Hello and welcome to the total soccer show.

My name is Darrell Grove and I'm joined by one of the founding members of the Tyler Boyd fan club. His name is Taylor Rockwell. Hello. Hello. I think it's Brian Shoretta is number one. Probably Tyler Boyd's parents are actually number one or two. Brian Shoretta three. I'll take number four. That's fine. Maybe Paul Ariola is in there somewhere as? Probably. Or Pauli Areola? Is I accidentally just called him? Apparently. Yeah. Tonight's result or yesterday's result, given that it's now Wednesday morning. As any indicator, yeah, Paul Areola is probably on board, the Tyler board hype train. Yeah. All right. So we are here to talk. USA 4-Giana. Nill. The U. the US has opened the Gold Cup with a 4-0 win. Here's how I'm thinking of this 4-0 win. It was, in my head, the acceptable result, the one that I wanted against a team that is as weak as Guyana. And then the performance is encouraging but not perfect. Is that a pretty good level to be out for this? Yeah, I think so. I mean, if you go back to what we wanted, we wanted to see some kind of cohesive attacks, a very consistent game plan. Not a lot of, yeah, not a lot of like individual moments, but more so sort of combinations to make the goals happen. Pulisian got to go at individual moments with a few elastikos and this and that. Yeah, I honestly think that is kind of the story of the opening 15 to 20 minutes. Is a lot of kind of individual, we got to try something. I do think there were some players who really wanted to sort of make a statement and show that this team is good. And I think once they did kind of calm down and get into a bit more of a rhythm, then I think things not necessarily turned around but got a little bit stronger overall. Yeah.

All right. Also, there were some moments. There's a 10-minute spell when things didn't quite go the US's way. Gianna suddenly looked like the dominant team. I think we'll get into maybe as his tradition. Why that happened later on. Before we dig into the goals, do you mind if we start with the starting liner? Sure.

Pretty much what we expected, except Jassizadez starting instead of Josie Altadour. Which we started to think was going to be the case earlier today. We've talked about this before. We need a term for it. When it's just like little stories start bubbling up and it's like, oh, Josie Altador, Or, you know, he hasn't quite been as fit as we would have liked. And then there's stories about Jesse Zardez, like, is this his time to shine? And it's suddenly, you start to wonder if maybe there's been some leaks about who is going to end up start of this game. Someone's just slipping that story out there. I first started thinking about this when I, I think I saw the full version of the extra time episode that we were on. And Matt Doyle was talking about like, all right, Josie has a history of getting injured in tournaments. He's just coming back from injury, right? He's just got those 45 minutes against Venezuela under his belt. Why play him against Guyana and risk him pulling his hamstring in the first game when probably Giasis Zardis can get the job done. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think that's probably what Greg Berthalter was going with. And that's why we did not see Josie Outta at all today. We thought maybe we'd see him for a little bit at the very end. But I think there was always a plan to maybe get Michael Bradley and Christian Pulitzer off around the 60th minute. Because also recently injured, just coming back. So that makes sense.

Give them 60 minutes, then wrap them in cotton wool.

Yeah.

And then I really, And then maybe just at that point, it comes down to like, do you want to give Josiah a little bit of a runaround or is it not really going to be that useful, especially when you've got players like Weston McKinney, who's, it sounds like got a little bit of a cramp at the end there so you get him off you get him a break before anything else happens is that great news or

what because I thought pulled hamstring the the quote afterwards from Belleter is he had a bit of cramp cramp if you don't I'm not a sport scientist but I know cramp essentially goes away yeah right whereas a pulled hamstring it's there for probably a few weeks in one form or another.

That is definitely accurate.

But I also am inclined to believe, not that I am a medical practitioner, but that cramp is also a warning sign, in my opinion, that, like, yes, things are... Is it a lactic acid buildup? Yeah, combined. I don't know. There's other stuff in there. But I guess what I mean more so is like once things are telling you like I am in pain,

it's not necessarily the best thing to be like, well, whatever. I'll just ignore and keep going, especially in the opening game of a knockout, eventual knockout tournament. We're going to get into individual player performances, including Western McKenney's maybe later on in the show. I kind of want to dig into the four goals because there's a lot going on there.

I also want to mention Guyana's performance and contribution to this game.

I honestly thought Guiana were going to come sit in a four, five, one and say,

here's a load of Guyana buddies, I dare you to try and pass your way through it.

They came and played a way more open game than I expected. It made it a more entertaining

game than I expected. And I think their coach afterwards said, Michael Johnson, the coach afterwards said

they should be really proud of what they did. And even with a 4-0 defeat in their

Gold Cup debut, I think I agree. It was a brave performance. It actually had some nice flashy moments.

Flash is maybe not a praiseworthy enough with some good moments of soccer

from Guyana and made the game nice and open. Sure. Kind of made it easier for the US in doing so?

In the end, I think there's maybe also a chance that because Giana kind of set up a little bit higher

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