Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

I am your host for today, Taylor Rockwell.

I am joined on the other end of the line by Henry Bushnell of Yahoo Sports. Henry spent the summer, at least the past month of the summer, covering the U.S. men's national team in the Gold Cup. He was traveling with them. He was going to games. He was in the mix zones trying to get quotes while writing simultaneously because he's just that good. So Henry is with me today to help me make sense of the Gold Cup final, the Gold Cup as a whole from the United States men's national team perspective, looking at some players that may be shown brighter than we thought they would, some that maybe didn't end up shining quite as brightly as we had hoped, but then also getting into some of Greg Burrhalter's tactical decisions, some of his substitution decisions in the final specifically, and then what Henry would like to see from the team going forward, both just like from a general perspective as well as with the upcoming Nations League

games in mind, some players who he wants to see called in, some maybe new looks he wants for the team.

And I'm happy to hear what Henry would like because we really enjoy Henry. I gush a little bit about him or to him on the show, but I should add, Joe and I really enjoyed his coverage for Yahoo. He does a really good job of kind of combining all of the elements you want to hear about with the team without getting overly focused on maybe details. You don't necessarily need to know. So we enjoy Henry. Hopefully you will enjoy this conversation and

enjoy reading him in the future. With me now, I've got Henry Bushnell, features writer for Yahoo Sports. Henry, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you for having me, Taylor. It's great to be back. And thank you for supporting the show, by the way. It sounds like you listened a couple times during the Women's World Cup and the Gold Cup and all that good stuff. I absolutely did. I'll be honest, I did not listen to every single one of them.

Then we're going to during the Women's World Cup and the Gold Cup and all that good stuff? I absolutely did.

I'll be honest, I did not listen to every single one of them. Then we're going to hang up, and you're going to go listen to those. We'll be back on. We'll talk about those. It's fine. It's fine. Don't worry about it. But I certainly listened to a lot of the, especially the men's national team stuff as I was following them. and yeah, it's great stuff.

All the previews, all the, all the, all the, all the postgame stuff. Often I will listen to post game shows before I go and write my articles. Oh, that's good. I'm glad we can hopefully be of some use. And thank you for that. Thank you for the work you've been doing. I've been reading your stuff as well, which is why I wanted to talk to you today, because you've been covering the U.S. men's national team throughout the Gold Cup. Now that that competition is over, I wanted to talk to you a bit about sort of what happened throughout the Gold Cup and then also what happens going forward. But first, I wanted to kind of, you know, like force you into a corner by asking you a very reductive and overly simplistic question, because that's how we roll over here. If you're looking at the U.S. team right now, the U.S. men's national team, I should stress, like if you were going with a state of the union style summary of the team, usually it's, you know, the state of our union is strong. Make of that what you will. If you were going to go with the state of the U.S. men's national team right now, how would you categorize it? I would say more encouraging than a couple, than a year or two ago. I'd say like encouraging, but with a lot of caveats and like just acknowledging

that we're still in a very like nascent stage of what Greg Burhall is trying to do here.

And a lot of the growth I think will be player driven and player dependent.

That's fair.

But I also think like some of like reading your comments or reading your articles, I made a mistake of reading the comments, specifically the one about the Gold Cup final.

Obviously mistake, never read the comments.

Never read Yahoo comments specifically.

True.

But I was struck by like how angry everyone is about this team, but then how like literally

every negative response is very certain about what is definitely wrong with this team.

And yet they're all very different in their kind of summaries.

And that makes me wonder, like I'm not breaking any new ground here, I don't think, but

I'm wondering where you come in on the idea like, do you think this is the fan base on the men's side is the most polarized it's been in a while? Or do you think maybe after the failure to qualify is when we saw the most sort of frustration in vitriol?

That's a really interesting question, because I think obviously a lot of the frustration now stems from the failure

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