Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - Episode 166: Olympic Qualifying — USA v Mexico

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Third group game. Result didn't particularly matter but it was a high-intensity match and there was still stuff to learn. 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 scuffed podcast. I'm Adam Bells in Georgia. With me is Greg Velasquez in Iowa. We talk about U.S. men's soccer. Thanks for downloading this episode of Scuffed. Mexico won USAA Zero in Olympic qualifying in Guadalajara. It was the dead rubber ahead of Sunday's do-or-die qualifying game. They said it was meaningless. But it didn't feel meaningless. It felt like there was a lot of energy in that game, I thought. And I can guarantee you for the players, you know, both looking to raise their stock and getting to play against Mexico. going a competitive match. It was meaningful. And we lost. But everybody's available ahead of Sunday and we learned some things, didn't we? Yeah, there's different meanings to meaningless.

So it was meaningless in the sense that winning the game was not the priority and shouldn't have been the objective that we built everything around. But definitely on an individual player basis, there were some guys who were less than stellar in some of their appearances. and so any chance you get to improve your stellarness you need to try to take if you want to be a player for the Olympic knockout game. If you want to make it to Tokyo, if you want to eventually be playing in World Cup qualifiers, you can't put together a string of bad performances or your phone number will get lost. Yeah, totally. And so a dead rubber against Mexico is actually a great opportunity for some players to try to improve their stuff.

I thought, you know, most notably, I even tweeted before the game, because I was thinking about this. I was thinking about this. I was like, well, this, everybody's saying this is meaningless. But look at Sebastian Soto's going to start up top against Mexico. And he's a player that hasn't, you know, he hasn't quite done it at the U23 level in a way that shows that he's like really good. He was decent in the Dominican Republic game. And I thought, well, this is a big opportunity for him. You know, this is going to mean a lot to him personally.

And so I tweeted that out. And then he didn't play well. And he gave up the, did the giveaway for the game winner for Mexico, which was pretty atrocious. And then everybody started coming at me saying like, hey, this is a bad tweet. I'm like, no, it's not a bad tweet. He had an opportunity. He didn't seize it. You know, in fact, we learned that, you know, his phone number might get lost.

And yeah, until he starts, like, and he won't have a lot of opportunities to show that we need to call him back because, I mean, it's not going to just walk back into Norwich and get called on to help get them promoted to the Premier League. Like, these games for the youth teams are basically like his only meaningful games. I don't know if that's entirely true. I don't know what the... I think it's pretty true. So, yeah, until he sort of, you know, quote unquote, turns the corner at Norwich, and starts banging in goals in England, you know, he's probably, we're probably not looking at him as a, as like a World Cup qualifying roster edition, I don't think. And it was, and it's because of this game

yesterday, which sort of confirmed some of the things we, we worried about with him. And, and he didn't do anything to change that. Now, now, there's a lot more going on in this game than just Sebastian Soto. Well, how do we, how do we line up? How do we line up? Yeah, to the lineups. A chole and goal around, I think, is telling. You do what telling of what exactly? I think Ocho is starting the semifinal. I don't know that that's going to surprise anyone anyway, but I think you get them in this game to build that chemistry and the lines of communication with whoever is going to be, whichever these four defenders will also be starting in the semifinal. Yeah. And it was, we should, we should mention the

semifinals against Honduras on Sunday night. We're recording this on Friday. So anyway, right, the game was on Wednesday. Arauj, Paneda, Kessler and Herrera across the back. Araah right back, Herrera deputizing as left back. Perea was the 6th, and then Dotson and Cardoso ahead of him. And then across the front line, Salcedo, Soto, the aforementioned Soto, and Georgi Mahlilovich. Mexico was Luis Malagon and goal, Vladimir Leronia, Gilberia, Gilber Gilberto Sepulvera,

Johann Vasquez, Alejandro Majorga, across the backline, Erica Gide, Jose Joaquin Esquiville. I'm not familiar with a lot of these players, honestly. Uri-Anto-Alvarado and Alexis Vega across that band of three, and then J.J. Macias as the striker. And they came out and they punched this in the mouth.

You know, they press just like Mexico always does these days, pressed hard, and we looked a bit flat. labyrinasted to start the game, which is weird because it's like that. We know that's going to happen, but we still look. It's a force of nature that we just are not quite ready to deal with when we actually do have to deal with it.

It is a force of nature, man. And I was like not in time. I mean, I expected that they'd come out and press, but I wasn't 100% sure they would because it's a dead rubber and because the most important game is Sunday, because the rosters are small and you can't fully rotate. So you can't have a group of guys that you can just rotate here. and then none of them have to play again on Sunday. So I didn't know for sure if Mexico would sort of take their foot off the gas with their press.

They did not. No. And it made it fun. It made it actually fun to watch for me because you're watching our players in real time try to figure out how to deal with it. Which the fun part was that they tried to figure it out because we could have been like, no, let's just knock it back to them and sit back and absorb pressure. Because again, the outcome of the game doesn't matter. And in fact, like the more energy we can serve, the more we'll have. Sunday. So that was possible, but we didn't do that. We definitely committed ourselves to

playing through their press. And I would say that Henry Kessler looked pretty good. You know, he was the one who most quickly adjusted to this new reality, one that they don't, I don't know that they face that in MLS games ever or very often, and definitely didn't face it against any of the other opponents in this tournament. So Kessler Kessler looked pretty good and started to get a handle on the game and that made a big difference.

But we couldn't break the press and then turn that into like actual attacking energy. As the XG numbers bore out later, I think it was we had 0.47 XG and honestly that seems generous to me. I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure where that all came from. whether that's just the number of set pieces we had from good spots that are going to boost it.

But I'd mainly agree with that the press didn't cause us a ton of problems in the sense that, you know, think about our first game when we were under very little pressure and we still contrive to give multiple opportunities straight to... Tell me again who we beat in the first game. Costa Rica. Costa Rica. We still managed to give multiple opportunities to Costa Rica. In this game, Mexico were all over us, super high up the field. And up until the one big moment, none of the players in the back had like terrible giveaways.

It wasn't like we had terrible giveaways that Mexico just failed to convert on like Costa Rica did. And Ochoa had to stand on his head. We didn't have bad giveaways. But we just basically delayed it and gave the ball away further up the field in less harmful situations. Yeah. Which is a, it's progress, right? Yeah.

No, and it's, you know, we knew that we didn't have like the best winger core on this team or a very creative midfield. And that was, that was born out in this game. You know, it was our wingers giving the ball away or our full backs high up the field, higher up the field, maybe at the half liner. So, Perea really struggled to, you know, to do the sort of work on the half turn that's needed from the six and that against a press. Cardoso is looking for a little bit of redemption from his poor outing against Dominican Republic. I will say he did not find that redemption in the game against Mexico. Right. And the Cardoso stands out there saying, well, that's because he's a six, he's not an eight.

And I guess, you know, I'm just going to have to punt on that, I suppose. I suppose maybe that's true. I'm only half punting because at some point you still just have to have, again, that like base level of universal competence. And he didn't have that in this game either. So it's two games in a row where it's like the turnovers just don't make sense. The turnovers he's committing. I would get if he was largely ineffective playing as an eight when he's nominally a six.

But it's like the level of ineffectiveness and the way he's ineffective makes it hard to put it all on the position. Yeah. I agree. I just don't want to really argue with anybody about it. Definitely. Those opinions of mine are definitely. staying here and not going on Twitter. He's still 20.

He's a U-20 eligible. A lot of time to learn just at the moment. He's not making a strong case to be in Tokyo should we win Sunday. No, yeah. I think, you know, it's true Mexico didn't get, they didn't get any guilt-edged chances in this game. Until they did, right?

Until the one from Soto, which was, you know, we'll talk about it later, but it was a giveaway way that was totally unnecessary. It was an unforced air. He wasn't under pressure. He just played it right to Antuna. But we did, like we said, we struggled to connect defense to offense and Perea, Cardoso, both fullbacks, I think, you know, deserve a little bit of the blame here and the wingers. And Soto, honestly. There's like nobody, nobody was really that good. I just was going to like chip in and be like, I feel like part of the blame, at least part of it is going on to Jason Christ.

How so? For his player selection. It's like I get that we had to rotate. So somebody like Hassani Dotson who was very good at doing this. Oh, Dotson was in this game, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So he was even less effective. But, you know, the reason we're playing Cardoso out of position is because we brought several players who play Cardoso's position, knowing that we can only play one of them at once, and we would only need a second one to rotate to. So, you know, we could have brought somebody who was better at the eight and then we wouldn't have to worry about, how Johnny Cardoso looks out of position.

Right. Eric Williamson. And so, for instance. Keaton Parks. Eric Williamson. So that's where it gets into like, okay, well, this is who Christ brought. But then I will immediately kind of defend Christ, at least for this game and say that we definitely weren't trying to bring a roster to win this game. We know we're going to get pressed against Mexico.

I think we can assume that we aren't going to get pressed this way in the semifinal. so bringing personnel specifically tailored to beat Mexico's press isn't really what we needed to do. You could definitely make the argument that the personnel that we left at home would have made us better against any team. And I'm happy to entertain that or assist you in making it. But the fact that we couldn't beat Mexico's press and it was somewhat personnel related isn't that big of a ding. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Should we do a little bit of timeline here? We're not going to do one like we did for the game against Jamaica, like four hours long. Just a timeline sampling? Yeah. So like immediate struggles with the press, some flabbergastment from the U.S. and then rough moments from Kessler Perea Soto, everybody really, including Dotson. But fifth minute, we had a sustained stretch. of possession and then there's an entry pass from Paneda to Soto dropping into the center

circle. He lays it off loosely to Perea, whose pass to Dotson is not good enough and Mexico Mexico is coming back down our throats. Just mention that to say that that's sort of a symbolic of the first half in a lot of ways. We can get it into, we got it into the midfield and then couldn't get it any further. The first time we really break out, it's Kessler stepping with the ball in the six minute and he squares it to Perea after he eliminates the first line of the press, and then Perea spraise it to Herrera down the left wing, and we get a corner kick. Yeah, I mean, we got a couple half chances, one in the seventh minute,

where Saucato picks up a ball that Arauj takes it from, I couldn't tell which player it was, but a Mexican player on the left wing, on their left wing, and then it falls to Sausato, and then he tries to clip a ball in, and it falls between, I mean, both Georgie and so, were in the box and it falls kind of between them. It's a decent opportunity there. And we did settle in and start to figure out the press a little bit. So, yeah, it was like our, like I guess I'd say our big picture spacing and connectivity for the first, for our first line, so our goalkeeper defenders and then Pereja were solid.

It was just, again, it was just everything ahead of that, that was either running into each other or running into the wrong windows or two guys running into the same window. So I think that's just going to be kind of the theme we're repeating here. Yeah. Right around the 20, I'm skipping way ahead, right around to the 28th minute. Araujo gets worked by Antuna, I think it was. And then Maricio Panetta makes a really nice tackle, last ditch sliding challenge in the box. That's the redemption we're looking for, right?

Because Paneda had a bit of a shocker against Costa Rica and then comes back against a much stronger opponent and looks good. So Paneda plays himself back into semi-final discussion, right? Not just on the strength of that tackle, but... Yeah, I think Kessler was better than Paneda and Glad was better than Panetta too. All right. So Panada, not quite there yet. Couldn't make up that ground. Not quite, I don't think.

But I do want to talk about the fullbacks because Arajo, you know, Rao struggled a little bit defensively against Mexican attackers, and I would say he struggled even more to connect passes. Herrera did not struggle as much defensively. I think he's a little more solid, a 1v1 defender right now. But also, you know, Herrera, Herrera struggled to play the ball forward, but Arauj didn't just struggle to play the ball forward. He struggled to just like connect passes. And so I'm thinking, Herrera's going to be the right back in the semifinal. Yeah.

And Herrera has the built-in excuse against Mexico of being slightly wrong-footed, playing, playing on the left side. Yeah. He was solid against Costa Rica on the right. Right. You're thinking he gets the nod? Yeah, I do. Because it's going to be Vines.

Vines is going to get the nod at left back for sure. Yeah. And I think that's something we learned in this, we've learned in this tournament, is that Arauj has a little ways to go. I mean, maybe some people might say they already knew that, but I think it's been confirmed if you already did know it. All right. What else we have?

What else is happening here? Yeah, a lot of stuff that doesn't really bear mentioning, I suppose. It was the game, it was interesting to see us try to break the press, but then after that, you know, we weren't creating a lot of chances. And Mexico wasn't really creating a lot of chances either. I should mention that the goalkeeper, Maragon breaks his wrist. Oh, brutal. He didn't break his wrist.

I saw on Instagram he didn't break it, but looked like he broke it on Perea's hip bone or something, trying to punch the ball out. His wrist was like flopping all over the place. But apparently he didn't break his wrist, just hurt, just a knock. Anyway, that was a long break. And the U.S. did get back into the game a little bit more after having a bad spell. After that break, I thought. And then we have the Soto giveaway.

He's coming back. He's dropping deep. do in the Jesus Ferreira. And I forget who the pass comes in from. Maybe the goalie, maybe from Ochoa to Soto or maybe one of the centerbacks. And he just doesn't even look over his left shoulder and plays a one-touch pass in the direction of Paneda. And it goes instead right to Saus, to Aria Antuna. And Antuna drives forward, it cuts in on his right foot and slams it past Ochoa.

Yeah. So Soto actually manages to not only have the giveaway, but then in his effort to like make up for it, I think also kind of takes Paneda out of the play. So he's chasing it from the back. Soto is chasing from the back where he's just given the ball away from. And from the central side of the field, Paneda is on the sideline side about Antuna when the ball's given way,

because that's where you'd be to spread out in possession, not expecting your forward to give the ball directly to Antuna. So Antunas cutting in. and Paneda's doing a decent job of like taking away part of the goal. But then Soto is racing back and basically like sets a pick on Paneda and overcommits. And so Antuna is able to cut in and have the whole goal to shoot at. And you know he has the whole goal to shoot at because he actually scores near post, which is what Paneda would have been taking away,

but for Soto running into his path. Yeah. Yeah. The shot was a little disguised for Achoa, right? I honestly don't know. I'd have to see the shot again. But if I'm Ochoa, I am counting on Paneda because of his positioning, taking away at least some portion of that near post.

There's no reason that Paneda shouldn't be in the goal frame at all. So he should be taking away at least a yard and a half, two yards of the near post with his positioning. But again, Soto disrupts that so that Antuna has the whole goal to shoot at. Okay. Well, that happened right before the half. and it was the game winner, it was the decisive moment in the game. And it's really a shame because we didn't, like we said, we didn't give up a ton of chances to Mexico.

It was a winnable game. And we lost it on a really, really unforced air. So that's that. 40. Basically, that was that. Yeah, I mean, that's about right. 48th minute. So, I mean, really the game, we never really threatened in this.

the second half, but I do want to mention Ochoas Kroif, the 48th minute. The live broadcast, at least the TUDN one, missed it, but the producers found it and showed the replay. Thank goodness. He croifs on Tuna, and the crowd kind of went wild. The crowd was booing Achoa every time he touched the ball, too. I think because he's Mexican-American, and I think they were booing everybody who was Mexican-American when they touched the ball. Okay. All right, a little bit of banter here. Yeah. Hopefully,

just the good sports banter. Yeah, I mean, it's tough for those, it's tough for those guys. I think, because they grow up, they grow up El-Tree fans. They end up playing for the United States because they're Americans. And, um,

and they get, uh, they get railed for it by Mexican fans. Anyway, I saw a tweet from, uh, tweeted by some like reputable, uh, Eltree journalists of a of a guy wearing a U.S. jersey and then holding it up and underneath it is a Mexico jersey and he's got his fingers to his lips like shh. And that tweet was that's half of the

USMNT squad tonight. That's good. That's good sports fan. I'll take that. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So I guess a couple thoughts on players. Sousaido had another very sloppy outing, I thought, but he's still the guy, most likely to create something, even though there were a lot of bad moments from him. I'm still not convinced by Georgie Mahalovich, really, even as a winger. Although I do want him to start on the wing against Honduras. Yeah, I think what you're getting at is it's just kind of an indictment on this particular roster.

And that that's the case that the two guys that you're hoping start have not necessarily been very good. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to be Saucato and Georgi. what else do we say about this game anything I'm a little fussy that Dotson went 75 minutes I feel like Dotson's minutes should have been cut off at 50 to 60 we had Tanner Tessman right there who I'm guessing is not going to be starting in the semifinal and who was very fresh I think he'd only play like 30 minutes in the tournament so those I mean just again tournament management wise

I was fussy about Dotson's minutes and I was very very very fussy that Jesus Frere even stepped onto the field. Because he was on a yellow card. He's on a yellow card. Any second yellow card would have had him suspended for the semi-final. And contrary to believe, you can't just say, okay, go out there and don't get a yellow card. Like, there are just certain things that can happen in a soccer game where you can definitely accidentally end up with a yellow card. And that was, for me, just a huge and wildly unnecessary risk.

But we got away with it. Okay. I'm going to give my line up for the game on Sunday. day since that's sort of by the time most people listen to this they're going to that's what they're going to be thinking about all right the apologies for not doing this earlier what happened yesterday is there was a lot there were a lot of storms in north Georgia and they sent all the kids home early from both daycare and school and it's just really tough to record a podcast with my children in the house special guests I love them dearly tiny bells is so

I Cho-en-goal Herrera glad castler and vines across the back line, Yule at the 6th, Dotson and Perez, the 8th, and then Salcedo Ferreira and Georgie across the front line. I think outside of South Sado, who has justifiably been criticized a lot in this tournament, I think that all writes itself. And I'm just backing Salcedo over Lewis because I think he has more playmaking in his game than Lewis. No, I'm with you in Lewis's. Lewis's value drops precipitously as your lineup loses playmakers. So if you don't have the playmaker in there, then Lewis isn't going to give you very much.

I got a question, though, on your midfield. Tell me their midfield setup again. Yule at the 6 and Dotson and Perea as the 8s. Do you think that's what we're going to see? Do you think it's going to be Perea and Ewell flipped? It may be that. I think it's a little bit, I think the distinction is a little bit overblown, because Ewell will still drop deep.

and Perea will still get forward. It's more fluid than I think, much like the senior team, more fluid than I think most people give it credit for. But, yeah, it could be Perea at the 6, Yule, at the 8. Paraya is going to have more time on the ball than he did against Mexico, so his inability to navigate that isn't going to matter as much. That's what I'm thinking, too, is that unless Honduras decide to go, like, with the full Mexico press,

Perea should be fine to move it to Eul, if that's what we need to do to have Ewell do as distribution. Yeah. does it kind of feel like we're either relying on like ferrera unlocking things in a way that we haven't seen him do in this tournament or that we just need dotson to do his grown-up soccer and win the game for us yeah probably one of those two and um you know vines a vines ball across i mean we have ways to score goals and from this lineup it's it shouldn't be impossible and and i think you've pointed out privately that, you know, Honduras hasn't rotated nearly as much as we have in this tournament. They get one less day, one fewer day of, day of rest than we do. It sets up well for us to win this game. Right. And again, they're not superheroes to begin with.

They don't have a bunch. It's not like they brought in a bunch of Champions League players. Like they are also playing Honduras U23 players. Yeah, for anyone who hasn't been paying super close attention. and I haven't either been paying super close attention, so I don't know exactly how Honduras is going to play or exactly what kind of quality they have because I didn't know if they were going to be playing Honduras or Canada, and I just wasn't willing to scout them both.

But I can tell you, Honduras have seven players who have started all three matches in the group stage. I assume those are key players for them, and it wouldn't surprise me if all seven are starting their fourth match in, like, ten days. So that definitely could, factor into things for all my fussiness about Dotson and Ferre getting onto the field. Jason Christ has done a very good like L-Sat job of organizing

his players minutes in that like the logic puzzle works out where no one has started all three games. Everyone like everyone is on two starts max so they've done a smart job of trying to sort of limit that exertion. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. And I mean, everything is, everything's sort of in our favor here. We just got to get it done. Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern time, I believe, 5 Central. Greg, 5 Central. Yeah, we have to get it done because we need to see Pomacall and Aronson in Tokyo.

Yeah, this is it. This is the playing game. This is the playing game. We win this. We go to the Olympics. We don't win this. We don't go to the Olympics. Very simple. Thanks everybody for, I want to mention thank you to our pay. patrons on Patreon, got a little boost on there when I tweeted about it earlier this week. And just for those of you who have thought about joining the Patreon and haven't done so, it's very simple. It's very easy. Email me if you want to link. Adam Bells at gmail.com.

Anything else, Greg? This is wildly uncharacteristic for us under 30 minutes. Well, the reason that we're not taking a full microscope to this is because all the tactics and sort of personnel puzzles are very much just relevant for this one more game. As soon as we win this game, God willing, like this roster blows up and we're talking about a completely different group of players for Tokyo itself. Yeah, that's right. And the fact that the senior team seems to be starting to click on all cylinders does take some of the meaning out. of these lower level tournaments, you know. Kellyn Acosta has effectively rendered all of the midfield on this team irrelevant.

Right, right. Or at least, not irrelevant, obviously, but there becomes like very little urgency now. And this is what it's supposed to be. Like you shouldn't have the kind of like pressure on immediate like progression from a U20 player to a U23 to the senior team. Like you should have the luxury of easing players in. and it feels like we can now do that. And in bigger picture,

like the fact that all of our senior team players are U-23s almost means that the guys in this group down in Guadalajara, like there's no under, there's no players aging out that they're going to replace. Like these guys might just be backburner players forever. For their career. They're going to be fighting off the younger, the even younger players coming up behind them.

Not David Ochoa, Greg. Yeah, it is. It's a real stark contrast to, for instance, the U-20 World Cup in 2019, which we covered really carefully. Because, like, think of who was on that roster. Richards, Dest, Wea, Pomacall, Ledezma, and... Mackenzie. Yeah, McKenzie. So, yeah, there's like four or five.

very serious national team players from that roster. I don't know that there will be anytime soon from this Olympic qualifying roster. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.