You look at a player like that with how well she played this year and you think, wow, that

player still has a lot to give.

Why would they be walking away?

But also with what I know about a listener, I'm not surprised at all that she really thought

about it in terms of, like I said, the program, not just her.

All right.

Hello, everybody.

And welcome to a special Saturday edition of the late sub. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday in the States. We took a couple of days off to make it to the weekend because we did have a big weekend game to talk about. We thought we just do it right away, right after final whistle. Of course, we needed to discuss the United States friendly against England. 80,000 plus at Wembley

Stadium. Big deal. People always remember that game two years ago and how it kind of set

these two teams on two different trajectories short term, but then also some of the connections

made for the United States in this game two years ago, set them up for that Olympic glory this year.

This has always been a really good test

between two really good teams that actually like to play in similar ways. They match up well

physically against one another. Always a really, really great test. Always a little bit of

edge to it. You know, there was the United States defeating England in the 2019 semifinal,

which I think always kind of really kind of set this off as one of the nice rivalries in an international football

on the women's side. And so maybe we go into this. It's Emma Hayes returned to England. I think that she

wanted to put on a good showing in front of, you know, her country people and the fact that she's

playing against some of her Chelsea players and just this nice kind of full circle moment after the United

States did so well at the 2024 Olympics and England did so well

at the 2023 World Cup. And yet, this game was mostly played without a ton of shots on goal.

There's a little bit of a snoozer nil-nill between England and the United States.

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