Hello, hello, everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

And with me today to do some theoretical roster building for the U.S. men's national team are two wonderful fellows up first.

It's a man who is not the least bit nervous about this final stage of World Cup qualifying.

It's Joe Lowry.

Hi, Joe. Hi, Taylor. No, I'm definitely not nervous at all in any way, shape, or form. Listeners, I just want you all to know that before we started recording, Taylor told me and our mystery co-host number three, I guess. I won't spoil that surprise. Not that you've read the description for this show. But he told us that this was a two notebook episode for him. So he's got not one, but two of the famous Taylor Rockwell note-filled handbooks out. This is going to be a doozy, ladies and gentlemen. It is going to be a doozy. It requires two notebooks to track everything we're going to talk about. So Joe Lowry, not nervous. Joining us is a man who actually is not nervous about the USA's final three games.

It's Graham Ruthven or their Gams, apparently.

Hi, Graham.

Hello, Taylor.

I mean, I wasn't nervous until I started going through the permutations of the games.

And, yeah, started to, as an honorary American, as an honorary USM&T fan, started to get slightly more nervous as I worked

out how the US is going to qualify. I think it's going to be okay. I think it's going to be okay,

but maybe it's slightly a squeakier bum time than I thought was the case before I started doing

my research. I think that's about as optimistic as Graham could be in this scenario.

And I will take it, though I don't love when even a neutral is getting slightly nervous for the USA's hopes. But I'm assuming that's all us just being rational and realistic ahead of these three World Cup qualifiers, which the US will win. All of and then it will be wonderful. Nine point window, ladies and gentlemen. The U.S. plays its final three games for World Cup qualifying later this month, starting next Thursday when they go away to Mexico, that it's home to Panama, away to Costa Rica to round things out. We're going to talk about qualifying permutations, do some in-depth analysis on a couple of U.S. players. The bulk of this episode will be roster construction or our ideas about roster construction. We're expecting to get the U.S. roster, the official U.S. roster sometime later this week. So why not spend some time today speculating wildly until then? We've got important players potentially back in the team. We've got big names missing out. We may even have some positional switching. We shall see. We'll get into all of that and more. Position by position. Let's start in goal. Joe, how we look at in goal. Okay. So on this roster that I think is, it's a large part of what I want or what I would do, but it's also a large part of what I think Greg Berhalter could reasonably do. So that's the the thesis for this roster.

You're not going to see a lot of wildcar picks from me. As fun as those are, I'm really not sure that the last window of World Cup qualifying is the time. Actually, let me rephrase that. I'm sure that it's not the time in large respect. There can be exceptions, and I do have one or two, and we'll get to those later. In goal, though, I have three goalkeepers. There's no, real quick,

there's no player limit for World Cup qualifying roster. So we could build these to be 50 players. None of us did that, obviously, but we all have a pretty rough and nebulous amount to work with. Okay, anyway, preamble over. Three goalkeepers. Zach Steffen, who was back on the bench for City yesterday against Crystal Palace. It appears that he is fit and ready to play. So that is good news for the U.S. I have Stefan, I have Sean Johnson, and I have Ethan Horvath as my three goalkeepers. I know that probably doesn't match up with what maybe even you guys have and certainly what some listeners would want with Guy Gus Lonina, but those are my three for this final window.

And then I'm assuming Matt Turner, because he's still not playing for the revolution, you're not willing to roll the dice. This would be what you're talking about previously, where it's not the time to gamble, it's not the time to take chance. It's the time to play it safe. Yeah, I just haven't read anything or heard anything about Turner's recovery yet. He's still dealing with that foot injury.

I've read weird things on Twitter that could be true or maybe not true about this being a St. Paul World Cup qualifier against Honduras induced foot injury with how cold it was. I have no

idea if that is true or not. But that just goes to show we don't really know what's going on.

We just know that Turner hasn't been playing. And until I read something that changes that fact, I don't think

he should be in this roster. I was going to make a joke about Matt Turner still being

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