Hello, hello, everyone and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

My name is Joe Lowry, and today I am joined by one of the foremost experts on the United States women's national team.

It's Meg Linahan.

Meg, first of all, thank you for coming on the show.

And second of all, right off the top,

I want to congratulate you for being named to the inaugural Women's International Champions Cup,

Best 11, as one of the people recognized for doing an incredible amount to advance women's soccer.

How crazy cool is that?

Yeah, I mean, it's been fun because I will actually admit to you, like,

when I first started thinking about taking this job at the athletic, like, one of the big

sticking points for me was, like, when I worked at the NWSL, I could hide behind, like,

the NWSel handle, right?

Like, it wasn't me personally.

So today is a fun test of me needing to understand that I'm going to be in the spotlight

and get some attention put on me, which I don't always handle super well.

So, I mean, still, though, like, I mean, you look at that list from a player point of view,

from an executive point of view, it's just,

like, it's really quite the list. And I'm extremely honored to be on that 11, especially just

being the only journalist on it as well. It is a stacked list. I mean, Jill Ellis is on there.

Megan Rapino is on there. And again, the guest on today's episode of the Total Soccer Show is on there. Meg, we had recently a United States women's national team game. And I don't know if listeners who are maybe still in a Thanksgiving food-induced coma or maybe just weren't aware that it was happening this past Friday, they might have missed it. It was a rematch against the Netherlands. It was a rematch of the 2019 Women's World Cup final with the exact same scoreline as that game had. It was the U.S. winning two to nothing. You and I are going to talk about that game getting into the nitty-gritty details from that 2-0 win, talking about players and debuts and goals, maybe even some tactics in there too. I also want us to talk about some more big picture stuff about the women's national team and what they're doing right now under Vlako Andanovsky. But first, again, let's start with the game itself. As I said, it's a two-goal win for the United States. We saw some familiar faces and got a look at a couple of new ones for you. overall on a macro level, what did you think of this performance from the U.S.? playing their first game in eight months? Yeah, I mean, it was really funny the week before, you know, I did my podcast and just kind of was on with John Halleran, who also covers the team, and we were both kind of like, we don't have expectations from this

game. Like they have not played in a really long time. Like for us, we're not looking at a potential

result. We're looking at how they look, how they, you know, just in terms of fitness even, like,

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