Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #348: Iran v USA recap

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

The best day for fans of the USMNT in a LONG time. A fantastic first half performance, and we're on to the knockouts. Greg and Belz go long.----Scuffed is an ad-free podcast. Support that and get exclusive episodes (more than 50 this year), plus access to the Discord including live call-in shows and round-the-clock access to other reasonable USMNT and USWNT fans online, 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. And the USA is through to the knockout rounds. Netherlands on Saturday. We were cool under pressure before and during the game. Gracious in victory. I couldn't be prouder. Look at the way Anthony and Josh and Tim were consoling Iranian players after the game. We've got Charles Barkley talking smack already too.

Let's go. Oh, man. You know you've pierced the general, uh, American indifference to soccer when you've got Charles Barkley talking smack. Yeah, let's just go ahead and listen to the clip because it's fantastic. We're opening up a can of woodpass. I guarantee. Nothing was in trouble.

Hey, Tyler, my man, 12. We're going on. Hey, I want Spain. I want Spain. I want Brazil. I want Germany. I want France. Well, they got the boy Mbapapé over there, France.

He ain't no joke. Mabapé. I don't, we don't need him yet. But. All right, all right. I mean,

we're going to get replaced here. Charles Barkley's coming for us. Netherlands are in trouble and scuffed pod is in trouble. We're all, we're definitely in trouble. That first half, though, man,

that was, you had to have been happy with the way we played. Thrilled. Like, uh, sequence after sequence of the kind of like penetrating soccer attempts. Yes. That,

that we have to have. We have to have these and we had them. And it was, uh, you know, not always coming off all the way, but it was coming off enough that it's like, oh, we are clearly capable, we're clearly competent, we're attempting the right things. I felt, I felt pretty good for the entire first half, even though it took almost the whole half to get our goal.

Yeah. And even, you know, even the goal itself required a great deal of precision from several people in sequence. I mean, we'll get there, but I had to watch it a bunch of times on the rewatch because, one, the replays don't always show the whole thing on the live broadcast. And two, because of how good Tim Wea's first touch was on that ball from Turner, I was like turning around talking to a buddy about how awesome that was. Like, oh my God, what a touch. Like Tim Wea, can you do any better? And then I turned back around four passes later and McKenney's about to hit his diagonal. Well, we'll get,

we'll get to it. We'll get to it. Make them wait. Make him wait for the good stuff. The cool thing about it all is, yeah, we have had this very solid sort of ability. to deny the opponent from scoring goals or even getting a lot of good chances. That continued to be the case against Iran. But we added, I thought, like a lot more patience and probing activity like you alluded to in the final third. And the service from wide.

I thought Anthony Robinson and Sergenio Dest had their best games in a long time, maybe ever, of just playing a dangerous ball when they got an opportunity. There weren't a lot of crosses hit, way over the box. They were whipped in there, dangerous repeatedly. I know you don't like crosses very much, but...

Right, right. Not just like the blind ones, or it's just like, oh, don't have any other idea, it's just going to whip it in. But yeah, I do think that we were creating good lanes for those players. I think they were getting a little deeper

than we're used to seeing them get. But for the most part, I'm sticking with my penetrating passes to feet into the amoeba. For those of you kind of joining in, and not sure what we mean by the amoeba. We're talking about the zonal defensive shape of our opponent or any team that's playing defense in modern soccer.

They kind of settle into a zone, a shape of bodies, and their goal tends to be to just keep the attacking team on the outside of them away from goals. Or shoot death. Yeah, so if you oblige them and always play it around the outside of the amoeba, you end up just playing around the perimeter of the attacking half of the field from sideline back to midfield to your centerback. like a Simpsons episode would have you believe,

and then around the other side, over and over and over again, with no real urgency to score. This is why time of possession metrics have ceased to be a useful indicator of whether you're playing well or not. They kind of used to be 10 years ago. I'd be like, oh man, this team really kept the ball.

But now defense has got wise to being able to let a team have the ball without actually letting them be dangerous. And one of the ways that you have to make yourself dangerous is to not just hit blind crosses into the amoeba, but to pass into the amoeba, collapse it, then go out. And then if you want to whip it back in against a disorganized amoeba, I guess have at that.

But one thing we had been missing for a long time was the courage and ability to execute passes into the amoeba, not just maintain possession, but capitalize on unbalancing that defensive shape. And we saw plenty of moments where we were really going for that sort of concept and pulling it off at times. against an opponent who is legitimately good at preventing that, I think, and a coach who is, you know, he's an old dog and he doesn't, he, he, he's a serious,

he's a serious soccer coach, Carlos Kyrash. And I think this was a, this was not an easy task, I don't think, for us to get this win. No, not an easy task. And as we'll talk about when we get into the second half, even though I was like, oh, we're doing fine. going into the 35th, 38th minute. There is, there does feel like there's a clock ticking on us because. Oh, yeah. Like we talked about in the preview, we don't have a lot of subs at this point who are like

chasing a goal subs anymore. So, and we've seen the team run out of gas in the 60th and 70th minute. So it's not like, oh, well, if we can just keep this up for 90 minutes, we kind of know that we can't keep it up for 90 minutes at this point. We kind of know that like if the goal doesn't come 60, 60 minutes in, that midfield is done. Yeah. And we're going to have to come up with another way to solve it.

Yeah, which does. I mean, there is going to be some criticism here. I think our subs could be better. Maybe they're just not good enough. But I mean, I feel like we could have gotten more urgency from Haji Wright and Kellen Acosta. I thought Brendan Aronson was pretty good, actually, in the second half. Yeah, I thought on rewatch, I thought he even improved in my

I thought he was kind of fine coming in for pool sick. He's never going to be as good as pool sick. I don't think he's as good as what a healthy reina would be either. I think there's that drop off no matter what. But I thought he was sort of better than a usual Brennan Aronson performance. Let's do the lineups. Let's do some 11s right here. Heroes.

Heroes, all of them. Yeah, man. It was the same lineup we played against England except for Cameron Carter Vickers stepped in for Walker Zimmerman at centerback. And Josh Sargent got back into the starting lineup instead of Haji Wright. So it was Turner & Goal, DES, CCV, Ream, and Antony across the back line. Tyler Adams at the 6, Musa and McKinney as the 8th, Musa on the right this time, and McKinney on the left more often than not. And then Wea, Sergeant and Pulisic across the front line.

Any big surprises? Yeah, go ahead. I mean, CCV is a big surprise, right? Like I didn't, we've kind of had a centerback hat. Centerback was the original position way back when we were talking about, like, these guys are all sort of interchangeable. And that would have been even in 2019 when we were talking about them. But like as as the cycle progresses and certain minutes are given to certain players,

like they're a group of sort of equivalent options no longer stays equivalent because you've got familiarity, right? You've got chemistry. You've got understanding of what's expected. And CCV never got any of that. He was in one camp in 2019, the pre-gold cup camp. And then he was in one camp in 2022 under Greg Burrhalter. the June camp. So the guy has only played like a half, right?

No, in June he got some play in time. He got a, I think he played the whole El Salvador game. So yeah, so he got half against Morocco. He got one half in that friendly. And then he got the two quote unquote competitive games. He started against Granada, Grenada, Grenada, and went 90 in a laffer, a net 50 win. And then he started went 81 in the El Salvador mud bowl in the one-one draw. So yeah, so he doesn't have a ton of reps.

he doesn't have really reps against a lot of good teams. And so to, and he hadn't played in the World Cup in the first two games of the group. So to start CCV in like the pivotal match of the World Cup, winner go home, like have to be mistake free. Just a massive, I don't know if I want to call it a risk.

I don't know if I want to call it a gamble. But it's a huge decision. And it's a huge moment for Cameron Carter Vickers. And he, I don't know, it's hard to find a spot where he put too many feet wrong. Yeah, I thought he was fantastic. And I mean, it's not just him.

I mean, if we step back a little bit, he and Ream both, I think somebody said this on the Colin show last night. If you'd have told me six months ago that they were going to be the starting centerbacks in a game that we had to win to advance from the group, nobody would have believed you if you would have said that six months ago. No, and all again, a lot of that goes back to the coach's decisions leading up to it. Like, obviously, Ream had fallen out of the picture after the September window of 2021, the first World Cup qualifying window,

he played 90 minutes away to El Salvador, and then didn't play the rest of that window, was called up in October. Essentially, the story was he declined the call-up because for family reasons, and then was never back in camp again. So there's no reason to believe that those two guys that Burhalter would circle back to Ream

or that he would suddenly include CCV ahead of options that he had given way more audition time to. Right. But we'd been kind of CCV curious, for a while now. I'd wanted to see him in that gold cup in the summer of 2021. I think he would have been a shoe in.

Like, I think he was definitely next up on the list after the guys who'd played in Nation's League. We had four centerbacks in the Nation's League. Chris Richards was hurt. So I think CCV would have been considered one of our top options for that. But it was one of those balancing acts

where he was like still trying to break through at Spurs or if he wasn't going to break through at Spurs, he needed to find a move. And then hopefully get into that new club for their off season to be ready to go for the season. So it was one of those where you can't sacrifice that off season for the Gold Cup. So he didn't come play. And he ended up transferring to Celtic where he has been thriving and where he's been forced to pass the soccer ball a lot.

Notably, we didn't really see any of that line-breaking passing from him in this match against Iran. But he kind of has a little bit of it in his bag. I don't feel like he's a liability passing the ball. And I would say he's definitely a level up. from like say Aaron Long. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't like that's, I don't know if we have another centerback in the picture who's, who's, I don't need to, I don't need to pile on here on Aaron Long's passing. But I feel like the start he probably gets here is because he's a little, he's faster. I mean, he's faster than Zimmerman. And if the idea is that Iran's going to bunker and we're going to sit on top of them the whole game and just have to protect ourselves against breaks going the other way, we just want a little bit of that extra speed for that one time we need

our deep centerback to chase down Iran's player and make it a little bit more difficult so that Matt Turner can make a Matt Turner safe. Yeah. That's my big CCV analysis. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. His speed against a counterattacking team. He didn't put a foot wrong.

I mean, even on that very last penalty shout, I thought he handled it sort of perfectly, put enough of a hand on the guy's shoulder, on Tremi's shoulder to put him off, but not enough for the referee to whistle it, you know? Yep, not even enough for VAR to catch it. What did you think of Sergeant up top? I mean, before the game started.

So before the game started, so we talked about this too. Like my preference had been Ferreira because I didn't think Raina would be able to start and I wanted a guy whose tendency would be to come back and get the ball so we could hit the ball into the amoeba. We talked about Sergeant probably has that ability. we weren't trying it against Wales when I wish we would have done more of that

because again we think he can but it isn't necessarily his tendency the way it is Ferreira's come back and play but still thinking that he's probably capable of it and then he went out and played and he was just fantastic and it wasn't just that either that's the thing is one of the things we said about

Sargent is that he's a hybrid right and Berhalter said the same thing when he announced the roster is Sergeant can do those things but he can also do some of the big caboose target striker stuff. And he was doing quite a bit of that too. He was moving guys around. Yeah.

Yeah, garbage balls up in the air that he just like posts up under the ball, uses that wagon and like hit checks a big, big centerback or big center midfielder away just to keep the real estate, protect the ball, and go. So he was doing this like old school target stuff, throwback stuff just to keep possession. You know, it looks clumsy, but it's really effective. But then he also had a bunch of moments where he was doing. doing the intricate little stuff to combine right off of his feet. Yeah.

It's the first time I've seen him play for the U.S. where he looks like he does for North City over the last couple months. I hope he's healthy. I hope he's healthy and I hope we keep passing the ball to his feet. Yeah, he spoke to the athletic, I guess it was last night. I'm really not sure how bad it is, he said. I think we'll have to see how it kind of progresses overnight, but we obviously have a very good medical team.

So yeah, we're going to do everything we can. Hopefully this is, this one is not too bad. And it was his ankle, not his knee, which on rewatch was very obvious. Like he was grabbing for his ankle, even though it looked like his knee took, you know, was under some stress when he stepped on the ball. It looked like it hurt a lot. Well, one thing we can be sure of is they are not going to tell us the truth about his injury regardless. It's all cloak and dagger around here these days.

Smoke and or mirrors until we're actually a living. or holding a trophy, one of the two. Hey, could happen. Iran was in a 4-4-2. They had Baran Vand in goal back from his collision in the England match. Ramin Rezaion, pretty dangerous at right back, I thought, at least at points in the game. Majid Hussein and Morteza Porla Ganji at centerback. Now, Hussein was a hero in this game for Iran.

I thought, I mean, when you go back and watch, he was. stepping and intervening in all kinds of different situations, like to save goal scoring chances from happening. Yeah. And again, just the fact that we were forcing an opponent's defense into those moments, I'm like, oh, man, this is different. There were at least, I can think of at least three off the top of my head that were like sort of above and beyond the call of duty from him.

And then Milad Mohammed, Mohamedi, also energetic at left back. And then the bank of four in midfield was holy zadeh. on the right side, he's left-footed and kind of tricky. And then Ezatollahi, the kind of big six, and then Nurilahi and Esan Hash Safi. Nur al-Lahi and Hash-Safi sort of, you know, steady guys for them, Hash-Safi, the captain. And then Tremi and Asmoun up top. They sat deep.

They didn't sit so deep, at least at the start. Their line of confrontation was a little higher than maybe I expect. didn't you think? Yeah, and then occasionally they would step up much to their eventual chagrin. Right. Let's go. Should we get to the timeline?

Let's do some events. Okay. Right after the first minute, there's a little light pressure from McKenny on Toremi as he's dribbling across the field in our half. And he gives it away to Christian Pulisic who just turns and drives 40 yards right up the middle of the pitch, held it a tad too long and gets tackled by Husani,

one of those examples I was talking about earlier. He did have Sergeant out to his right for a slip pass. I'm not saying it would have been a simple pass, but there was something there to explore, I think. Yeah, a little excitement from Pool Sick. That last touch was definitely not exactly where he thought it would go and couldn't quite run it down. I noticed, like, in around the three-minute mark,

a spell of possession from Dest and Musa, mostly down in the right corner. That, for me, just felt good to see. Nothing really came of it except a poor cross from Musa. But their ability to sort of keep the ball and under pressure and get the ball back and do that in the other team's final third was on display for the first time. And it was a good omen, I think, both it felt like a good omen at the time. And now it even feels like one more. Yeah.

And when you're getting it into that absolute corner space, not just sort of at the edge of the box up above the box where a defense is still mostly okay with it, I think that's a promising sign. I think it's a promising real estate to be in control of to exhibit that level of control. So again, just signs that we were having the right ideas. We were getting into the right areas. We hadn't yet started to really hit it into the bubble. So I don't know if it was just waiting and easing into the game or if it's just kind of a fluke that we hadn't quite started really penetrating yet. Yeah, we didn't start getting dangerous right away. In the fifth minute, oh, got to pronounce that correctly.

Fifth minute, Iran does some good attacking down our left flank. They're able to pump two or three crosses in, and we can't get the ball out of there for almost two minutes until Turner covers it up after it dribbles through. I won't describe everything that happens in those sequences, but it was, it felt a little threatening. It was, I think, the last time Iran was really threatening in the first half. There was one other moment, which we'll get to. Okay, yeah, I was going to say that that was about it for actual goal mouth.

threat, right? Yeah. There was the time when Reem cut out, Teremi's pass to Os Moon. Yeah. So our first decent chance comes on that left foot of volley from Eunice Musa in the ninth minute. It comes from a desk cross that gets punched out and then it's settled by Pulisic. And, I mean, it's a good cross and the Byron Vaughn has to really come out and go for it. It's settled by Pulisic.

He drives at Rameen and then taps it back to Robinson, who plays another ball. And this one's also kind of dangerous. It gets knotted out to Musa, who takes it off his chest and hits it hard on the volley with his left foot, but way over, way over the goal. And again, just having Pulisic with the ball at his feet in the box with one player looking at him, you know, he got that against Harry Kane against England too. But like, that's what we need to be having, right? We've got to, if we're creating these moments where a defender, is going to have to make the play of the game for, you know, for him. Like, that's good.

The more times we can do that, the better. And Poulsick did well here to stay under control, not to take the man on to the extent that he would lose the ball, but just sort of test him so if you can get him to make a mistake, lunge in unnecessarily, drag a foot over him, take a penalty. I mean, all of those things, Pool Sick is testing him. They stood up well to it. But by standing up well to Pulsick and collapsing on him, it opens up the rest of the attacking third.

and we move the ball pretty well to Pulisik moves it pretty well to Jedi and then it's one of those sort of hopeful crosses but another again a hopeful cross where we drag people out to Pulisic is different than just a hopeful cross into a completely set defense. Right.

Okay. And I will stress again that even though it was hopeful it was a well-hit cross and there were several of those from both fullbacks. 11th minute, some more good possession in Iran's half and then Musa plays a clipped ball to Pulisic near the penalty marker. He jumps for it and gets a respectable header on frame.

It's pretty easily dealt with, but he, you know, a good shot on goal. At this point, I have noticed two good bits of Sergeant holdup play, and then he runs down a ball on the right channel. His touch is clumsy, but he still lifts it across and causes a little bit of a problem. Yeah, at this point, it just feels like we're exerting our dominance, and our midfield is special. That is, how gratifying is that to see them sort of acknowledged on the world stage this way? It's awesome.

And there's every reason to think that they can enhance the acknowledgments they're already receiving on Saturday. Because, yeah, it isn't just that we're also, that we're doing a better job controlling the ball and attacking, which we were, like notably better passing, like adventurousness, ambitiousness, ambition. but yes, like the defense. Enficiosity. The way we're smothering Iran once we do give it away, it was incredible. I didn't see the possession stats popping up very much. And I know we were just talking about that being like not necessarily metric of how well you're playing, but it can tell you something. And I feel like what we saw was us having a very intentional, deliberate way of attacking and then eventually losing it because most of the time you lose it.

And then Iran giving it right back to us. Like it was never like Iran stretched us out. and just kept the ball and defended via possession for a while. It just felt like we would smother them as soon as we turned it over. And so much of that smothering is done by Musa, McKinney, and Tyler Adams. They're so smothering. They're very smothering. Yeah.

It's such a, it's such a great platform for success, you know, such a, like, I guess they set such a high floor for us. Absolutely. Should point out here since we were just talking about Iran, getting too expansive or having that much possession. The few times that they did, I think it was clear, I thought it was clear at least that the U.S. we were settling into our 4-4-2 shape defensively. And I wonder, and one of the reasons I wonder if we are doing that is to extend the life

of the legs of that midfield because it is a little bit less exertion. There's less ground to cover by adding, by kind of dropping or sliding one of them out wide right and then bringing pool sick wide left and having that four man bank sort of shifting side to side instead of the stupid amount of running that those three midfielders would have to do sort of our old way yeah of pressing where we leave like the weak side fullback open invite that big switch knowing that they can cover that ground very quickly our midfield can but it's an expensive ask right because that energy that they're exerting and all through the first half uh takes away from how long they can play into the second half.

I noticed the same thing. I didn't track it throughout the half, but I was glad to see that we were dropping into that 4-4-2, at least some to conserve energy. 16th minute, another good spell of possession in their defensive third. Some good service from Robinson trickles right through the buy. Trickles isn't the right word. It whips through the box and Dest gets on it on the other side.

McKinney, it gets recycled to McKinney at the top of the box. He tries a little over the top of the box. He tries a little over-the-top ball to Tim Wea, which Hosseini does really well to read and cut out. And then it cycles out to Dest again, and he hits a pretty fantastic ball across the edge of the six, which requires a big diving, outstretched paw from Baron Bond to keep it from getting to Pulisic, who is absolutely arriving at the backpost to tap it in. And this goes back to the smothering, right? Because even when we try things that don't come off the first time, like we are at the end of every attempt.

by Iran to release it. Every attempt they have to clear it seems to go right to a blue jersey. Sometimes even if they're not in the picture right away, like you see the ball go out and on the screen as a viewer, you're not sure who it's going to. And inevitably, it would be a blue shirt all alone just approaching the soccer ball ready to make the next attack. Again, and I think that fed into why I was not feeling so like tense. I mean, there's obviously tension when you need a goal to stay alive and you don't have it yet. But the way that's, that we were just on top of them over and over again. It never felt like this might be our last chance to score this half.

Like it felt like there was going to be another attack in the next minute or two every time. Yep. Still quite tense for me, I will have to admit. But yes, I agree. In the 20th minute, McKinney plays through the lines to sergeant's feet. And I think you wanted to talk about this one. So I'll let you speak, Greg. So this one was where I like got legitimate tears to my eyes.

it was a I mean first off like don't even sleep on the McKinney pass right like so we we have a restart Adams just hits it to McKinney who's all alone in the center circle no pressure everything fine this is normal this could easily turn into a horseshoe of sadness but instead McKinney like delays on the or McKinney clips the ball up so the ball comes into McKinney and he just sort of lifts it between two pressing Iranian players into the gap into the amoeba and it's kind of going towards pool sick, but not quite. So pool sick reads the ball going beyond him up to sergeant, and pool sick reacts instantly.

So now we have sergeant coming to get this ball from McKinney, and we have pool sick between the lines, racing onto Sargent, and where in the past, we've seen our attacker decide that that's too tight of a pass to make because they're only separated by like four yards, five yards as the ball gets to Sargent. And it's a tough pass, right?

You're very likely to turn this ball over. as you're playing. And instead of choosing to just be safe and hold it, which Sergeant could have done and recirculated back to our central midfielders, he goes for the more difficult layoff to Pulisick, who's now running upfield. It's not a perfect ball from Sargent. It's a little hot, so it bounces up on Poolick.

Poolick has a harder time playing it. But as that's happening, Tim Wea is streaking from the right side, upfield, he's on side, he's beyond the centerbacks, and he's inside of the outside back. So we have a man in on goal if we can find this next pass. We look for it. Kulik tries to hit it and it's intercepted. But this is just my long way of like breaking down what turns into a nothing play,

but is the exact recipe for how I want to see us playing the rest of the Iran game. And then into this Saturday against Holland. It didn't feel like a nothing play at all. It felt really dangerous to me. I think I was watching at a bar in Chattanooga. and I feel like the whole bar was excited by that moment. I mean, obviously it didn't come off. But again, I'll mention it was Husani who cut it out.

And one thing that, you know, my labored breakdown of it does is it sort of takes away how slick and bang, bang, the whole thing was. Oh, so fast. That's what strikes you watching on TV. It's just how, like, quick, it's basically the, you know, in the preview we talked about what England did to Iran on their best attacking sequences and talked about how. how they could go so quickly from playing deliberate to like, holy Lord, that was a lightning, like lightning three touch sequence and they got him behind.

And that's what we were looking at right there. And it just barely doesn't come off. We didn't get a replay, so couldn't really tell, you know, exactly how close it was to coming off. But I'm not disagreeing with it. Disagreeing,

maybe you're saying. Let's see. McKinney did have quite a few good passes. like this in this game. And I noticed Vince was, you know, was dancing on some people's graves on Twitter. I'll just, I'll jump in one more time because 23rd minutes. So moments after this sequence to Sargent's feet that McKinney keyed, we do almost the same thing only as Tim Wea now.

And it's a little farther upfield. So now instead of a center mid keying, it's one of our attacking players, attacking line players. And it's just the one that, the stuff that Tim Wea does is so subtle and so nuanced because he's got the ball facing upfield in the half space. And there's like an Iranian defender directly in front of him, like a yard and a half in front of him. You think the vertical pass is taken away. There is no window into Josh Sargent.

And this again goes back to that like bravery and ambition and confidence that we need to see from our players because they have it. And Simwaya hits just this like vintage arsenal, Barcelona, like Javi Iniesta, outside of the right foot pass with no window right past the Iranian defender's foot. and it works because Waya disguises things and they're so unexpected that the Iranian defender just doesn't think that that pass could possibly be made.

And it's right into Sergeant's feet and then a Waya bursts beyond the defender who is just on top of him. And Sergeant has a perfect little layoff. I think he might have croft it through the defender's legs. And Wea just has it running into space, full speed, into the box.

He ends up, you know, getting closed down by the help side defense and hitting like a spinning attempt at a cutback. But the buildup again, just phenomenal. And more of the good stuff. More of the stuff all game. Yeah, I actually didn't even clocked it, but without a time stamp.

But yeah, that was really nice. I couldn't tell if Sergeant Croifted it if it was on accident. But the result was the same. He was rushing into the box with the ball. Waya, that is. A couple things we should mention in the 20th minute, Iran did get a little bit of. opportunity when Izatollahi played

Terami in behind and CCV he was a little behind the play but he stands up to Remy and then Terami tries to play a square pass to Asmoun and Ream stabs it away. I didn't think either striker for Iran really got into this game and I don't know how much that was just smothering them and how much they just didn't have a good game but they didn't have a good game either of them. I mean in some way you just got to

you got to tip the hat to our team defense and And I really do think that that's the case because, you know, England didn't have a good game. And part of it is like they didn't need to be ambitious, but part of it is their really good players just got smothered by a really good defensive setup. Yep. We want Spain. We want Brazil. We actually might get Australia. What's happening here?

I mean, this is like the, you know, well, we won't get into semifinals talk just yet, I suppose. The Netherlands are the best What the best nation to never win a World Cup I think that's that's sort of conventional wisdom isn't it Yeah I think most people have the Netherlands in the US Sort of in that same tier And then in the 23rd minute There was some lovely work from Dest Mousa and Wea up the right

Musa slips Wea to the byline with some I mean they're all kind of like dribbling and passing in a very elegant way And Wea tries to pick out Pulisic with the cut back I mean, it was silky the whole move, and it gets cut out by Hosseini again. All right, tons of good attacking, basically on either side of the field. It seems like we're getting better at breaking a team down, doesn't it? I mean, we were much better in this game.

This was unequivocally for me the best we have looked breaking down a low-block team, an organized low-block team. Ever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, probably ever. I mean, soccer's changed a lot in 30 years, so it's. It's hard to compare eras of how you even attempt to do this stuff. But certainly over the last four years, this is the best week,

this first 45 minutes, by far the best we've looked. Yeah, I think so too. So let's hope the Netherlands come out in a low block. All right. Well, that's the thing is if they come out and try to play against us, that plays into our hands a little bit too. I'm not saying. Yeah, we'll take either way.

We'll take either way. Yeah. 27 minute Mark Pulisic gets the ball around the mid, around midfield, and he could play McKinney running right down the middle of the field into a bit of space, but he finds Sergeant's feet at the top of the box, and Sergeant touches it across the top of the box. It's a little bit of a loose touch, but it does the job and has a shot that doesn't look super likely to go in to me, but it deflects off the turf and up in the air for Tim Wea, who is, as usual, running in behind, and Wea tries to head it from, I don't know, 10 yards out,

right at the keeper. Not a very good header. Probably had time to let it fall to his feet for a volley or something, but I'm not, you know, I'm not going to be too picky at this point. Oh, man, I'm super picky on this one. Okay. We are different here.

So I feel like this and a sequence we'll get into in a few minutes where like the biggest attacking, this was like one of the biggest attacking mistakes of the game decision-wise. like, Wea has to be aware of what the situation is and know that there's no power on this ball, this deflected ball from sergeant that's already bounced on the ground. So he can't power it in. So the only way this header is going to go in

is if the goalkeeper is also coming out to try to arrive at it and he just loops it over him. But that wasn't happening. He's all alone. Like, he has to have a better plan to score here. So it's either let it come down and volley it, let it come down, take a touch and try to pass it in if you think you can pull that off, or if you're going to try to score on your first touch,

without letting it come down, you have to go full Paul Ariola and go for the bicycle here. And I'm not kidding at all. Like, if you're going to, there's no power on the ball, then you've got to generate the power and you're going to do that by, with rotational velocity. Wouldn't that have been something? I don't think he, I think he thought he didn't have as much time as he had. I'm sure, because you never get that much time. So it's, in that sense, yeah, I totally understand that you don't.

realize that you are that alone. But just sort of, you kind of have to hope for the best because you're not going to get the power on that header to score. I think what I hear you saying is that finishing is a skill. The decision, the decision you make and the technique you choose are absolutely skills. Okay. 29 minute mark, desk dribbles past two, three, four guys from the right side and has a shot as he's going to ground.

it's blocked by Husani. I'm not kidding. This guy was everywhere. And it was, I don't, we don't know how much that would have tested the keeper, but it was a left footed shot.

Might have been perfectly placed. I don't know. But a nice run from Dest. He's having a good game. The dribble, right? The dribble is incredible here. And we talked about how we needed a little bit more end product from Dest.

He'd been getting put in the right spots in the previous two games. He'd been showing glimpses of that incredible skill and technique that he has. Like, I know his shot is blocked here, but this for me is like a different, that was, that was a different level of execution to even like create the shooting window that he had. And it was, I mean, that was sauce. So, again, was still feeling good about what we were generating.

It was the fifth defender that he had confronted in the sequence who ended up blocking it. So, 33rd minute, we're getting closer to the goal. Sergeant drops it for Wea in the box After running down a desk cross It gets deflected by the first defender He runs it down at the end line Plays it back for Wea And Wea

Kind of doesn't lean over it and blazes it over Sargent here again using his caboose really well Because he doesn't just have to run it down I mean he's got to run it down And then seal seal off the defender And this is he's been doing this I think all tournament in these situations He's totally willing to turn his back on the goal

To maintain control the ball and then extend the play. And so this is just a great example of him extending the play. And then he has the great vision to pick out a player in shooting position. Pretty good layoff. It's right there on a T for a way out. And I think Waya has to blaze it high. There's a sea of bodies so we can't try to go low to the far post.

So you have to kind of go into the roof here. You're going to score it. So, you know, it's not easy to just roof a shot as hard as you can. So again, difference here between decision, the choice you make to finish and the actual finish itself, the finish itself is. There's going to be a lot of times that goes wrong, even if you made the right choice. Yeah. I'm with you, Greg.

I'm with you 100%. I mean, you know, well over 50%. 36th minute corner played to the top of the box from Pulisic to Dest. It's just a tad short with the pass. I think I like the idea, but it's taken off of Desfoot right as he gets to it. Well done by Anthony to cover and track down the loose ball, I thought. He struggled with his touch a little bit. this game. I counted like four or five very heavy touches from him. But even so, what a valuable

member of this team, man. He does so many good things. It's like he can have five poor touches a game as far as I'm concerned. I'm with you. I think when Colin Schoey said if he weren't making a couple of those bad touches of games per game, he'd be like a hundred million dollar fullback. So he is who he is and he gives us a lot. He gives us a ton and you just take those, uh, touches along with the good. The short corner, underhitting the short corner, though, pretty ridiculous. It was for sure the right idea. We don't have good aerial presence in this game besides Weston McKenney.

So definitely steering away from just whipping it into a not good bunch of set piece targets is probably a good plan. And then we had the opening. Like, Desk was open. Jedi was there with him open. Like we had open players at the top of the box to hit it to. and Pulcic just kind of soft-shoot it. Let's do the goal.

I hope he makes up for it later. Yeah, he makes up for it very shortly. And it's in the 38th minute. I'm going to play a few calls of this goal. This is the BBC one. This is the extended version. Tyler Adams. McKenny, Dest has made the run.

Time to get in behind. Hasafi, Tundasik. Let me play the, let me play the, an Arabic call. Here's a French call. Go, goal, goal, goal, goal, goal, goal. Here's a French call. There's a zero-zero.

And there's the Iran who is qualified with the Angleter. Deste. Oh, the view of politics. La Pinesselection. And here's a, I got two more, a Portuguese call.

Keep them coming. And then Sergio Dess, and then here's the legar to legate with a lateral, he'll try out of the goal. The selection North American,

the Pulizica, who's going to be to the ballisa to Ali Reza, Baran Van. And then here's the best one, which is Andres Contor on Telemundo.

You can just hear the emotion in his voice. Like he, he has a profound understanding of how precious a goal like this is. Again, Tyler, now, Tyler.

Now, Wolt to MacGen, Serginio, but Sergio dez. Man, I was getting dusty making that clip earlier. I was like, I know it's kind of pathetic for a grown man to have a tear come to his eye over a soccer game. But, whoof. So should we describe the play?

Should we describe the play? Let's hear the whole sequence. So it's a long ball from Iran. And you can, I retweeted it, but Rodrigo Carvajalo Carvalo. Carvalio, Rodrigo Carvalio, a guy on Twitter, has the tactical view of the goal. And it's very, very fun to watch many, many times.

But it's a long ball from Iran. Desch challenges for it. Kind of wins it to Musa, who settles it to Adams, who then plays it back to Matt Turner. Matt Turner then takes a touch to his right and hits a really good ball to Tim Wea, who's checking back at midfield. He one touches it,

silkily out to Musa out of the air. Musa takes a couple quick touches or just one and then passes it to Dest. And then Dest plays Adams into the middle of the field. He's carrying it upfield and kind of a diagonal line right to left. Adams taps it to Robinson out on the left sideline. Robinson one touch back to Adams.

Adams plays it to McKinney. And he looks up. He sees Sergenio Des making that run at the back post and hits a ball for him overlapping. Dest meets it and heads it across the box perfectly for Pulisic. I think the header here is, it has to be pretty much perfect, and it was. And Pulisic is making an absolutely determined run at the Goldmouth. As soon as he sees McKinney start to play that ball to Desk.

And I think we got to, I mean, there's so much credit to give, but Pulisic's ruthlessness arriving in the box is a real, Like, we've known about it for a while, but he hasn't always been that way, you know? And his just determination to get there and side foot that in past the keeper. So impressive. And then, of course, he gets hurt. Let me stick with the Pulisic part real quick, because I'm sure we'll talk about this from a thousand different ways. But this, you know, you talk about Adams hits it out to Jedi, right?

And then Jedi hits it back to Adams and we're kind of passing around the amoeba because Iran got numbers back. They had eight players back defending. They just weren't organized yet. They weren't in their actual shell yet. They were just numbers-wise they were back. But as that ball goes from Jedi to Tyler Adams, Pulisick checks all the way back to Tyler Adams. He's almost doing that thing that we have been critical of him for,

which is to come all the way back and clog things up when we need him being more of an attacker, right? He's eight yards away from Adams out at the edge of the amoeba. And this is where, you know, there was talk about how they rehearsed this exact moment, this exact sequence. And when Adam, you said Poulosick broke as soon as he saw McKinney hitting that long diagonal. He didn't.

He broke as soon as that ball started traveling to McKinney from Tyler Adams, which is just incredible. So he, you know, Adams starts to move that ball eight yards over to McKinney and Poulsick checks the far side of the field. And for me, I think he's probably clocking that Serginio is on. So once he sees Serginio is on, like he takes that peak and he goes, like he takes off running because he is nowhere near goal dangerous at the start of this point as this ball is going to McKinney.

We have Sergeant up near the top of the box. Iran have three players around Sergeant and Tim Wea. There's nobody like Poulsick does not seem like the threat here. No. But because he goes this early, he ends up with that head of steam gaining 12 to 15 yards on that center back line. And that's how he ends up,

you know, when you pause it as it's hitting Dest, there's everyone's at the penalty marker. Poolstick included, he's right on top of that centerback shoulder, but he's got the head of steam. So the centerback is just now starting to break as hard as he can. Poolick's already been running downhill for 20 yards. Yeah. There's no way anyone besides Pulisick is going to get to this ball from Sergenio Dest.

So if he doesn't start that run when he does, we don't get this goal. The fact that he started it as Tyler Adams moved the ball over to McKinney is just stupid good. Off ball movement, baby. So we're up one zero. And I think someone pointed this out on the call-in show. Other people have pointed out in other places. The goal was exactly like the Bradley to Lima to Zardis goal back in the early days of the Burrhalter era against Trinidad and Tobago. Oh, yeah.

It's it's a, it's sort of a classic way to score a goal in soccer, right? But it is, Greg Burhalter didn't invent it. No. It is a beautiful echo. of those early, that was the Gold Cup in 2019. It's an amazing echo of that play. I don't know if you can call it the name of the coach if you go 40 games in between scoring those two goals.

But whatever, it doesn't matter. It's what he was talking about in the early days. You know, playing that long diagonal to the overlapping fullback and them putting the ball across. I mean, it seems like he was talking about that a lot in the early days too. Well, honestly, the other guy we got to give the credit to here. is Vince because in the preview Vince was saying we need a few of these big

switches like he was all over this too and we talked about you know hoping we were hoping that Iran would run a back four and not a back five to create sort of these avenues and I and one of the other things we talked about was striking that balance of you can't just hit diagonal switch

after switch like you hit it into the central areas to start keeping Iran honest about protecting the central areas and that's another thing is Iran got there eight players back their right back in their shape was actually all the way over on like the other side of the field

early in the phase with Christian Pulisic who dragged over so he was protecting the center line of the field their left back cheats way over with Sergeant and Tim Wea as we go out to Jedi's side so their left back cheats way over and they're really focusing

on protecting that central area and that's how they end up adrift and have totally lost Sergenio Desk because at that point they're relying on their left midfielder to be totally clocked in and dialed in and tracking that run, and he doesn't. He falls asleep for half a second,

and McKenny's ball is inch perfect, and Sergino Dest's header is inch perfect, and Christian Pool is sick. Sacrifices everything, and we are now in position to advance out of our group in the World Cup. Yes. It was Tarami, I believe, who was tracking Dest,

or not tracking it as the case maybe. Yeah. I mean, because that's what you're doing. and you're trying to put players a few steps away, a few passes away, you want them to fall asleep. Everyone can pay attention when the ball's right next to him. But how do you make a guy fall asleep three passes away? And then how do you execute those three passes to punish him?

Yeah, Pulisic's hurt. Apparently he's day-to-day with a pelvic contusion. I have no idea. Again, this isn't something they would tell us either way. They will for sure say he'll be a game-time decision. Because there's no value in, I don't think, being honest about what his status is. Unless, I mean, he's still in the hospital and there's no way to hide it. I imagine that they will be very coy about what he is able to do.

He did look like he was hurting. Oh, yeah, he was definitely hurting. He played the rest of the half and then came off the half for Aronson. But there's other things to talk about in the first half yet. 42nd minute we're countering with 10 men because Pulisic is still off the field and Wea gets on the ball in space, pokes it to Sergeant, Sergeant to McKinney, and then McKinney plays kind of the same ball he played earlier against a very different sort of defensive setup, one that was much more in transition. Two sergeant, Sergeant tracks it down in the right channel and then tries a shot from a tight angle,

misses the target, but it skips dangerously across the front of the goal. We've had a couple people. ask us to discuss way as off ball movement, which has in many ways is like unbelievable. But could he have been there to, you know, get on the end of this shot cross? For the record, I don't think Sergeant was trying to pass it to anybody. I think he was trying to shoot. Yeah, he was definitely trying to shoot. Now, the space that he shoots and it ends up going into is open, available space to attack. But I think it'd be asking a lot of Tim Way here. This counter starts with like a Iran cross-in that CCV had.

out and CCV heads it out of the box, not to anyone in particular, but Tim Wea is actually the guy who comes and wins it. You know, so he's, he's 30 yards away from Matt Turner to start the sequence. He's actually the one who wins it. It's his fantastic first touch to settle and then a little poke to Sergeant into the pocket that keys this. Sergeant knocks it back to Wea and then Wea finds McKinney. So Sergeant has a huge head to start already.

And it's just an incredibly direct attack, right? Very few other attackers are going to catch up to this play. It's basically Wea and Sargent with McKenny as the quarterback. McKenney hits this long ball. So again, it's a very vertical accelerated attack. There's nobody filling any lanes yet in the box. The only player who's going to fill lanes is Tim Wea. Christian Pulisick isn't even on the field.

So essentially, Wea has a choice of which lane to fill. If there were more players filling these lanes already, Wea might opt for that open space on the far post. But it's just as reasonable to be like, okay, there's nobody in the center of the field. There's no one in the most dangerous space at the penalty marker for a cutback for a possible cutback. That's where I need to get to.

And that's kind of where way it goes. Yeah, he's looking for the cutback. He takes a little tug on the shoulder, fights that off. But even then, he doesn't even have time to really get to the penalty marker by the time Sergeant hits it. Again, just the result of it being such a direct vertical, fast transition attack. Okay. You have another item right.

after this that we should talk about when Adams gets his yellow card. Yeah, about a minute later, we have an attacking throw-in. This might be the attacking throw-in if Sergeant's cross was deflected. This might be the same sequence, where Jedi's up taking it. Christian Poulsick is still not on the field. And this is key because West McKinney steps into Poole-Sik's role as the advanced player, and we throw it to him, and we lose it. So we lose it right away with McKinney-upfield.

And so Tyler Adams is up a level into the space of McKinney's vacated to be the attacking, and Iran are able to clear it over McKinney and Adams. So now it's in the space that Adam should be in, but he's not. So Tim Ream has to come in. And if you're new to the team, Tim Ream is not as mobile as Tyler Adams. So this ball comes into the space that normally our best rangy destroying Center Mid is in. And instead it's Tim Ream trying to defend. And Iran just skip by Tim Ream with total ease.

So they break into our half. And this is another one of those where it would have been threatening, but because Tyler Adams is so rangery, he runs the play down, barges just through the back of the Iran ball carrier, picks up a yellow card. I just wanted to point it out because I felt like we were maybe a little unnecessarily stretching ourselves

when we're down a man with Bullisick out and leaving Iran a little bit more space to counter into. And now we just have to hope Tyler Adams plays smart through the rest of this game and then obviously through the Netherlands for our eventual quarterfinal game. Yeah, and then really well in the quarterfinals, no yellows in the quarterfinals, no yellows in the semifinals. They'll reset after the center.

He can take a yellow in the semi and it won't matter. So he'll be fine to play in the final. Okay, good, good. I had some confusion at my table at the bar where we're like, wait, is that his second yellow? Same thing happened where I was at. There was like, there were a couple of like really dejected shouts of like, oh no, because they thought we were going to be, we were going to be missing Adams. But no, Adams is still okay for now. just have to have him play smart for our next three games.

All right. 45th minute, we get a big chance. No shot results, so it doesn't pad the ghost stats. But Musa and Adams win the ball in the middle of our half, as they did so many times. And then Adams works forward and steps around a guy and plays a lovely ball to Sergeant down the channel. I don't know that I've ever seen Adams do anything so elegant before.

The way he kind of, he took like a, like a hesitant. hesitation touch and then pushed it past the defender who was kind of moving to his left and then played the ball just gorgeous he's a different go ahead no just then the ball to sergeant was also again perfect like the trajectory he kind of curled it around one defender and then into sergeant's path to ahead of the other retreating defender he looks like a different player than he did a year ago doesn't he i mean in that way his ability on the ball he was so good on the ball in this game. Maybe you think he's always been that way.

I don't know. No, no, no, no. I wouldn't have backed him to hit this ball. I feel like even in real time, I might not have realized that it was, in fact, Adams, who hit this and not Moose or McKinney. Yeah. McKinney, you know, would have been, I mean, that's who he bet on to hit, he thrives in those sort of scramble chaos moments to suddenly hit an elegant pass. But to have it coming from Tyler Adams, that could open some doors for us. It could open some doors.

Could open some doors. So Sergeant gets on it in the channel, you know, running at the goal. He, as he's driving at the defender, he plays a little reverse pass to Wea, who's kind of curling around to his right. Pulisic is arriving to Sargent's left. I assume he saw him, but maybe not. And then Sergeant, after playing it to Wea, runs around, kind of runs around the defender and tries to go in the left side. or like run it sort of the back post and Wea tries to

try to side foot it to him through the two defenders and Husani again intervenes it would have been an absolutely lovely goal if that pass was able to get through there to Sergeant but I think you have a legit bone to pick with Sergeant on this sequence yeah it's again this is all bang bang this is happening so fast and I don't think Sergeant

sees Pool Secure because if he sees him here the decision is the easiest decision ever. Waya's run is brilliant to overlap him and or if it's not brilliant and at least has a brilliant outcome because the defender chooses who's tracking Wea chooses to go with Wea and like actually runs to the outside of the ball and leaves the goal. And that means that Christian Pulisic has the entire runway into the goal unopposed. So if Sergeant just uh pulls us foot back like he's shooting and then just taps the ball three yards to his left, um, is Christian Pulisic with the goal

open and the goalkeeper already scrambling out of position so having to scramble back into position to even stop him. So this is the other big, big decision that we missed. Wea's decision to head it all alone earlier in the game and then this decision to not hit Pulisic

is what keeps us from turning this game to two zero. Yeah. But it's brilliant execution. Brilliant execution from Wayf. Brilliant from Tyler Adams. Sergeant does well to get control of the ball, racing at goal with the two defenders backpedaling.

So everyone's doing everything right. And then Sergeant just makes the second best decision instead of the best decision. And the margins are very narrow in these situations. Yes, they are. And I agree with you. I think had the way a pass back to Sergeant come off, it would be maybe the greatest goal in American history. I don't know. That's a limb to go out on, I suppose.

I mean, look, even if Sergeant just passes us to the open pool, It's still going to go down for me as one of the greatest goals. Because again, it'd just be such perfect execution between what Adams did, what Sergeant did to collect it and keep running. Way as movement. Pulisksik's urged to join. Like, everything about this, Poulsick was already dealing with a contused pelvis here. There's no way that this wouldn't have been like Kerry Strug combined with Landon Donovan combined. I mean, this was everything.

Yeah, I do. Part of me does wonder if the contused pelvis would have, you know, prevented Pulisik from finishing the play the way he knows how to do it, but I guess we'll never know. We're close to picking the lock a few more times, but can't quite. There's a great tackle from Musa after he gives the ball away once that really got me off of my feet up off, up out of my chair. Iran makes a sub. Ali Karimi comes on for left back Milad Mohamedi, who'd been energetic, but suffered some kind of injury. I don't actually know what it was. And then we get right at the very end of stoppage time,

51st minute, we get the disallowed Wea goal. Again, it starts with Matt Turner's feet. You must be so happy about this, Greg. Iran is pressing a little bit, and under some duress, Turner takes a touch to his left and hits a pass up the gut to McKinney

that eliminates five Iranian players. And McKinney just waltzes into their half, totally unconfronted, and surveys the situation, plays a pass on the ground to Wea, who is, again, making a clever run. This one's across the face of one centerback and behind the other. And he runs onto this pass and then the finish is just a delight outside of the boot on

the ground finish that tings off the far post, you know, sort of freezes the keeper to the spot, tings off the far post, goes in the goal. Unfortunately, he was offside, according to the computers. Again, just the nuance that Timwaya plays with. What can you even say? Like, what a ridiculous finish? We just talked about what would have been the best, one of the best finishes in U.S. men's soccer, World Cup history a minute and a half ago. Just the tidiness, just like the, like you said, the elegance of this would have put it immediately in the conversation. Yeah.

He was so barely offside, too. It's kind of a thing that sucks about soccer, but I don't know how to fix it. Now, before, before like it turns into a VAR thing, the official on the field signaled offside. So it wasn't overturned by the computers. The machines just confirmed it. But yeah, you know, just robbed by just robbed by a fluke of timing here. Do you think maybe McKinney hesitated a little too long before he hit the pass? I don't think so.

I mean, again, I'm not going to nitpick any of this. Yeah, let's not. McKenny running into space. He gets to watch and see what Sergeant and Waya do, and they just had both of them running at one Iran centerback is the only player who had position. So he has to wait to see which a player is going to go where. Sergeant stays in the center channel,

Waya runs behind the defender's back into the half space. And again, Waya has no business putting the ball into the goal from the angle he ends up at. So nuts, yeah. Like he is in the half space running away from goal. and for him to like have the power and the and the technique and just the wherewithal to hit that ball in off the post man that's all it would have been so so wonderful Turner and Turner with the hockey assist I can't I mean with his left foot he's been he's been really good with his feet this whole tournament yeah I would agree with that I don't think he's had a single like his shakiest moment was his progressive carry Right?

With against, was that Wales? I think it was against England. Okay. Where he's driving the ball up field, wants to show the EPL crowd what he can do. Yeah. He must be learning a lot at Arsenal.

If you are the type of U.S. soccer fan who enjoys recaps that are nearly as long as the games they recap and sometimes even longer, please consider joining our Patreon. The link is in the show notes. The half comes. Aronsonson comes. for Pulisic. Samang Godos comes on for Sardar Asmund, more of an attacking midfielder

slash winger than a striker, which pushes Tremi into a lone striker role. And I think Aronson was immediately bright. 47th minute, he drifts inside, changes places with McKenny and gets a ball through the lines from Ream, turns on it, slips Sergeant into the box down the left channel. Sergeant has a shot from a tough angle and does not hit it very well. We shortly get another little spell of attack keyed by Adams on the dribble who passes to Aronson, I think right at the line between the middle third and the attacking third. Aronson then passes it to Wea, and then we lose it. I think Musa loses it over there on the right side after Wea turns and taps it to him.

And then we get Aronson down the left wing for Robinson to win a corner. Aronson takes the corner and it's not the best, and then Tremi dribbles down the field and gets corralled by five blue shirts. Yeah, I'm going to, I got to, I mean, all of this is great and Aronson was immediately bright, but I got to quibble with the way that that corner sequence ended. And that was that Aronson's corner was cleared back out towards Aronson, his side of the field, and Terremi gets on it, and Aronson is right there with him. And again, we know Iran excel in the counter attack, so the idea is to deny them this.

This was my, this was like for me, the biggest mistake of the second half, and we didn't pay for it, thankfully. But Aronson needs to just grab the guy's jersey with both hands, as we saw Aran do later to us, and just, I mean, just literally childishly stop the game and raise your hand and take your yellow card. Because he didn't, and Terremi just shrugged him off like the little brother. We had Terremi running directly at Sergenio Dest and Tyler Adams, of all people.

So he's in the open field, and he's running against two players who are on yellow cards for us. so they can't do the tactical foul. And then what you see as they cut back to the wide shot is American hero, Weston McKinney, making up like 18 yards of space over 60 yards chasing to eventually run through Tremi a little bit to make up for it. And again, Weston McKinney also on a yellow from earlier in the tournament. So if he does get whistled here and get booked for it, he's suspended.

Okay, now I'm mad at Brenda. I actually, I wasn't thinking he, needed to take a yellow. He could have just, he's running without the ball and, and, um, Toremi's running with the ball. He can just take an angle that puts him between Toremi and our goal. And eventually he's going to get there first, right? And he does a lot of buzzing around. Yeah. Okay. You don't think so. I didn't, I didn't think he, I mean, he runs sort of into the back of Tremi, and he literally like, even puts his hand on Tremi's shoulder. Like, oh, I'll just grab him a little bit. But he just does it a token way. And I mean, almost like a, like an American basketball player who's, who's, who's,

fouling somebody late at the game intentionally. Like all you have to do is put your hand on the guy. Referee knows that's a foul. They call it. It doesn't work that way in soccer. If you get shrugged off, the referee is not going to give you the courtesy foul. You're like, well, let's see where this goes. So you have to stop the play.

That's why you make no mistake about it. You grab the jersey. It's already going to be a yellow card, whether it's a light foul or a full on ridiculous jersey pole. So just stop the play. You cannot let Iran run at our whole yellow card squad with a chance to tie the the game. So that was like my huge, huge moment of, uh, frustration in the second half over decision making. And all told, maybe it's a minor one. Um, but yeah, I was just like,

Brenda, like you're on a, you're on a pressing team. You know that once the lines are broken, be cynical. Fowl here. Like, don't play honestly. Yeah. Well, it's also from, uh, for the West McKinney energy conservation initiative, it's a really bad, it was really bad decision too. No, and that's no small thing either. That was McKinney, you know, on the corner is at the six yard box ready to leap over to score a goal. And you see him have to make up ground that other guys in blue were not willing to try to make up. So that is 100% the case that, again, that's an expensive run for Weston McKinney. And we can't, we can't afford to just have those happen when they don't need to.

So yeah, so even if it weren't yellow card defenders that Aronson's protecting, protect the legs of your teammates by, getting the whistle, getting everyone to just be able to soccer jog back into their spots. Yeah, especially if you've not yet been on the field for five minutes. No matter what, no matter what, this is, there's no question about the play here.

You grab the guy and wrestle him to the ground and then apologize. Now, we still seem like much the better team at this point, and there were other moments of attack from us, but they started to become fewer and, and further between as we got around the hour mark. And I noticed the BBC, I rewatched the game on the BBC using my VPN.

And I recommend it. It's a nice viewing experience. But the BBC color commentator, I think his name was Steve Wilson, said he wondered how long we were going to keep up the attacking impetus and when we were going to start, you know, essentially playing to protect our lead. That was right after that, right after that incident with Aronson. not taking the yellow. So 50-1-minute mark, Ramin, Rezayan, they're right back,

exposes a little bit of reams, lack of quickness, running down a ball in behind. I thought we were kind of slow in our rotations to cover between the lines. I don't know exactly who to put this on, but Rezayan, after another quick exchange of passes, whips a bouncing ball into the boxed. Des does just enough to put Gatos off from putting his head through it. and the header goes well over. Yeah, and this is just a, again, when you have to not concede a goal, this is a very nervous moment for U.S. fans, simply because we're 1v1 in the box, right?

When they cut to this cross, you've got CCV nailed onto his man, then you've got DEST nailed onto his man, and that's it. So when I say 1V1, I guess each defender, so we're 2v2 with no help for either man. They were really being tested here. They had to stand up and be accountable. And CCV was giving his man no room. And Serginio Dest was right there to challenge for the ball coming in. So in that moment where we kind of had a bit of a breakdown and didn't have plus one protection in the box, the boys handled it.

Do you think not to pile on, Brendan, but do you think the joy that Iran started to get in the second half down that side has anything to do with Aronson instead of Pulisic? like they respect him less than Pulisic or something like that? Man, that's tough. I don't know. Because there's so many things going on, right? So you have the drop off in attacking ability, which I don't think there's any question about. But then you also have the fact that the rest of our team is getting tired.

Now, it's not going to help Brennan Aronson that on the sequence we're talking about. He had shifted all the way out to the right side of the field. Like he just chased as he as his nature. Like he chases a ball carrier from the center. circle where he pinched in as the left winger to defend. That player had dribbled all the way over to our right side over to the sideline. And Aronson chased him. He's a chicken, right?

He's a puppy dog. He chases. So he chases this guy all the way to the sideline. And then when he arrives at the play, like he just bounces off of a dude. Like he bounces off the guy. And so he doesn't stop and contain things. And so now there's a giant gap over on Aronson's side of the field. And Iran quickly switch it over there.

So when you're talking about it, what was the rotation issue, that was probably it. Weston McKinney realizes it eventually is the center mid, and he does go out there and he gets there. But now McKinney's spot is open, and Adams is a little bit late to get there. You see Aronson like trotting through our shape. You know what I mean?

We talk about the amoeba. This is like if you had the amoeba, and then there's just one blue dot running across the middle of it. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to pile on Aronson either, but this was definitely like an outcome because of his puppy dog nature. The rotation issue. Okay. All right, so Rezaian is starting to get forward more whipping in.

He whips in another cross shortly after this that Ream heads away. 54th minute, Sergeant holds it up to Aronson and gets it back, carries and sprays it wide to Dest, who tries to scoop. So this is really nice from Sergeant. It's a long ball over to the left side line. It's a little bit messy how he gets on it, but he gets on it and carries it towards the center of the field. and then sprays it out to Dest. And then Desk tries to scoop Wea in behind the back line. He's making another diagonal run.

It's cut out. And then Iran comes at us. It's Teremi going at CCV on the left side, on our right side. But CCV does well, keeps him, actually shepherds him out of bounds. And then Tremi kind of sticks a leg on Matt Turner, who I think wisely makes more out of it than it needed to be. Well, this is kind of more what we'd seen from Dest in the other two games, where if Sargent gets the ball to Dest in a great attacking space, you like what, I mean, as a U.S. fan, you love this situation. And you want Desk to be free to do the things he does here. And again, it's not always going to come off.

It rarely will. And this was one that was more closely resembling the first two games where it just doesn't come off. And not only does it not come off, but Desk kind of gets tackled to the ground in the process. So it is an Iran transition where Dest is on the ground. We're now 53 minutes into the game and legs are starting to get a little heavier. And then the other element that I think we saw here was that CCV chemistry, right? This was for me, one of the first big CCV chemistry moments. And it's Iran advancing up the field where we have no right back.

So CCV's foldback is out of the play. So there's a rotation question. Who's going to go cover that space? And on the wide shot as Iran are building up to it, you see Adams, essentially pointing out to that man who's occupied in the space. And I guess you'd kind of assume that it's CCV who's, it's going to be his job of step. They cut to a close up, of course,

because that's what soccer broadcasts do for the ball carrier. And then as he hits the pass, they cut back to the wide angle. And CCV has not come out to defend that man. And Adams, you see Adams' reaction as that ball's hit and he turns his head again. He's like, hey, where is the man who is supposed to be covering this? I thought I told CCV to come out here.

and there's almost that like real time frustration communicated between the two of them with the arms up in the air like what do you want me to do? I thought I told you. So it's kind of a funny moment in that sense, watching it back. But yes, it's like, well, yeah, it's his first game playing.

They're not going to know exactly how each other plays or what they're all supposed to be doing at all times. All that being said, CCV does, I think, a very good job defensively once he's 1V1 with Doremi. Maybe that's not Doremi's strong suit, going out a guy from wide and trying to beat him. So CCV does enough here.

The only quibble I'll have is CCV makes it like a very close play. He like he kind of lets Tremi just almost get outside his shoulder to the edge. He uses that sort of frame of his. We call it the bend bracket frame here in central Iowa. Like he gets that hip out to him and makes Tremi take a very wide circle because he makes contact with that hip. And that changes Tremi's trajectory to get to the ball. But he probably isn't supposed to be even trying to let Terremi get that edge because he's got Adams coming from the inside to help.

So Adams and CCV come out to double. And so Terremi very nearly gets around CCV to do it. But, I mean, CCV did enough, right? And that's what we're, that's what we need to do in these moments. Game of fine margins. Fine margins and wide hips. That's right. 58th minute Turner plays a diagonal, a long diagonal.

to Wea. I just mentioned this because it's a, as a nice pass from our goalkeeper. And then Wea kind of squares his guy up and pushes, pushes the ball out of bounds, kind of inexplicably. I mean, all you can do is chuckle at that point. Yeah. One of our most technical players that I've watched in my time

watching the U.S. when he hits it out of bounds, you just kind of chuckle. Yeah, he was mad at himself. 58 minute mark. There's a lovely ball into Nur alahi between the lines for Iran. And this is just a little example of that they are, these are legit soccer players.

Nur alahi is considered sort of the, I don't know, the least technical of their midfielders, but he does some nice stuff on the half turn here and plays a ball in behind for Toremi. Our backline did well to pull him offside, to eliminate the danger. But he was, had he not been pulled off, side, he would have been, you know, at least into the box.

All right. Well, let's call that a positive CCV chemistry test. Yeah. In here, Sergeant receives between the lines and isn't quite fast enough with his touch and decision and gets wrecked. And then there's some flowing stuff from Adams and McKinney to break through the midfield line. McKinney plays it, uh, plays it out to Robinson and we get another one of Anthony's

poor touches. I guess I shouldn't do all of these items. So the big one is in the six, around the 64 minute mark. It's a bit of a scramble, gives Iran a good chance when Robinson loses a 50-50 with Holazideh, letting him go free into the box. And Halazidei tries to pull it back. Terremi and CCV both stab for it. So Terremi running goalward, CCV coming out from the goal, both stab for it and miss. And Terami's studs luckily go into CCV's leg.

Very fortunate for us, less so for CCV. Right. And then so neither of them get it. And then Godos meets it just beyond the penalty marker and just hammers it, curls it just wide of the post. He missed the goal, so, you know, that's fine. But it was a really scary moment. And the only thing that prevented it from me being even scarier was that the foul was whistled on to Remy.

Yeah, that definitely saves us go stat-wise. which a lot of us will appreciate. We lost a few duels on this sequence, and I'm always trying to clock these, or I notice them because, again, we are a team that has shown that we will run out of gas around this time in the game, and one of the signs that you're running out of gas

is half a step late into challenges, half a step late, changing directions, and you're going to start losing some of these duels. So the first one we lose is right at midfield, and it's sergeant getting sort of shrugged off by an Iranian centerback a couple of times. He collides with him twice and sort of loses both of those. And it's one of the few times his caboose didn't win the day.

And now the centerback's free, feeds it all the way down to the left corner under no duress, and Death stands his man up, forces him inside. And this is where Adams arrives over enthusiastically. He doesn't lose a duel because he overcommits so badly that the guy just cuts in inside of him. And now Adams and Dest are both on the wrong side of the ball. And that's where the first service comes into the box. Jedi wins it with like a leaping diving header to try to get as much range on as he can, but he still doesn't get that much. And this is why Jedi is now out of position when this

ball comes right back into his space where he's late to get out to the 50-50 and he loses that duel. So you're starting to see where we might start to be half a step behind every play and those half steps add up really quickly. They can very easily be the first domino to fall when a guy has a half step late. Interesting. I hadn't noticed the, the, I know Sergeant, I think, I guess it was, um, was it after Sergeant gave up that ball in the middle where he got shrugged off that, by that CB? Yeah, it was, so Sergeant gets shrugged off with ease.

It's not the one where Sergeant got wrecked through his back. Uh, it was just like a nothing ball in the middle of the field, like bouncing straight up in the air. And in this time, Sergeant did just get, I mean, this was a little brothering for sure. Okay. All right, so 67, McKinney comes off for Acosta here, and then at the 67 minute mark, there's a handball on Rezaaon just outside of the box.

Musa takes the free kick and sends it over. We don't really have anybody who can hit a free kick. Did you think Acosta was going to, though? I did. I was hoping Acosta would, actually. But I guess I shouldn't say we don't have anybody, but we haven't done well with our free kicks. No, we haven't.

I thought Brenda's corners were a little bit better than Pula 6. They at least felt more like they were in dangerous areas. He didn't underhit any short ones, which is important. Yeah. So can we use the Acosta for McKinney sub to just sort of talk about Greg's Burlter's subs generally? Yeah, we can talk about that now. Yeah. All right.

Give me your take on our substitution patterns generally through the group stage. Oh boy, that's a broader question than I was expecting. If you want, I can go first. If you don't want to try to jump into it right now. Well, I guess I'll just say, McKinney, I don't think we have that good of a bench. And that's not really an answer to your question, but I don't think what? Yeah.

No, I mean, it totally is. I don't think we have that many good players on the bench. They're good players. They're just big downgrades. from the starters. And I think the practical stuff about how much energy we have is the factor, you know. And then if you can't bring anybody who can make a difference, then we're just kind of stuck riding out these games if we're winning them, you know.

I don't know. What do you think? So I'm going to take us back to the September window. and I'm going to kind of marry two bullet points together from the aftermath of the September window. One is something we talked about here about the system because a lot of the talk going into it was about system, you know, P-Fox omission system, system, system, and one of the things we said was, you know, a system, if it's really working the way we think of it, should be sort of immune or somewhat immune from like personnel attrition, where if, okay, you've got a really good system.

So if somebody goes down, you have to take somebody out of the game, you bring in, a reasonable or like a similar profile and the system should still keep functioning in a recognizable way. And what we saw in the September window is that doesn't happen, right? If we don't, if we're missing any three players, the system is unrecognizable and terrible.

So we don't have a system in that sense. We said we have an 11 who we give some instructions to for how to play. And the other thing that came out of that aftermath of that window in September was the Greg Berthelter Press conference where he says, We learn some things and someone says, what did you learn? And he says, things.

And so I'm wondering if what Greg Burrhalter learned was kind of the same idea that if we're missing these four players, we can't just replace them with their backups and then keep running the same thing. So when our guys run out of gas, we can't just bring Luca De La Torre in for Weston McKinney and expect that we will just keep running a slightly worse version of what we'd had before. If it's going to fall off a cliff, then there's no reason to, like, bring in a a like for like and keep trying to do the same thing. And instead, he's going to run his starting unit out for as long as he possibly can.

And when their legs fall off, he might feel his only choice, especially in a game where a goal isn't required, would be to shut up shop and hang on for dear life. Yeah. Because it seems like that's what we've seen as a pattern so far. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I do think at Stryker maybe, I mean, I'm grasping here a little bit, but Hases Ferrer maybe could make a little more of a difference up there than Haji Wright did today.

I don't think Haji Wright was terrible. I mean, he had a couple of bad moments, but he also had some good moments. Yep, I thought he had some good moments too. Yeah, I mean, I could see something like that where maybe we can, but especially in a game like this where we ran into a pool sick injury. And if our theory that Raina is severely restricted is right and you can't put them in at halftime from Pulsock. Maybe if Pulcic had run out of gas at 70, 75, we might have seen Raina in for him instead

of Aronson because we had to switch at halftime because of the injury. And then when McKinney runs out of gas and we start to replace more and more of the pieces, it's like, okay, now even putting Raina in might not turn the tie to the game because Raina can't necessarily do it all himself. There's that tension too, right? Like, do you defend the lead by just giving up the ball and absorbing, which is kind of what we chose to do? Or do you try to defend the lead by controlling more of the ball,

defend by possession, and maybe even get that second goal to really decide it? And I definitely think we have leaned towards shutting up shop and absorbing pressure. And so it just, the question becomes like, does Burrhalter stick to that plan? If hopefully we have a lead or a draw to protect? or does he eventually feel like he has the options on the bench to actually try to control the game and continue going back at the team chasing? Or will that scenario even play out? Well, I mean, I'm already going to have nightmares about Javi Simons coming on against Shaq Moore in the 115th minute.

Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing. Give me your specific person. Or do we want to do that when we get to Shaq's entry? Well, I thought Shaq was quite bad on that. the ball, I think defensively he was okay. He, like, he didn't make any huge mistakes, but there was the time where he headed it to, he had no one near him and he headed it out of bounds. The other time where he conceded a corner kick with a sliding tackle that I'm not sure

was necessary. And then on the ball, he was a real mess. Like, he could have scored if, on that, that clipped ball from Brennan Aronson. If he just had attacked it, he might have been able to get a shot on goal. and he just like sort of backed off it and then sort of off balance tried to slap it across the box and it was you know it turned into a counterattack so I was a little frustrated with that um Acosta to me I don't I didn't notice him doing anything really which is maybe that's the point I don't know and then um yeah right right was some good some bad like the the shot he had at the end the shot he had at the end was bad I thought he had at the end was bad I thought Yeah, I don't love that. I'm not saying that you can never take a shot in that situation because a shot does end the game right.

A goal ends the game right then and there. But I think you have to do the math in your head about how likely you are to score. And I feel like that weak left footed shot was about the only shot he was going to be able to get off there. So if you can't get the good shot off that's going to score, don't just pass it to their goalie and let them run back at us. And nearly score. Here's what they said on the BBC. Brendan Aronson, the right pass here, can play and Haji Wright.

Go keep a thought about coming. It's a terrible finish. Why is he trying to finish? Run into the corner. Yeah. They were not pleased. Again, if you were all alone with all the time in the world, score the goal and end the game.

But when you don't, and you're only going to hit a half-hearted attempt, that's where you've got to do, make the business decision, and dribble to the corner and be strong, draw the foul, waste the next 90 seconds. Yeah.

I do back him usually when he's in a little bit of space to get a good shot on frame. I mean, he didn't even hit it well. Had he hit it well, it would be different. Probably be a corner kick, you know, or something. But he didn't, he didn't make good contact. Let's go through the rest of these. we've already gone an hour and a half.

So 74 minute mark, Sergeant steps on the ball, racing down the left wing and turns his ankle. It looked to me like he hurt his knee at first. And I'm glad it was his ankle and not his one of his tendons. And I read the quote already. So we'll see. Hopefully he can be healthy for Saturday.

He came off immediately for right. Holazidei, Holiza day, came off for Karim on. Sarifard at the same time. And then we get Zimmerman for Wea and more for Dest. We've discussed more already. There were a few chances for Iran. Nothing super great, I didn't think.

But there were some crosses that we had to deal with. There's what there's a... Seems like Walker Zimmerman was put into the game and was like, you go get all of the balls in the air. Like, CTV and Zimmerman will just... Well, and Riem will just stay. with their marks and Walker, anything that's in the air you race onto and head it 20 yards in any direction.

Yeah. And I thought that was fine. I mean, that was fine, but it would be nice to have a little bit more cutting edge from our front to, I guess, at that point. And there's the, now why don't I just play a quote from

Clint Dempsey about it, which we can react to if you want or or not. This is him after the game. I love the subs that came in and maybe maybe difference. Zimmerman, he had that clearance that got behind Turner

but yeah, Shack Moore. I saw him put his hand up more time saying my bad than actual passes he completed. Haji Wright wasn't really pressing enough for me and getting on the ball. He had an opportunity late in the game. Look like he hit it with his heel. You've got

to be more dangerous if you're going to be in the game. If you're going to be in the game, you're probably thinking what do I got to do to get in this team? I love the subs that came in and maybe Yeah, I just think like if we had a little bit more, if we were a little bit more toothy up front, then they're, you know, they're throwing everybody forward. Maybe we can make them pay. But it didn't feel like we were going to make them pay with who we had on the field. No, and some of it was just execution. Some of it is, might be personnel. But like, Aronson was doing his job, I thought. Yeah. I do think like they're happy questions about Shaq Moore for the next game. I'm not sure exactly what would have made him jump over Yedlin to begin with. or Scali?

I kind of feel like they were names out of a hat, you know, going in Yedlin and Jack Moore in particular. I had Scali ahead of both of them. So it's definitely strange that, you know, if Yedlin was deemed not good enough in his cameo, now we've now gone to Scali twice and Scali hasn't been particularly good at either of his cameos. You mean more? I'm sorry. And Moore has had some bad moments in both of his cameos. I don't know if that just means like we'll go back to Yedlin or if we'll go to Shaq Moore.

I'm sorry if we'll go to Joe Scali. Right, I get it. But we should. I mean, it sure seems like we should. Scali was good in the last window when he did come in for Yedlin. So I don't quite understand that one. I don't, and I would definitely understand even less if we stuck with Shackmore in the next match. I agree.

And I've been a, you know, I've been somewhat of a fan of Shackmore over the years and over the months. but he's not I don't think he's better than Scali at this point interestingly we started nobody from MLS in this game did you notice that yeah yeah yeah it was a perfect

Roar Shock test for anybody to say that it's proved their case I feel like so we got every side of the proxy war celebrating after this game it's a win win there's a 80 second minute Ezatollahi ball across

to Ali Karimi and it comes off his arm right in front of Moore just can't steer it on frame. Moore is behind the play a little bit but does enough to kind of make it complicated. It was a complicated ball to deal with anyway.

We do get some good work from Haji in the 87th minute tracks down a long punt from Turner then Meg's a guy to slip Aronson to the byline. This is that one where Aronson clips it over to the back post to Shaq Moore and I'm not sure what he's trying to do at this point.

Either put it in the either try to go for broke and try to score a goal or, you know, take it to the corner. But don't give me this halfway stuff. And 88th minute, that's when Shaq heads that ball out of bounds that he could have taken down. I think he motioned that he couldn't hear anybody. Apparently it was a very intense atmosphere. I talked to some of some scuff listeners who were there.

And one of them said it's the most intense soccer game he's ever been to. And it was, I'm talking about like loudness. and, you know, I think he's been to like 16 of the World Cup games this year. Musa's so tired at this point. You can barely walk. You can tell. Dude, that's where I'm legitimately like, do we consider just flipping Haji and Mousa? Because Mousa could not play, but to have him out there as though he can is almost worse

because, you know, when a guy gets the ball facing him up, everyone's going to be like, okay, Musa is now the defender, but he can't actually defend him. There's no move necessary. You touch the ball to the side of Musa, and all he can do is foul you. So I was like, do we flip Musa and Haji and just leave Moussa a field and let Haji at least be a fit body to play there? Or like, I'm curious how Greg will handle that, because another option for the next game, if you're in this scenario, could be like if Ferreira's on, you could do that

a little bit easier, I think, than if it's Haji. Yeah, and even... It's a pretty specific consideration, but man, we're out of gas. We were. And I've been arguing that we should respect Iran and that this is a legit, like, you know, this was a difficult game that we should be proud of winning. On the other hand, do I want to spend 40 minutes white knuckling it with the Netherlands trying to score a goal against us while we're packed in like that?

No, I don't. Here's what I'll say. I'd rather spend 40 minutes white knuckling it against Netherlands than 40 minutes chasing when we are totally out of gas. That's true. Yeah. So give me the protecting white knuckle if I got to choose. But if we're a team that can really

only go about 60 minutes with our starters, boy, can you imagine going 120 minutes? What's the what's extra time going to look like? There's a there's one more big chance which it's the long ball from Iran

that's headed into the box by poor oligand. for Teremi and he goes down with CCV's hand on his shoulder. Iran, the entire bench, everybody's shouting for a foul, which you can understand, but it was, I think, on replay, not a foul, or at least not enough of a foul to draw a whistle. And that's pretty much the last thing. Well, the ridiculousness of that play is just how it played out from that moment. So Teremie's going down, but while going down, he ends up showing both his stud, both his cleats,

bottom of his cleats to a Matt Turner, who isn't sure if Tremi's going to actually get a touch on the ball. And so Turner comes out like he's got to protect against the shot. And when it isn't touched at all, it surprises Turner and slips through his legs. And if you haven't seen the still shot of Matt Turner looking back towards his own goal at the ball, trickling in, you definitely need to see that because it is definitely an emotion that you'll feel in your soul that was captured. and then Walker Zimmerman swoops in and clears it out. If you want to say that that's a poetic redemption for the penalty he conceded to Wales,

I think that's fair. That's right. It was, yeah, I'll take it as poetic redemption. I saw Zimmerman talking to Anthony Robinson in the locker room after the game. You know, Anthony was crying in the locker room sitting on a bench. and Zimmerman kept saying, now we inspire people. Now we inspire people.

So I feel like Zimmerman seems happy in his role off the bench, happy with his contribution. It's a, it's, I mean, we got to just acknowledge how fun it is to win and go into the knockout round of the World Cup. Shouldn't we? Yes, it is a moment, right? Like this is a moment. And you can tell because the players didn't have this level of,

I don't think this emotional response to qualifying. Like when we qualified, there wasn't this, that level of like, uh, relief. And part of that is just the nature of the way we qualified here where up to the last second it was still in doubt, um, to advance. But, but I still think like this is different. Like getting through the group now, that is, that is such a different thing. And, and I think the players know it.

And, and I, we talked about this in the live recording afterwards too, but, uh, this puts for the, for the US fans, I think, this puts these players like into the Pantheon. Like they've done it. It's no more like they haven't proven anything. You know, I mean, like you got to wait to see what they.

Like what they have already done is incredible. To be a U23 team, a Tokyo Olympics eligible team, that 11 that you listed off could have been an exact 11 that could have started in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Like that it is nuts. It's nuts that that this group of kids qualified us to the World Cup and then it's nuts that this group of kids have brought us into the knockout rounds of the

World Cup and it's no there's no longer like they they're just potential like this is an incredible accomplishment for a generation already and they're just they're just starting yeah it's so great it's they've done what only one only one men's national team ever has done better than this at the world cup it's crazy to think that to remember that And now people are going to be, you know, I guess the question that we're going to have to grapple with when we get out of this World Cup after we win it is the question we're going to have to deal with is so who's up next? How are we going to get to a two deep, you know? Right, right. Rather than just being an 11 plus a hurt Giorina and Brendo, Brando's coming in playing a lot of minutes as the first sub.

I have no idea, man. Scali could, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we might be just as good as our fullbacks, you know, oh, for sure. But let's let's, let's, let's right now just, uh, I, I just want to savor it. I just want to think about what the, like, how, I feel like the game against Netherlands is house money. Uh, none of our players are suspended. Um, the injuries, uh, are going to be tough. Uh, I have no idea what, what, what the extent of them will be or what the plan will be to replace the players.

But I think we have the, I think we have the personnel to compete. compete against the Netherlands. I think we have rehearsed game plans that we've seen from the cycle already to play against a team that you know, ostensibly is better than us and to bring our level up to them is how I'm going to

frame it. So and Saturday it's going to it's all about just an experience for everyone on Saturday. Yep. Excuse me. Find a find a bar. Watch it with watch it with other fans. It's it is more fun than watching it at home.

Where did you watch it? Where did you watch the game yesterday? We watched it at a place called the station in Des Moines. And it was all U.S. fans. It was a lot of TVs, every TV on the U.S. game, a couple of them on England, Wales, just to see if we could win the group, because we still could have won the group if Wales had done anything. Yeah. Wales.

But yeah, it was fun, man. It was fun being in that setting. So, yeah, highly recommend getting into that kind of atmosphere for the game. can. I was struck, I said this on the live recording last night, but I was struck at the tailgate brewery in, you know, off of East Main in Chattanooga. I was struck by how, uh, how serious the, the fans were there. Like everybody was really, really, really, it was a nervous atmosphere. It was, it was not festive. I would say. It was not festive at all. But it was still really fun to experience it together. All right. Well, yep, Saturday.

10 a.m. Eastern time, 9 a.m. Central time. I'll probably be at the tailgate in Chattanooga if anybody wants to meet up. I think I'm going to bring my kids. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.