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, Mexico One, USA Zero, in Olympic qualifying in Guadalajara. It was the dead rubber ahead of

Sundays do or die qualifying game. They said it was meaningless, but it didn't

feel meaningless. It felt like there's a lot of energy in that game I thought and I can guarantee you for the players, you know both looking to raise their stock and getting to play against Mexico in a competitive match. It was meaningful and we lost.

But everybody's available ahead of Sunday and we learned some things, didn't we?

Yeah, there's different meanings to meaningless.

So it was meaningless in the sense that you know

winning the game was not the priority and shouldn't have been the objective

that we built everything around but definitely on an individual player basis, there were some guys who were less than stellar in some of their appearances, and so any chance you get to improve your stellarness, you need to try to take if you want to be a player

for the Olympic knockout game if you want to make it to Tokyo if you want to

eventually be playing in World Cup qualifiers you can't have you can't put together a string of bad performances or your phone number will get lost.

Yeah, totally.

And so a dead rubber against Mexico is actually a great opportunity for some players to try to improve their stock.

I thought, you know, most notably I even tweeted before the game because I was thinking about this I was thinking about this I was like well this everybody saying this is meaning meaningless but look at Sebastian Soto's gonna start up top against Mexico and he's a player that hasn't you know he hasn't quite done it at

the you 23 level in a way that shows that he's like really good he was decent in

the Dominican Republic game but and I thought well this is a big opportunity for him

you know this is this is gonna mean a lot to him personally and so I so I tweeted that out and then he didn't play well and he gave up the did the

giveaway for the the game winner for Mexico which was pretty atrocious and and

and then everybody started coming at me saying like hey this is a bad tweet.

I'm like no it's not a bad tweet.

He had an opportunity.

He didn't seize it, you know in fact he we learned that you know he's he his phone number might

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