Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a very late night edition of The Total Soccer Show.

If you are listening to this late at night and if you are listening to it in the morning, then good morning.

Things are still bleak.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

I am joining you more or less straight after the U.S. M&T's 1-0 loss to Uruguay in the Cop America that eliminates

them in the group stages, not clearing the minimum bar that we had established here on the show.

We're going to talk about individual performances, about the tactics, about Greg Berhalter, about where we go next, all those good things, but I cannot do those things alone.

I must instead

be joined by Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe. Hello, Taylor. When Taylor says more or less, right after the U.S.'s loss to Uruguay, the end of their Cop America campaign, what he means to say is Joe took forever to get through the press conference and the mix zone. And Christian Polisic was drawn into a random doping test and that took forever and Joe said hold on I need a little bit more time

and Taylor was very very patient and I'm thankful. That's what you meant to say, I would assume. I mean, yeah. But, you know, it gave me an opportunity to watch about 60 minutes of the game, more than I had intended to watch again. Because it's a strange one. And we can start with the big picture, which is that the U.S. loses, is eliminated, doesn't score a goal, has very few shots on target.

And it's overall an okay performance if you remove all of the context.

But when you add the context of this competition of going out in the

group stage of the expectation and the failure to meet that expectation, it becomes, if not a

disaster, then a very big problem for Greg Berhalter if he would like to stay in charge of the

U.S.

Yep, no doubt about this.

The U.S. failed.

They underachieved for really, I think, the first time you could talk

about World Cup qualifying, finishing third in the Ocho as an underachieving. They made it to the

World Cup and qualifying sort of a weird thing, but I'm happy to toss that into that category

if we want to, but really, at an actual tournament, I'm thinking Gold Cup, I'm thinking

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