Welcome to the scuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer.

Hey everybody, we've got three Champions League goals and a super sub master class for Monday to cover,

and also the bump of enthusiasm for the World Cup after the draw.

And Doug McIntyre is here with me.

Fighting through illness, Doug, thank you for your service.

Good to be here, Bells. Thanks for having me.

Let's start with the other guy fighting through illness in the last few days.

Christian Mate Pulisic.

I guess he had a fever over the weekend.

And so he didn't start in Milan's game on Monday.

And this is against Torino, the smaller club from Turin.

He comes on down to 1.

And what happened?

Why don't you tell us what happened after that?

I mean, it took 10 minutes for him to, it took less than a minute, I think, when he came on to get the equalizing goal. And then, you know, less than 10 minutes later, he gets the winner. Masterclass off the bench. I mean, sometimes it's a weird thing. Sometimes when you're sick, you actually play better in a funny way. so I'm hoping to have a performance, you know, half as good as Christians today on this podcast

coming off the flu myself. But, yeah, I mean, look, he's a phenomenal player. He's a match winner when he's at his best. And we saw that in that game. I thought he took both goals tremendously well. you know, the first one, it seems simple, but it's just,

he takes the ball out of the air and he just hits it right away before the keeper can react.

And, you know, second goal was even better than that. So that, that's what he's capable of when

he's at his best. That's what we are all hoping we're going to see from Christian Polisic

at the World Cup this summer. It's a great sign that he's that he's playing well, that he's in form,

you know, going into the holidays, you know, a lot of time between now and June. But he looks

like he's in, he's recapturing the form that he was in at the start of the season, which

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