Welcome to Allocation Disorder. I am Sam Staskell, and this feels good to say, joined as always by Paul Tenorio, his grand return to the formal podcast. We've done, we've messed around, we've done some live rooms on the athletic here over the last couple of days. But Paul is back and so is the U.S. men's national team. Paul, welcome, buddy.

I hope you had a restful start to your paternity leave. Yes. No, I think it's time for Joe to hit the

Welcome Back Cotter theme song. Here I am. I'm back. I have big shoes to fill. The guest hosts that you've had on have done a fantastic job.

I quite enjoyed the last show with Bobby Warshaw.

So I've got, I've really got to up my game here.

A lot of compliments for Bobby.

And so I hope I bring it in this episode.

There were a lot of compliments.

Not 100, not universal

praise, but, you know, we don't need to talk about that. You do, you do need to bring it this

episode. The U.S. men's national team sort of brought it on Thursday night. They won. They beat El

Salvador one nothing in Columbus, Ohio.

You and I were at lower.com field for the game.

The weather held up.

It was not that cold.

It snowed for a couple of hours in the afternoon,

but none of it stuck,

and it stopped before the game began.

So all of those concerns didn't come to pass for this one.

But it wasn't really all that convincing of a performance for the U.S.

In the end, though, that doesn't matter all that much.

They are now in second place.

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