Hello and welcome

Hello and welcome everyone to the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell. And with me today is a man who spent at least some of the weekend buying even more Eunice Musa stock. It's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe.

Hello, Taylor. Yes, I did. I don't know how you found out about that. I thought my investment portfolio was private. Come on, man. I mean, you know, I just, I always have a like a notification for when there's been a massive amount of Eunice Musa stock purchased, and I then just assume that you're the one doing it. Because I think he had a very good game against Northern Ireland in the U.S. 2 to 1 win. I was, I was pretty happy to see him playing and looking pretty solid. I was pretty happy to see a U.S. team winning. We're going to talk about that senior teams 2-1 win over Northern Ireland later on. But we're going to start on the more depressing foot. The U.S.U.23s failed to qualify for the Olympics for the third time in a row. Eliminated 2-1 by Honduras, Honduras yet again. Honduras will now go to the Olympics along with Mexico. The United States will not. I want to hold off a little on what this means or how disappointed we are until we get through some of the basics of the game because there's been a lot of frustration with this result. I would say it was surprising to me that it was kind of on par with Kuva,

but I think when the U.S. fails to qualify for the World Cup and then fails again on the men's side,

it becomes more of a, is this a big deal?

We're not sure.

I've had a lot of those texts of is this.

Is this a big deal?

How big of a deal is this?

And I think we can maybe talk about that a little bit later, as I said, right now, Joe,

when you saw the U.S. lineup, the formation, kind of everything in the basic couple in those

opening couple minutes, how are you feeling what were your sort of primary concerns or areas of

concern about this game? So the U.S. come out in a 433. It's the same shape that Jason Christ has used all throughout this tournament.

It's the same shape that Greg Burralthers used for the most part, barring that Northern

Ireland game and one friendly in 2019.

We'll talk about that later.

But it's a predictable shape with a largely predictable group of players.

So I see the lineup and I see Andres Perea and Jackson Newellule, in the mid, in the midfield together. And almost immediately it takes me into thinking, okay, Andres Perea is going to be the six and Yule is going to be the eight because that's what we've seen in every minute that those two guys have been on the field. There is some interchanging, but it's largely Perea as the deeper midfielder and Yule out to the left. And there are some issues with that in my mind against a team like Honduras where you can predict the U.S. are going to have a lot of the ball. So I see the lineup and that's a concern because I think Jackson Ewell brings more value deeper down on the field where he can get more touches and he doesn't have to wait for the ball to circulate over to his side for him to then get on the ball and make something happen.

So that was a slight issue, but not entirely unpredictable. Then along that forward line, Georgi Mahaolovich as a right winger, I guess this is when the game started less when the lineup dropped. But Mahalovich as a right winger was a little bit surprising to me, but the fact that he's in that forward line didn't surprise me a ton just because Benji Michelle hadn't impressed and

Sebastian Sossato hadn't really impressed either. So you get Mahalovich and Lewis, the two guys who started, the first game was while Mahalovic started in the central space, but it's guys that Christ clearly believes in and they're more veteran players on this roster. And then Hesu Ferreira, I thought he was going to be a key player in this game because of how he can drop and help unlock a team. But, spoiler alert, we didn't really see that. We did not. So let's talk about a few of those players you've already mentioned there. Let's start with Jackson Yule. Because we had this conversation in the preview for this game where you were thinking he made more sense as a six. I felt like we would probably see him in that sort of number eight, shuttling number 10 sort of situation role. And I'm with you that like he probably makes more sense deeper. He can connect some passes. He can make sure that everything is functioning as it should. I think that's probably where he feels most comfortable.

And we did see Ewell and Perea switching on multiple occasions.

My feeling for why he would be further forward is because I think he's probably the most

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