Hello,

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell. No Daryl Grove with me today. He will be on later as we do our USMNT Transfer Spectacular. But for now, I'm going to be talking to Kim McCauley from All for 11 over at SB Nation. Kim, thanks so much for returning to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you back. It's a pleasure to talk the knockout round of the NWSL Challenge Cup. We've got, if people have missed the schedule, North Carolina Courage versus Portland Thorns, Houston Dash versus Utah, Royals on Friday, then Washington Spirit, Sky Blue FC, and O'L Rain and Chicago Red Stars on Saturday. We've had a lot of games in a short amount of time when Darrell and I cover tournaments, we kind of move from loving the tournament to hating the tournament at some point, and I'm wondering where you are in terms of tournament fatigue. Are you still enjoying the games or has it reached the its work stage or have you moved into

the I'm looking forward to this being overstage?

I'm still enjoying the games.

It's definitely a little tougher than like a World Cup just because the World Cup,

the games are like normally spaced.

And with this, the games are 10 hours apart, which I understand why they had to do it.

It makes perfect sense.

They can't play in the middle of the day because of the heat.

And they need time to disinfect everything between games.

So it makes perfect sense why they're doing it this way, given the situation.

But if you are somebody who has to report on both games,

it's certainly not ideal. It's kind of messed up my sleep schedule. I have enjoyed the various

reporters I've seen sort of go from like, NWSL is back to like, I love you all and I love this

league. I will be watching it tomorrow with a cup of coffee. That's my new approach to the 10m games.

Do you have that luxury or are you on deadlines?

Do you have to stay up and get it all done? I'm not on deadlines, but I've heard from people who have tried to do this that like they'll get up at 8 a.m. and the replay won't be ready yet. Oh, no. So, like, sometimes it takes like 12 hours for the replay to be available, so I've just decided to stay up.

All right. What's been your go-to of choice? Is it coffee, or is there something else to get you through the late games? Yeah, coffee is my go-to. Yeah, always, always. Well, you mentioned, like, the work that's being done to disinfect between the games.

That seems to me, like, the league sort of obviously taking things seriously, doing what they need to do.

Steffi Yang wrote a great piece about parenting inside the quarantine bubble, which I guess it's telling that I was surprised by how much thought and care had been put into things.

Are you pleased with the way the league has accommodated the players, or, again, is it telling that, like, I'm just surprised that a sports league has thought about players, like, needs at all? Well, I don't think it's that they thought about it. I think the players said, unless you do this, we're not playing. Which is a completely different, I don't know, a way to look at it. Yeah.

I can't say I'm pleased or not because I'm not there.

...