Hello Sunshine, I'm Alexi Lollis and welcome to the State of the Union

podcast. We will look at the beautiful game on and off the field through the lens of

red white and blue colored glasses. This week on the State of the Union we'll be talking about

Liverpool and Pulisic and the NWSL and Barcelona and

Byron Munich and Kankakaf and so much more. But first, joining me as always is my friend, my colleague,

my guiding light, David Mossier, soccer savant and a fox soccer researcher and writer extraordinary.

Mossy, before I throw it over to you, I wanted to take a moment here at the top of the show

to discuss very briefly what happened over the weekend.

Many of you that listen to the show will already know,

but for those that don't, this will be new.

I woke up on Saturday and like a lot of people I woke up very excited for the opportunity to watch professional American soccer.

Once again, the return of not just American professional soccer, but the return of professional league sports in a team setting in the form of the NWSL. North Carolina Courage versus the Portland

Thorns. We had talked about this before and we were made very well aware

that the National Anthem which we know has become a point of contention was going to be played as opposed to

MLS in their tournament not playing it and WSL decided to play the national anthem and so there was obviously some curiosity as to how that was going to go.

I watched the game and I was curious to see what happened and for those that watched the entire 22 players, starting players on the field,

CBS showed it, were all taking a knee. But we we were seeing I think was that new normal on display and me in my

infinite wisdom in that moment I decided to tweet something, an observational tweet

about what I was seeing.

Unfortunately, that was not the thing to do.

It was poorly timed. It was lacking context. And it was

insensitive. And it was also distracting to what I said was a very important and powerful moment that was going on the

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