Hello and welcome to Soccer 101. My name is Daryl Grove and I'm joined by a man who's not afraid of a slide tackle. His name is Taylor Rockwell. Hello.

Hello. Once again, I should yes and you. I will say yes and that was the case until I watched the game we're going to tie.

So we are here to talk about the epic. I'm going to call it epic.

Oh my goodness. 1995 Copa America, USA versus Argentina group group stage game. Mm-hmm. Lots of slide tackles, lots of rough play. It's Thunderdome. This game was Thunderdome. Yeah. It was, what was the name of the small Uruguayan town where this was played? Oh, I forget. It's Pasandu. Paesan do. There we go. Yes. A.A. Thunderdomedome. Yeah. So the U.S. wins 3-0 in a really, really scrappy performance. I want to say it's one of the best, it's maybe the pinnacle, scrappy performance of the U.S. men's national team. Yeah, I think that's probably fair because the other one you would maybe point to is the 2-0 win over Colombia that gets marred by tragedy off the field plus there's an own goal in there

whereas this one it's like it's not a comprehensive victory even though it's

three-nil because Argentina do get chances it's not like they're just completely

stymied but it is the United States essentially outworking out fighting out

musling and occasionally out-tacticking and out-technicling on Argentina squad. I want to set the scene, Taylor. I want to set the seats. So it's the year after the World Cup, right? The US has hosted 94 World Cup, made it to the Render 16, got knocked out of by Brazil. All in all, respectable performance, right? It's a lot of the same group of

players. It's the next summer. It's the Copa America down in Uruguay. The US beats Chile in their

first game, loses to Bolivia in the second game, and then faces Argentina in the third game

of the group stage, has to get a result against Argentina to hope to advance. They end up winning 3-0 and topping the group, Taylor Rockwell. And we all saw it coming. I mean, it was pretty clear that when the United States was drawn to that group with Argentina, we knew they were going to be top of the group. So no surprises. We're down here? Lots of surprises. Including, I want to set this in a little more. Here's a surprise.

When the US team went down there, they traveled down to Paisandu in Uruguay.

They sort of had a bit of a handshake deal, as I understand it, with US soccer, about what

their new contracts would look like, essentially a CBA, right?

When they received the paperwork on the plane, it seemed to be not what was promised.

There was a very weird bonus structure where if you sort of only had a few caps for the national team,

you basically got no money for playing in this tournament.

I like to think of it as an early draft of the US Women's National Team current contract.

It's not a dissimilar battle. I saw Marcelo Barbao saying that

$5 per diem was was not enough. And so when the team lands in Uruguay, they basically say

this isn't good enough. We're not training and we're not playing until this is resolved. The US team

went on strike after landing in Uruguay before playing

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