it's just super unlikely that any of these guys will actually be good. You may have said it about, you might have said it about Andrew Carlton to you. So it would have been accurate. Was on that team, I think.

I didn't even think Sergio Dest was that great in that tournament. So is what I know. That was me just saying like reflexively. It's just a reflex. Like, no, the guys, I mean, that's cool. I'm happy for those kids. It's cool to watch the Americans compete at that in a tournament like that. Not only are really going to pan out.

Like they just, it's just such a long shot for any player. And so that was still, you know, very possible as we were watching these kids beat France. But it did feel different. Part of the reason it felt different again was because this was summer of 2019. We already had players who sort of had beat the odds, right? Weston McKinney was starting for a team that was going to, about to finish second in the Bundesliga. Or he was a rotational starter. Christian Pulisic, you know, was racking up ghost stats for Brugia Dorman.

And Tyler Adams was now a starter at Red Bull Leipzig. Like those are 20-year-olds at the time. And it's like, hey, this is no longer, this is no longer like the U.S. hyping up a kid in the Norwegian second division, which is still kind of the cliche and saying he's going to be the next thing. We have kids who are doing this. These kids are now playing in the UEFA Champions League for big name clubs. It's no longer hypothetical.

They've broken through. And unless this is a complete outlier or a fluke that these three who are all within a couple months of each other age-wise have hit, we should expect to see more players hit as well. And that's kind of what we've had is we've had a decent stream of players hitting. We've done a good job in some other areas to generate players. And so that's what this 2019 U-20 World Cup felt like. Yeah. And it was, if you remember, just a lot of fun to watch this team play. They did okay in the group stage enough to get out of it, but there were some really nice moments here and there.

Paxon Pomacall was on that team. He went from being, in my eyes, kind of a so-so prospect to, you know, somebody that I wanted to see get looks with the national team for a long time. Tim Waye was on that team. He was very good. I watched a compilation of his touches against. Ecuador in the game we lost in the quarterfinals. Man, he was good in that game. Chris Richards was on that team, started at centerback.

Alex Mendez was on that team and Richie Ledesma, you know, two players that I've hyped up a lot on the SCuff podcast over the years. I'll remind you that Mendez is a, he starts every week in the Portuguese first division now. Richie Ledezma started yesterday in a admittedly dead rubber game in Europa League. But they're both, to say that neither has pandas. out would be inaccurate. I think they've both, they've both turned out okay. And it still just, and it still just highlights, uh, what the rest of that, uh, age core cohort has done. The fact that those guys are doing that and it barely registers, uh, in the discussion because who cares? I mean,

and it's not because who cares because, um, you know, the lost generation paned out and came through with the goods. Who cares because we've got four other, uh, U-23 midfielders who have already seized the opportunity and are doing the job and there's just no need to even check on on what else to an extent. I know we're saying that as we have a center mid crisis with injury. I mean, yeah, Mendes is probably worth checking on,

I think, but, but you know, I agree with your point. And I mean, players who weren't on that roster who would have been eligible included Brennan Aronson, you know,

now, you know, praised every weekend in England. And not just by Americans. I think Jimmy Sands would have been eligible for that team. He was already playing every week for New York City. So, so yeah, so it is. Mark McKenzie was on that team.

He was hurt, but he was playing. So I'll just use this as a quick World Cup roster interlude. Mark McKenzie is kind of the lesson for bringing an injured center back to a tournament, hoping that he'll be able to play. If you have roster spots to play with, you can do it. This is all, if you can't tell, this is all Chris Richards bit. because the dude hasn't been playing and it's like we still want to bring him in hope but centerback is just not really a position that you can just toss someone in at not full

fitness you can do that with an attacking player I think and get away with it because you're just looking for one moment centerbacks have to be spot on every moment and man is it going to be tough if we're trying to do that with Chris Richards I'm not saying that we can't but I am going to be really really anxious about it yeah good point I also I also want to go really deep in the weeds and say, don't bring an injured center back and then play him at right back, which is what Tab Ramos did with Mark McKenzie. In the final group stage game, right? Yeah. Yeah.

It was silliness. Must. I think it was like a must win game. It was a must win game. It was ridiculous. Dest was on the bench, I think, in that game. Anyway. So anyway, awesome tournament.

A lot of fun. A lot of people who had brought some joy back to what had been a bit of a bit of a job. joyless existence for men's national team fans. I remember when Ledesma, you know, Ledesma carried the ball and played the through ball to Soto for the opener against France, which was a lovely goal in many ways. I really, you know, people were just coming to me on Twitter, adding me on Twitter. And I felt like me and all my friends just got to, they gave that to us, you know. Richie gave that to us.

I'm happy you had that moment, Bells. Thanks. All right. The fall of 2019 is number five. And it was, we lost to Mexico, three zero, a humbling, friendly loss. Just got completely annihilated. And then we lost in our October Nations League fixture at Canada, lost two to zero. And I think, well, what do you think, what do you think happened as a result of this?

I mean, these were the, these were kind of the low point of the Burrhalter era, right? Yeah, this was the low point of the year. And it was a it was the end. This was the end of what Burrhalter had been trying to accomplish in 2019, I think, in a lot of ways. It was the end of the line for several players who had been staples in his rosters, in his 11s. And they just were never heard from again on the national team scale. That's Michael Bradley. that's Daniel Lovitz, that's Will Trapp.

That was just it. They'd been key pieces of every camp. And they sort of quietly disappeared into the night after this loss. And then the other big turning point here was that the takeaway for both of these games, the Mexico loss and then the Canada loss was that we were not disorganizing the opponents with the ball. Like we just were not. We were not creating scoring chances, which is the idea. If you're not creating scoring chances, then you're not disorganizing.

organizing them. And the big, I think the big lesson that Burhalter learned was you do need to create some scoring chances to score goals. I think that was one of the big takeaways. Well, and the practical way that played out was we started to try to create scoring opportunities in transition, right? By essentially by pressing. Yeah, we took a much more aggressive defensive posture.

Gone was the buttery soft 442. that we'd sat in a passive sort of low block. It wasn't even a trapping 4-4-2. It was defensively solid, but it left us with no other attacking streams other than win the ball, get your expansive shape that you like to use in your possession and sort of slog through possession

until you disorganize the opponent. And when we weren't doing that, it meant there was just no offense. So it just came down to whether or not the opponent was able to eventually break down our 4-4-2 and get a couple of chances. And Canada could do that. Mexico could do that.

There were, in that Mexico-friendly, of course, they didn't break us down that much, but, you know, this is going to be shades of the last window we had against Japan. We gave Mexico the chances with our possession. So not only were we not disorganizing them. We handed the ball to them in good scoring opportunities by trying to play out of the back. You could say we were disorganizing ourselves with the ball. And so that's part, and we were committed to it the whole game, right?

We never veered from it. And that sparked the big discussion about whether or not you should treat friendlies, especially against Mexico as training sessions, which I still maintain misses the point. Like, even if you concede that it's okay to treat that game as a training session, did we learn anything from it? Because the next important match we had was Canada. And it's not like we were like, oh, here are all the lessons we took from the Mexico game. So I still thought that was a, we missed the mark narrative wise,

because the big question is, is Greg Burr-alter capable of, installing this in a way that can play against Mexico or can learn from the Mexico game in a way that can beat the next opponent. And we still don't really have that answer. No. I don't know. Yeah, we're just rolling the dice. We still have our defensive solidity. And we at least now have several games in the books of moving away from that deliberate possession style and playing a more aggressive, both attack and defense. where we're less deliberate passing the ball around

and more just like get it upfield. If we lose it, we'll at least smash into them when they try to win it back and bring it back at us. So we have those games in our pocket. We can fall back on now. We didn't have those through any of 2019. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, lump it forward and let the MMA midfield try to win the ball and get going. It seems like a decent plan to me, but I've never heard those words out of Pearlters now. Let's see. I think, yeah, Christian Roldon was also in the midfield in that game against Canada. So that's another thing we went away from after that, I think. Yeah, he took a year off or so.

Roldon did from the team. That was, that was, so we had our asymmetric rotations, which we can always bring back. There's nothing inherently wrong or complicated about asymmetrically going from defensive shape to attacking shape. But for anyone who really wants to stroll down that memory lane, Roldon and Bradley were defending as sort of our two center mids in our 4-4-2, and McKinney, who also started, was actually defending as a second forward next to Josh Sargent.

So we were defending in the 4-4-2, and then an attack we would adopt that 3-25 shape that we still have, for the most part, a 3-25 shape through Burrhalter's time. But it was like McKinney is one of the do. 10s next to Pulsick until Pulsick got subbed out after an hour for Paul Ariola. It was a, it was a heck of a, it was a heck of a event. Yeah. Yeah, it was, and Poulosick was seemed mad. I think the Tenor, Tenorio, or Stayskel called it, came off in a huff.

And I think that's fair. Another thing from that docky series from Tenorians and Staskel is they point out how tone deaf Berhalter was. after the Mexico game. He thought they played well or something. You know, he said that in the press conference. This is not the only time he's done this. And then he said, so they wanted to ask him about it.

And so they asked him about it more recently. He said he just didn't realize how deep the wounds from Kouva had been. And he thought he was thinking sort of as a club team. You could, you know, we lost, but we did some things we liked to do. And then you're on to the next game on the next weekend. And that maybe he was trying to take that approach. to with the national team. But it's, you know, even Paul and Sam are like, well, you're surprised at how deep the wounds

were from Kuva? Like, you played on the national team. You played at World Cups. So. Yeah. I mean, he's had to say a couple of times, uh, in press conferences, things that seem outrageous, right? Like they just seem not outrageous in an offensive way, but outrageous in like, uh, you can't

be serious. Like you can't expect us to believe that you believe that. And it was, you know, the Canada loss in World Cup qualifying where he came out and said, we dominated the game after we created like a shot in half from open play. And so, you know, he later talks about, I'm essentially talking directly to the players, even though I'm in a public press conference. You know, he actually, he actually said that to Paul and Sam, too. He was more, he was more worried about what the players were feeling after that Mexico game than the, than what the, you know, anybody in the press thought. He just didn't want to lose them. Right.

And, uh, that's fair. I don't think he did. I don't think he did lose them. It might not have lost them, but he jettisoned some of them. So he kept, he kept some of the important ones and some of the other ones were, were cast aside. And, uh, that was, I mean, that was, that was the turning point. That's right. And, and one, one last thing on this is we, we, we sort of wandered to it or we didn't, it wasn't a point A to point B thing.

But after that Canada game, you know, it was about a year later that we first saw the Musa McKinney Adams midfield and a friendly against Wales. So, you know, 13 months later. And that's what we've sort of, I think we've sort of settled on as our base setup is those three guys in midfield. I don't know that that's necessarily how we're going to start games at the World Cup, but very likely it is. And so I just think of the Canada game as the beginning of us sort of arriving at that MMA. midfield. No question. Burhalter, I think, after the January camp might have said the following the ensuing January

camp, this was right before the big COVID break, said something about how he was excited to because of some of the all-action midfield players we had. And so this was before Musa. This was before Musa joined in. And because we, in that January camp, we adopted more of a press, like an organized 433 press. And so Buralter said in a. in a conference that he was starting to really think about the personnel and how exciting that was.

I was like, yeah, all right, buddy. Welcome, welcome to the program. Yeah. It was essentially just signaling Michael Bradley's time was over, I think. I think that was a lot of it, yeah. Michael Bradley slash Will Trap. Jackson, Ewell, stuck around for a while, continue to play. But let's get to number six.

But first, let me quickly plug the Patreon. I know what you're thinking. So much hassle. No thanks. But it's not. It's very simple and easy and you get the Monday reviews and a bunch of other stuff. The Monday reviews come directly to your podcast player once you set it up and it's not difficult to set up. And you support the work of this ad-free podcast. So the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Also leave a review if you if you insist on not subscribing to the Patreon. Leave a review, please. Number six, the fruit basket payoff. So by this time, we had already secured Sergenio Dest, right? We got him in October of 2019. So we'd had the loss in September at Canada.

We didn't have Sergenio Dest at that point. He had just started being an IAC's first team player. And so he was deciding between the Netherlands and the U.S. We get him. We get him before that October win against Canada. So now we've got a dest. And that was a huge deal because this is an IAC starter that Netherlands want.

They want him for their team right now and he chose the US. And then you can fast forward about a year later and we get Eunice Musa who's like a triple national, quadruple national. Yes, including, I think quadruple, yeah. But he chose us over England.

And he had been in England's youth set up, I believe, pretty consistently, very much still prospect, to play for England and he chose the U.S. And these were two huge gets. We've had other gets along the way. And I even kind of feel gross saying their gets. We presented an environment that they wanted to be a part of.

Yeah. And that's how Burrhalter framed it when he would talk about this too. The push and pull over dual national recruiting was a big part of the discourse in 2019. And you were, you and I think were a significant portion of that. Because we were like furious about the idea that we shouldn't be communicating with these players that had multiple national team options. That was the big discussion. Should we be connecting with them or not? And one side, including some people within U.S. soccer who would reach out to you, effectively said the player should be happy for just getting the call-ups.

That's all they should need if we don't talk to them in between camps. So what? We called them up to the last camp. What else do you expect us to do? And it was baffling to us at the time. At this point, it seems like, again, totally naive that anyone would ever think that would be the right way to go about this. We were in Eunice Musa's ear from the time he was a reserve player at Valencia.

He spent a year with their reserves. I think it was Nico Estevez, right? Yep. Yep. Nico Estevez was texting him like daily from that summer of 2019 through the entire 2019 season because you have to build relationships with players. You don't just call them up once it's clear they're good enough. Or you're really just sort of hoping that that is enough.

And I think it's very clear that the fruit baskets pay off. It seems very clear at this point that we have a great fruit basket network. And we are in constant communication with tons of dual nationals, probably just a lot of non-dual nationals too, just maintaining relationships with the player pool. but Burrhalter, McBride, Ernie Stewart have totally turned around the process for getting these duels on board from what Rangen and the U.S. soccer were doing in the Jonathan Gonzalez era. Thomas, I went to his house, Rangen. Rangen.

You did not go to his house. But, you know, one other thing, so I think Burrhalter gets, he gets a lot of credit just for his approach. to this. It's very, it's very tasteful. It seems like he's saying all the right things and obviously the success of, because Destin Musa are incredibly important players for this team. So it's hard to overstate how important they are. I will say there's all, there's a, there's another reason I think that it's not just Burrhalter going out and recruiting hard and being really good at it. It's a, the, the team itself, I think is kind of its own, you know, salesman. And, and unlike the, like the Dutch team, unlike the English team, the U.S. team is a predominantly black team.

And these are two men of African American or African descent who looked at it. And I can't, I know it's weird for a 40-year-old white guy to say this. But like, got to imagine they look at the culture of the team and say, that, you know, that's appealing. I think it's a, I think it's an important factor that we have this like very diverse, you know, majority black U.S. men's national team. It is its own. It sells itself in a lot of ways.

Totally. I mean, totally. And it's young. I mean, it's like you want to be around these kids. Like, right? You're not, you're not going into a stuffy locker room of people who don't look like you. And it's,

it's exciting. And it's not just young. It's also like competitively, Eunice Musa gets to step into a World Cup at age 21. That's, I can't forget that part. He has, he has.

If he weren't with us, I'm sure he would have England possibilities ahead of him, but they would still be very much ahead of him. He would not be going to the World Cup for England in 2022. And he's going to go in and probably start five matches for us in this tournament. Five or six? I mean, they're a tight turnaround, so I assume he won't be able to start all six. But he'll get five of the six starts. Yeah.

Okay, let's move to the next one. Number seven is, how are you phrasing this? Number seven is the rise of the badge 11s. And this is the irresistible phenomenon that was going on. I mean, around those. It's still going on. Around the start of 2020 where you make your US 11 with the badges of the clubs the players are playing for. Because we are very much an unprecedented badge territory.

So, I mean, the novelty is definitely worn off. and you know that a lot of times there are some real technicalities here, but Badge-Evins are not bound by technicalities. If Zach Steffin's contract is with Man City, you get to still put Man City on there. But this was just, again, totally different than anything we'd experienced before, where you can put Chelsea on there. You can put Uve, Uve, Barcelona, Leibzig, Dortmund, Byron, Man City.

Like, that's Chris Richards and Zach Stephan barely playing for those teams, but technically in 2020 they were still doing, they got some minutes. But the big ones I mean the big ones That is unprecedented The big ones were legit Most of them were legit I think

And we've had players At prestigious clubs before But very few of them Really broke through those clubs Like Gooch almost never played For A C Maloney Might have gotten like a handful of minutes In a dead rubber I think

In the Champions League Never played in Saria And you know Jonathan Spector is one Who came up through Man United Had a few minutes But I think it's a reach To say he was ever

A real part of Man United's team. Donovan, even as Byron and Leverkusen days, I think combined for like less than 400 minutes at those clubs. We didn't have guys who stuck the way that these guys are sticking. So this is new. And I think it's okay to be excited. I know it gets kind of mocked now, but like, come on, like this is, we can be excited about this.

Totally. Yeah. I love the badge 11s. And it'll be fun when we can do it. I mean, Verde Bremen would sneak in there when Sergeant was playing, You know, not like the most perceived. But, you know, color scheme-wise, it works because there aren't that many green badges. Yeah, Wolfsburg in there, too, for John Brooks. That's true. That's true.

Yeah. Dorman's really important for that reason, too. You need a yellow one. I mean, the big transfers, obviously were Pulisic to Chelsea, and he started playing for Chelsea at the beginning of the 1920 season. And then West McKinney moving in, West McKinney and Sergenio Dest moving to Juventus in Barcelona in the summer of 20. 20, which is, which was like, what?

Well, Dest, I sort of made sense. But I think a lot of us were like, is McKinney really going to be playing at Juventus? Is that going to work? Oh, yeah, that was for sure the case. And again, I wasn't like a McKinney doubter, but I also wasn't like, Juventus is actually coming in to swoop in for West McKinney. That's definitely what's going to happen.

I mean, I really thought it was going to be a mid table, another mid table side somewhere. And hopefully Juventus don't turn into a midtable side. No, not going to wood. But he plays all the time. time still. But yeah, so this is just yet another like exhibit in the, it really is different this time. Because again, these guys weren't buried in the reserves as they went. These were multi-million dollar purchases.

And they're being treated like multi-million dollar purchases. It doesn't mean they've got an easy play every game situation that they're walking into. Right. But they're getting to play. Right. All right. Next thing on the list is number eight. The summer of 2021, what do you call on this?

This is the trophy accumulation. And this is where the senior team finally is like, I feel like we rounded the 2019 corner finally. I mean, we had the big COVID pause. We had these a bunch of camps with a bunch of different restrictions coming back from COVID. And then finally we got to get the band together for two competitions in 2021. We brought the first team to the Nations League finals,

semi-final and final and we did the business against Mexico and that's really how I would say we just did the business we didn't it wasn't pretty but man was it exciting and the business got done it was great television

and I mean everything from the three to two win an extra time with like Pulisic roof and a penalty but also Raina scored in that game McKinney scored in that game we had a big mistake from McKenzie but we had the big saves

from Ethan Horvath who came on for Zach's definite halftime. So it's just a lot of exciting stuff and, you know, fighting and people throwing stuff at the end of the, at the end of the game. People throwing stuff is, I don't support it, but I'm just saying it does,

you know, makes the television a little more interesting. I mean, it does. Sorry. And go ahead. So we're into, so we're into our first real competitive game since that Canada rebound.

And, uh, that guy ran over the, and jumped over the railing right behind Clint Dempsey. Do you remember that? Yeah. I don't remember if Clint Dempsey had been doing other broadcasts ahead of Nations League or if this was Clint Dempsey. I think it was his debut.

Right. This is, we're getting Clint Dempsey on our TV again, which is awesome. We're on a camo blazer and sunglasses. Right. Some of these details are always going to get forgotten as you're thinking about them. But man, were they all really important and still, I think still are? So, yeah, so this is awesome because it had been, it had been drab. And then we got these friendlies through the COVID sort of coming back from COVID.

And you just never knew what to make of them. So to get this performance against Mexico in that final, I think it was a big deal. I think it was a big deal for knowing what the team and what this group of players is at least capable of. Right. And we're still clinging into that, clinging to that as we go into the World Cup. Right. And basically our performances against Mexico after that 30, loss are the main evidence we have of a successful men's national team program at the moment.

Yeah, because a month later, we beat them in the Gold Cup with a backup team. They brought their, they're mostly a full-strength team right back to the Gold Cup after this Nation's League loss. They kind of, they kind of mexicoed their way to the final. They weren't always pretty either, but they were mostly in control. And then we went into that game with backups, didn't play a lick of good possession soccer, but we were tough and we turned them over a few times and created some good chances, and then we set piece them in extra time,

and we have Matt Turner on our squad, and we took another trophy. Yeah, it felt really good. It felt like, oh, boy, are we good? Even our B team can beat Mexico at the Gold Cup. And that brought, that skyrocketed Miles Robinson up the depth chart, I think, that his performance is in the gold cup to the point where we really,

we really do miss him. Good summer. It's a really good summer. So it did feel good. And then we got a few months later, we jumped into qualifying. And that's what number nine is. And that's the qualifying roller coaster. Because it was ups and downs.

And it tended to correlate with home games versus away games. And that's historically been the case. Right. And that goes to the heart of like, it's tough to play away. in Conca Calf, which there's definitely truth to that. The disappointing thing, we said before on this podcast is like the hope was that we could build a system that would negate some of those away obstacles and allow us to play like a pretty good looking game of soccer away as well.

We have not done that. We are still a pretty messy team playing away from home in Conca Calfe. And that was a big part of the excitement of qualifying for me was to see us, you know, ascend those heights to solve that problem. And we didn't really do it. We did have the win in San Pedro Sula, four to one, but it was a nail biter. Even despite the score line, we were down 1-0 at halftime. Most everybody thought Burhalter should be fired at that point. But then we scored four goals in the second half.

If Grandpa Dave had been vacationing in Honduras at that moment, I don't know. I don't know if Burr Alter would have come out of the locker. And then we had the one zero loss in Panama City a month later, which was just really hard to watch and depressing our inability to create any chances. And then Dosacero restored in Cincinnati. It really was a roller coaster. And I guess you've already said this, but if you were looking for a linear upward trajectory

and what we could expect when our national team took the field, like I was, you were, you were frustrated. One of the cool things, though, about it, about the trajectory was because the first window was kind of rough, even in the home game. We played Canada home in that window and tied them and really had a hard time doing anything with the soccer ball. But it was not, it was not MMA, right? It was not, we did not have Eunice Musa. McKinney had been suspended for, you know, things that a 21-year-old wants to do when they're in Nashville. And so we had that window, which was less of a roller coaster.

I mean, the Honduras game made it a roller coaster. But it was more just like, man, what are we doing? We didn't look great in any of these games. We are supposed to be asserting ourselves. This is the moment to do it. We just beat Mexico twice, cruise through Conccaf over the summer, and we are not cruising. But then it wasn't like this climb in the next window. We put Musa, McKenny, and Adams in the midfield against.

Jamaica in that first home game of the next window and we looked great. Jamaica's not a good team and we're playing at home, but we looked great and it was just like from then on, the home games with MMA playing, we looked great. So it wasn't like a climb where they had to ease into things. It was a light switch. Yeah, that's true.

And it was just like, oh man, here we go. So the two home games at window, MMA, we look good. So that's kind of how the trajectory it took the rest of the way. It was like a very good steep plateau for those. home performances. Yeah. Has there, what, did we have the full MMA against Canada away?

We did. That's their, that's their one blip, right? And, I mean, I'm just going to keep putting it on the field, on the conditions. So let's hope that Qatar has a nice,

smooth grass. Yeah. Good, well, it'll be warm. We know it'll be warm. Um, all right,

let's do the last one. It sounds like, uh, it sounds like a made up Bible story or something. All right, this one's the sacrifice of Paul. Uh, Paul Ariel will do anything for the team,

including being a late injury scratch for the Costa Rica home game, which allowed Tim Wea to replace him in that lineup. And Tim Wea has been the, I think, key piece of our attack ever since. Yeah. Yeah, if you haven't watched all these qualifying games closely, and some of you maybe haven't, I don't know, he has been our best attacking player. since that day.

You mentioned watching a comp of him from the U-20s against Ecuador. Tim Wea holds up to any compilation in any match he's played in that I've done so far. Like when I go back and watch his all touches and like any game, I'm like, oh man, he was doing some things. Yeah. So he's been great. It's still an open question where, what his role will be for if we have a full strength theme in guitar. But he is going to have a part to play for sure if we are going to be successful.

Yep. And thank you, Paul, for making that sacrifice. I'll add a couple more things about this window in particular, because this was the window where with Wea and Musa asserting themselves, we effectively cemented the youth movement, like, even within the 11. And that hadn't really been like fully agreed on or like recognized as being the case, even through like the last window. Musa had been hurt for the first window of qualifying. He hadn't played in the Nation's League games. which I remain adamant about was not like a pure soccer decision. I just genuinely do not believe that Greg Burhalter believed that anyone else

was a better starter in midfield than Eunice Musa for us. But come October, when he's back and healthy, he started immediately, started all three matches in that October window. And that was it. The midfield was not getting any older at that point. If everyone's healthy, it's Musa and McKenney and Adams. And if it wasn't, it's because it's going to be Gio Raina or Brendan Ayers that we're not going to.

back to the vets. And with Wea having the game that he did, there was no longer any question of Wea or Ariola or even like when Jordan Morris was going to come back and be healthy. It didn't matter. This is Tim Wea's spot unless Gio Raina takes it from him. So the idea of like, you know, us, us ever going back to the veterans in so many positions was basically dead at that point. Yeah.

And I think it is fair to be adamant that the him not playing and that Musa not. and that Musa not playing in the nation's league games was there was some element of non-socker decision to that. But in the case of Wea, Burhalter kind of accidentally started him against Costa Rica. And, you know, just to be just to be fair on both sides there. Yeah, no, I think that's the case. And Wea had been very good off the bench against Jamaica

to the point where I don't see that as a defense of not starting him. Like, yeah, but he was so good off the bench. Like, yes, we need that player. in the attack as much as we can possibly have him in the attack. And so I do still think that's a miss for Burhalter. And we've talked about it before. Who knows how it would have turned out if Ariola had not been injured? Because the thing about Paul Ariola is he's very consistently average.

He's not going to go out and have a shocker. So he would have had the exact game you'd expect from him. And if that's the game that you like from Paul and it gets him into the starting lineup, who knows if that would be enough. for Wea to have jumped him going into the Mexico game in the next window. And Wea was outstanding starting against Mexico in the November window. Yep. So Paul, so Paul giving us that chance, huge, huge moment for the national team in this.

It really was, man. When you put it like that. Let's do a quick postscript. That was number 10. What's the post script? So the post script is this existential tune-up dread that we're going through right now because our rehearsals in the September window were not good at all. And so this is now,

we have nothing to do but wait and hope that those were not representative of what we'll do in guitar and that we can point to some of these successes that we've just talked about and hope that we look more like that. Yep. And we did not, very worth pointing out, we did not have Wea or Mousa in the final rehearsals. Or Jedi.

Or Jedi. Yeah. So, or Chris Richards, we're not, we may not have him in Qatar either. Anyway, the tune up dread is probably what you're feeling right now to some extent. Yeah, that's what we're left with. Let's just limit it that. That's a good place to, no, it's not a good place to leave it. It's a horrible, horrible place to leave it, but what choice do we have?

Right. Well, no, I mean, I think, yeah, I think the, I can be talked into us being much, much, much better than we were in September. Certainly you can too, right? I mean, it's not just wishful thinking. We'll be better than that. Absolutely. No, I absolutely believe we will be.

And I also absolutely believe that if we aren't, if we come out looking like that, we will adjust in ways that we did not adjust in September to raise our floor. Of course, we'll adjust. That's it from us. Have a good weekend. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.