Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. I'm your host Taylor. Rockwell, Daryl Grove is not with me. He is away in Boston, but he will return next week to help me review the first round of the MLS playoffs, as well as look at some of the action from this past weekend. Ryan Bailey is out of town, so Daryl Grove will step in. But I said review. We have not yet previewed those games, and that's exactly what we're

doing on this show with Joe Lowry. Joe has been on the show many times. We love having Joe on

because he combines tactical expertise with an ability to convey that tactical expertise,

and in this case, he's going to be doing so about every single playoff team that is playing

this round.

We'll have Joe back on next week to review these games and then look ahead to games

featuring L.A. and NYCFC. But for this one, it's only playoff teams in action this weekend,

sort of look at the individual games, what might happen, what the trends could be, who the key

players are, and what the key performers might need to be for certain teams to get certain results.

Joe has an insane amount of knowledge in his brain

that he somehow was able to convey via audio format,

so credit to Joe for that.

And with that in mind, I will stop talking about Joe,

and instead let Joe talk for himself.

Joining me once again on the other end of the line all the way from the southwestern United States. I don't know why I feel the need to point out geography, but I am. It's Joe Lowry of the Athletic. Hello, Joe. Thanks for being on the show. Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Taylor. It's always good to chat with you. It's always good to have you on, especially when we've got MLS playoffs coming up, which we do this weekend. You wrote a great piece for the athletic where you had some tactical insights on every single

team. chat with you. It's always good to have you on, especially when we've got MLS playoffs coming up, which we do this weekend. You wrote a great piece for the athletic, where you had some tactical

insights on every single team that made the playoffs, or we'll be playing this weekend. We're going to talk a lot about that in the near future. But first, we're recording this after the USA's Two No Loss to Canada.

Darrell and I did our lengthy post-game review,

as we are wont to do.

But given that it's been almost a day thereabouts, Joe, I'm wondering where you are on this loss. Well, I'm a little sleep deprived for one. You guys were up late doing your review. I was up late typing up my analysis of the game as well. So I think we're both on the same page in that

a little bit. A little bit. So between yawns here and there, on the whole, I know I'm doing fine. I think the U.S. is pretty much in the same spot as it was before. We're just a little bit more keyed into some of the issues now. Maybe our eyes have been opened a little bit more than they were before. But at the end of the day, it is just soccer. We love it, and it's a lot of our

livelihoods. But it does help to get some perspective now and then on what kind of really matters. And if you were going with like your sort of basic takeaways from your review, what were sort of the key things that you focused on from last night?

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