The U.S. Women's National team is back from their long summer break, and it did not look amazing.

Welcome to the late sub. I am your host, Claire Watkins. It is Friday, October 24th, and we are going to get into the weeds on the U.S. is two to one loss to Portugal last night.

The good, the ugly, some of the tactical things I think could have been different

to help the team succeed, some of the individual performances I liked, some of the individual

performances I thought struggled. There's so much to dig into now because I think with the

U.S. one year out from World Cup qualifying, all of these little things are beginning to stack up,

they're beginning to matter, and this is a new test for the Emma Hayes era.

So let's dig in.

So the U.S. women's national team had a heck of a start to their October window

playing their first game as a group in almost four months on Thursday

after the long summer, late summer layoff.

They lost to Portugal, two to one.

The first loss to Portugal in program history.

Only the third time the U.S. has lost to a team outside the top 20 FIFA rankings.

And only the fourth time, the U.S. has lost to a team outside the top 20 FIFA rankings, and only the fourth time,

the U.S. has lost three games in a single calendar year. They have never lost four games in a

single calendar year, but as we recall, there were those losses earlier this year to Brazil and

Japan. So not great. This loss felt a little bit worse than those. I think we should re-contextualize

with those losses in sort of the cadence of these three. Those losses earlier in the year were

when the U.S. was going kind of deep into their roster pool. We didn't have a lot of players available.

They were still getting even at that point used to Emma Hayes' style. There was a lot of

behind-the-scenes work going on. There was a lot of behind the scenes work going on.

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