Hello and welcome

Hello and welcome everybody to The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell with me today to talk Americans in Action, as well as some

MLS offseason activity and at the current USM&T roster, is a man who knows that the holiday season

is the best time for an international friendly in Southern California. It's Joe Lowry. Joe, Santa Rudolph, Caden Clark. What's not to love? Oh, Taylor, I actually have a T-shirt printed already with, you know, the holiday season is the best time for a camp candy cane friendly against Bosnia and Herzegovina already printed. I'm actually wearing it right now. So it's kind of eerie. We're not looking at

each other, but kind of eerie that you just rattled that off. Very strange. Did you make that yourself? Did you find someone to print that? Were they available like it mass produced for sale? Joe, I have questions. Oh, no, I've got a t-shirt guy. He lives at Graham's bait and tackle haircut shop. Yeah. Joe's got a guy.

All right.

Well, let's stick with that roster for a moment.

Joe, we were going to have this conversation before we started recording, but I forgot to bring it up. So we're going to have it now. How would you like to cover that? How seriously do you think we should be taking this camp? Because it's a non-Fifa window. It's uml s offseason you've got a ton of mLS players

in there and a few non-mLS players um but it doesn't seem like it's going to tell us a huge amount

about the u.s men's national team going forward we might learn a couple things we might see some players

back in the fold or some players given some minutes or maybe some debutants overall, not quite the same severity as,

say, a World Cup qualifier or a Gold Cup game or a Nation's League game or something like that.

So, Joe, for you, how important is this game?

It's not that important for me, or for you or for really anyone that's going to be watching

these games, but it is important for Greg Beralter and more important than that, even, it's necessary for a lot of these players who are done with their season in Major League Soccer or who are just not getting time over in Europe, Koff Koff, Brian Reynolds. It's a good opportunity for those players to get in and get looks. We mentioned this before, right? This camp serves a couple of purposes. Keep guys fresh and get

looks at new guys. Those are the two main goals. And really for us, we'll get some data points and maybe we'll develop some opinions on on which young players are impressing or how the veterans look like Jordan Morris and Aaron Long who have been out for a while. Morris has played more recently the Long has, but we'll get an idea and a sense of some of these things. But for us, Taylor, I feel like this is a kind of game that we'll look back on in weekend review or something like that. Because if we do a full-on show to recap this game, I know myself and I think I'm going to start to overanalyze things and start to draw conclusions that really just don't matter. And I think I'll start to overvalue certain things. So I think we should tackle this one on Monday with whoever else wants to chime in with some thoughts on it. But it will be a valuable exercise, but more so for Beralta in those players than it will be for us. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that's the answer because this is more of a personal thing. But we don't often talk about the U.S. women's national team friendlies because sometimes they're playing teams that they fully expect to beat 6, 7,0, or they're playing a team back to back. And this feels the equivalent of that type of friendly for the U.S. women. So for us to give full coverage to the U.S. men for a meaningless friendly or a potentially meaningless friendly that we could easily overanalyze.

I'm with you, Joe.

I think that's for weekend reviewing purposes.

But we can talk about this squad for a moment because I'm looking through it.

Joe, I'm going to build an argument here.

All right.

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