Was the U.S.'s lost to Portugal a blip? Or were there some learnings here to take out of this international window?

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub. I am your host, Claire Watkins.

It is Thursday, October 30th. And we got a chance to watch the second two games of this U.S.

and national team window. And things looked better. And from the outside, we're seeing some patterns emerge with some positive performances,

some tweaks to the formation that I think the team should take into their final friendlies in

November.

And we've got some stocks really, really rising from this young group that are always kind of

going out there and making themselves proud.

Let's dig into what we saw.

So the U.S. played two more matches after their somewhat inauspicious start last Thursday,

which was good. It gave us all some time to calm down a little bit, give things kind of a holistic

view, enjoy some nice performances, throw this one kind of into the learning experience bucket as

an entire week with some low lows and maybe some high highs. They did go on to beat Portugal

in their second game against them on Sunday, three to one, two goals by Olivia Moultrie,

and then one by Sam Coffee. And then they closed the window out by fully dismantling New Zealand last night,

six to nothing, as we kind of expected. Hat trick by Emma Sears, a brace by Katerina

McCarrio, a classic Rose LaVelle banger. New Zealand was overmatched. I think we kind of

expected that one going

into this. But, you know, an emphatic ending to sort of an ups and down, an emotional roller

coaster of an international break. After that second match where they do go on to, so they split the

games against Portugal, they lose one and they win one. Emma Hayes did call that opening loss. She was on

the broadcast. She called it a blip, which I found very interesting, kind of in what we did

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