Joining us now is Jimmy Conrad. He knows a thing or two about soccer.

CBS Sports Soccer analyst, long-lengthy career MLS.S.

He played for Team USA in 2006 in the World Cup.

Fans can tune in to the free 24-7 CBS Sports Galazo Network to hear all the latest analysis.

The World Cup and other soccer coverage throughout the year.

Galaise Network is available on CBSSports.com, the CBS Sports app other soccer coverage throughout the year. Galazza Network is available on CBS Sports.com, the CBS Sports app and on Paramount. Plus, and with that, Jimmy joins us. Jimmy, it's, of course, Boomer Assayson. I'm Jerry. Thank you for calling, and how are you this morning? Well, I can be better, to be honest, Jerry. Obviously, still in my feelings a little bit about how we performed with the bright lights shining on us. And a big game, obviously, one of the biggest in the U.S. men's and soccer men's side, I'd say, history. So, yeah, disappointed because, you know, I'll say this, just to get started. Every time the World Cup comes around, we've got four years to kind of, we're in a shop window for all the casual fans, right? They want to, they want to cheer on the team. And so when we give them performances to feel proud of, that just continues the conversation. And anytime we get knocked out, we lose that momentum that I think it really helped kind of continue to inspire the next generation and want to be a part of it, too. You know, Jimmy Boomer here, great to have you on. And for people out there who don't know Jimmy, Jimmy was a defender when he played.

And our defense was a disaster last night.

And as Carly Lloyd basically pointed out after the game, how do you explain what happened

with the goalie, the defense, and the way that they just seemed to like freeze up in the

moment? Yeah, so there were some signs there, Boomer, and great to speak with you. Earlier on in the tournament, where maybe not so much against Paraguay, which I thought was our best performance, the opening game of the tournament, we were excellent in every facet of the game. When we played against Australia, Australia actually rested or didn't start two of their better attacking players, which I thought it was a bit of a surprise. But when they brought those two players on, we started to have some vulnerabilities. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. Because it seemed like we were just trying to solve a lot of our defensive problems as high up the field as possible. So right when we lost the ball in the attack, we tried to win it back right away. And that was wildly successful for the first two games, which I think led to us winning those first two. Obviously, the third game, the Turkey game is a bit of a wash because we rotated the squad a lot. And then against Bosnia, we played against another team where that was really effective. Belgium are pretty much, they just, they don't react negatively to pressure. They've got a lot of,

a lot of talent and a lot of different areas, and that wasn't as effective, and they were starting

to play through us a little bit. And to your point, that's where things started to show up a

little bit, where we need to have different answers to solve problems. And what I, what we, what

normal teams do, or normally what happens is you just drop everybody back behind the ball. And that's okay, but you still want to have a plan of, okay, once we win it, what does it look like from there? And last night, every time we won the ball, we would miss the next pass. Or we would connect the first pass out of that win and then we'd miss the next one. And we can never really establish any rhythm or tempo, and that allowed Belgium just continued to get more and more momentum.

All right, so you said a lot there. Jimmy Conrad with us, member of the U.S. team for the

2002-2006 World Cup U.S. team. So is that coaching? Is it preparation? Is it anxiety?

Is it guys just failing in the moment? Because I heard

kind of a little bit of everything in what you just said. Yeah, yeah, I got a little soccer nerd on

you. But yeah, can I say all the above? I'm going to say all the above because I do think there

was a little bit of it, right? The pressure, regardless of the flow balligan situation, I think the pressure was going to, we were going to feel it anyway. There was some expectation that we should be beating this Belgium team. The bookies even had us beating this Belgium team. But I don't know if we necessarily played an opponent that compared to Belgium. So maybe that was a little unfair. And maybe we felt the weight of that a little bit. Plus, we started every game. With the first three games, four games, we scored really early. We scored in the first half of every single game. And this game didn't feel, even though we did do that, it didn't feel like we were really in control of any part of that. So to answer your question directly, it's a little bit of everybody. The coach has to take responsibility, not just in this moment, right? That, to your point before, the defensive structure has to be worked on consistently leading up to the tournament, in the tournament, and continuing to be fine-tuning that, especially as you kind of adjust to each opponent. And then the players have to take accountability, right? I mean, if you're going to win any game of consequence, you need the majority of your players giving you a seven out of eight out of ten

performance. And yesterday, we just had too many guys giving us a four or five out of ten.

You know, Jimmy, you know, the thing about it is everybody who watches whatever sport they

...