Welcome to the scuffed podcast. I'm Adam Bells in Georgia. With me is Greg Velazquez in Iowa. We talk about

US men's soccer. Thanks for

downloading this episode of Scuffed.

We now have official rosters for the Olympic qualifying tournament that kicks off for the US on Thursday

and what could very well be the decisive match against Costa Rica. You see, the best

US players are getting knocked out of Champions League right now, so we're fielding a B to C U23 team coached by a man,

Jason Christ, who has yet to demonstrate proficiency in the job.

Mexico's squad is A-minus. We're in a group with Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in order.

We don't want to roll into a must-win versus Mexico to get out of the group, so we got to beat Costa Rica.

And Costa Rica is thinking they got to beat Costa Rica and Costa Rica is thinking

they got to beat us because they are seeing the same thing in the future.

So it's going to be the first game with real stakes in a while and I got to say for me it's easier to map out American failure than

success. Greg may disagree I'll let him talk at long last. I will somewhat

disagree I feel like what we've got here given the

available players and who was you know finally selected is sort of just a case of

a fan base the supporters effectively flying blind.

I think, you know, had the selections been a little different,

we could have easily predicted, you know, the setup and some of the tactics.

We could have had this reasonable expectations for like what the baseline performance would be.

And there's a real comfort to sort of that predictability and kind of a discomfort to what I think is now just a very uncertain picture as you've kind of laid out.

And you know, nature just abhors a

of certain pictures you've kind of laid out and you know nature just abhors a vacuum and all that

...