Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

I'm your host Taylor Rockwell, Daryl Grove.

Not with me. Still in the hospital. Still on the men recovering should be back early next week, but we're going to give him time off to recover. He is feeling fine, so do not worry. But also, I'm sure he appreciates any positivity sent his way. So thank you for thinking of him. But without Darrell, I'm instead going to be talking to

Felipe Cardenas of The Athletic. Felipe has been on the show several times. I'm not going to say many. He's not quite reached that point yet, but several times. And I always really enjoy talking to him. This time, he is freshly back from St. Louis, where he was there covering the U.S.'s one-to-one draw with Uruguay. And I want to pause here to say that

on tomorrow's show, we're planning to have Joe Lowry back on to help me kind of do a post-mortem

of this international break to look at which players stood out, which players hurt their stock,

which players helped, who we want to see more of, who we want to see less of, and getting

into sort of the individual performances from some of the U.S. players against Uruguay and also against Mexico.

So I say that to say that this conversation with Felipe is a bit more about sort of the philosophy

of the U.S. right now because I'm really interested in his experience covering Uruguay.

He gets to kind of sit down and chat with Oskar Tabadas for a little bit or got to last night

and sort of how Tabarez sees the U.S.'s development, but then how Greg Berthor sees it, how it relates to other teams that Felipe has covered, specifically Atlanta United when they were their kind of growing pains early on under Tata Martino and the kind of correlation to this current iteration of the national team because obviously like you can take a lot of stuff away

from that one-to-one draw with Uruguay. Oh, this guy was good. This guy was bad. But it all still has that sort of couching of like, ah, you know, it wasn't like a friendly and we're not sure how good they were. And so it's tough to draw hard conclusions, which is a thing that I'm going to say for me and Joe to try to figure out how to do. What I wanted to get into with Felipe this time around was

sort of where the United States stands in terms of embracing that philosophy, in terms of

embracing this new style of play, and how it seems to be manifesting or not manifesting in the

kind of challenges that remain. I think we initially set it on maybe like a quick 15 to 20 minute

chat, and then as we tend to do, went long because there's lots of great points in there from Felipe. He always brings it when it comes to his appearances on the Total Soccer Show, and for that we're very much appreciative. So with all that said, I will say joining me now, I've got Mr. Felipe Cardenas of the Athletic. Felipe, thank you very much for taking the time today. I know you're only just getting back into Atlanta from St. Louis, so we very much appreciate you being on the show. Anytime, Taylor. Always a pleasure. So you're back in Atlanta now. First of all, I'm glad to know it's always a pleasure. Second of all, you're back in Atlanta, as I said. But last night you were in St. Louis. You're covering the USA Uruguay game for The Athletic.

And I want to talk a lot about the U.S. national team, obviously. But I first want to start with Uruguay, actually, because you were on the show during the Copa Medica talking about all the different teams, but Uruguay obviously in there as well. So you have more familiarity with them than I do, certainly certainly than a lot of other people do, certainly.

They were without Louis Suarez, Edson Kavanaugh and Diego Godine, to name a few last night.

They didn't look particularly inclined to press or mark aggressively.

A lot of tweets I saw were kind of talking about how they were playing it, maybe like two-thirds speed thereabouts.

So I'm wondering if that felt like a standard performance to you from what you've seen of them in the past, or were they trying new stuff and it was maybe more like experimental

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