Hello and welcome, hello and welcome everybody to the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and we've got a domestic soccer show for you today. There's a U.S. men's national team roster. We have not yet broken down. MLS playoff games to discuss and a championship game to preview. To help me do so, I'm joined by our MLS assist

colleagues up first, a friend whose analysis is never blurry, unlike an ESPN broadcast camera.

It's Jordan Angelie. Hi, Jordan. How you doing? Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Did you think you were going

crazy when you're watching that Philly New York City game? I was like, why has everybody

have a halo around them? Is that their aura? What's happening? I can't tell. But thank goodness they finally figure that out. And I'm happy to be here. And my vision is still pretty good, even though I do have to wear glasses. That makes me happy. That makes me happy. Yeah, I stream most things, especially when it comes to games that we're going to be talking about. I'll stream them on the monitor on the computer. And I definitely reset the router once, thinking, like, oh, it must be our internet. It's pretty choppy. It was not. It was ESPN. Hopefully we don't have that for the championship game. If we do, I'm sure we'll be discussing that. And if we do, Joe Lowry will probably be here to discuss it. Joe Lowry, I think a man who was one positive COVID test away for the Philadelphia Union from starting, or at least being on the bench. Joe, did you get a call up? Were there any discussions? So from what I understand, they just needed that 12th player to go down and to be unavailable. And then I was next on the list. They dipped into the MLS Reserve player pool first before they called me, which I was only slightly insulted by. But no, I think I was pretty close to being in that group. Joe, would you just go by Joe on the back of your jersey? Just Joe, Brazilian style. Yep, just Joe. No last name. No, not even my full first name. Just Joe.

I think that's the way to go. I like that a lot. I look forward to discussing what you all would have on your jerseys as well as the MLS Cup Championship game.

I would be the palest person to ever have just their last name on a jersey. I think that would be, just my first name, excuse me. I'm pretty sure that would be the case. I don't know if Peter Crouch ever had Peter on the back, but if so, he might give the road for your money. We're going to talk about MLS playoffs in a bit, MLS championship game this weekend. But a USM&T roster dropped last week. We have not spent any time discussing it. So we're going to rectify that now. First, a little bit of background.

It's the roster. dropped last week. We have not spent any time discussing it. So we're going to rectify that now.

First, a little bit of background. It's the roster for the December friendly versus Bosnia.

It's a non-Fifa window, so we're getting a lot of MLS players and one outlier.

Joe, my question for you to start could be a slightly downer of a way to begin this, but I'm going to go with it anyway.

How much can we take away from this camp? That is a thing I always struggle with from these types of camps, with these types of opponents. For example, if Kelan Acosta gives a 10 out of 10 performance against Bosnia, does that change the way we see him, or is it the best case that we're going to be thinking, like well we'll see what happens in an actual meaningful game might we see some interesting faces that then factor into

the camp down the road like what are your sort of optimistic hopes for this group i don't think

anything we see from the more established guys on this roster we'll run through the roster in just a

minute but i don't think anything we see from Calacosta as an example will really change, at least not in a positive way. We'll change how Greg Barlter looks at him or how we look at him. This camp is really happening for two reasons. The first reason is to keep the MLS guys fit, right? To get Ricardo Peppy minutes, to get Jossi's Ardis back into the fold, right, to get these more established MLS players minutes. And not all of those guys are here for a few different reasons, but to get those players involved and get their legs ready to go for the end of January, the beginning of February. The other reason, though, is to look at some less established players, some players that haven't

either been involved in the past or have barely been involved in the past.

It gives Berlther a chance to work with them in the camp leading up to that actual friendly

on December 18th.

And then it also gets a chance to see some actual minutes from those players, too.

So I don't think we should be going crazy with our evaluations of the more established

guys, but we can certainly learn things about what Berthor thinks of some of the young players,

and we can get a little bit of data on how they look in the game. So on the fly, I'm going to ask

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