Hello and welcome,

Hello and welcome everybody to The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

Here with me to talk a lot about the U.S. men's national team is my friend and yours.

It's Mr. Joe Lowry.

Hello, Joe.

Hello, Taylor.

There's no time for convoluted introductions because it is not just you and me today on this Tuesday episode.

We are joined by two gentlemen. The first has been here before making a return appearance from

the scuffed podcast is Mr. Adam Bells. Adam, good to have you back. Good to be back, Taylor and Joe.

And I believe, I believe speaking with us for the first time or at least me in podcast form is Greg Velasquez.

Greg, it's great to finally get to chat. How are you doing, man? Yeah, this is my very first TSS cap. Okay, I wasn't sure if Daryl had the foresight and wisdom to chat with you, but I know there was, we talked about this last time Bells was on, that I think Bells and Daryl had done like three or four shows together, but we had never been on the show together. And I wanted to

make sure that there was no friendly rivalry and now we have Greg here so we can all just be best friends and that's the plan we're all going to end up best friends or at each other's throats by the end of this very long recording process. Yeah I've already I've already worked on figuring out who my enemy is going to be from Scudge podcast. I can't say it yet, but I'm working on it, guys. That's good. All right. I'm glad that's an evolving process. This is going to be part one of a crossover series. Part two will be available in the SCUFT feed. We have not talked about when each episode is being released. Probably should have gotten to that. But who needs details when you've got a bunch of questions to answer,

which we do there about the USM&T past and present,

about Burrhalter, about Concaf, a bunch of other topics.

First, I wanted to start on a slightly tricky note

because it is the thing that really resonated,

at least for me from y'all's episodes during World Cup qualifying, it seemed like I think that you all were sort of grappling with. Joe and I I think definitely did. The idea that coming into qualifying Greg Burrhalter was, at least in my opinion, very much the right coach, he had a plan, he had a system. It seemed like everybody was on board. And yet there was a period when, I think, like, midway through the Honduras game,

that the U.S. was going to come away from qualifying with two points from three games.

And that feels like this type of situation that leads to a coach traditionally getting fired.

And so this kind of, like, difference of a coach who I thought was very, very good in getting the right

result and getting the right decisions and then two points from three games. Obviously,

...