Hello,

Hello, Hello everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer Show, your final Total Soccer Show episode of the week.

My name is Taylor Rockwell with me today to talk Olympic qualifying, to talk U.S. senior roster, and to talk the UFA Champions League draw.

is a man who will harbor no slander against

Tassani Dodson.

It's Joe Lowry.

Hello, Joe.

Hello, Taylor.

That is 100% factual.

So last night after the USA's won no win over Costa Rica in their opening game of Olympic

qualifying, Joe and I did a little over an hour on stereo about the game. We did a kind of quick take, hot take, we answered some questions, and we left it with what are some things that we maybe need to review, what are some things we want to go back and watch. One of the only things I think we mildly, not even definitely, but mildly disagreed on, is I was a little bit cooler on Hassani Dotson's performance. Joe was a little bit more positive. Joe is having none of it, and we'll find out where we are later on in this episode. As I said, we're also going to talk about the senior U.S. men's roster, which has been released for their upcoming friendlies. We're going to talk you away for Champions League draw, which has now taken place. But first, we're going to start with that Olympic qualifier. Joe, before we even get to tactics or lineups or roster or anything that happened in the game, how exciting was it to just watch meaningful soccer? We talked about this at the very beginning of our stereo show. Some folks might have missed that one, and we know that our general audience wasn't listening,

so we should probably revisit that one for a moment, because I was pretty pumped to watch

this game and have it matter. It was fun, right? It was fun, but also not fun. And that's what soccer

is. That's what watching soccer that you care about is it's

it's really great yeah man when things are going well or or the buildup to it's really great and then

you kind of turn into a little bit of a nervous wreck during it and I I mean I wasn't I wasn't

biting my fingernails or anything in this one but it reminded me of what it feels like to watch

a soccer game that you care about and that's a pretty cool feeling after how strange and weird and terrible in some ways the last year's been. Yeah, man. That's really well said that it was like fun and not fun. And that is such, sadly, unless you're like a Byron or Barcelona fan, I'm in Barcelona lately, but maybe

just a Byron fan.

Like sadly, there is always going to be those moments of like, ooh, this isn't going

well.

And you're right that even like as I'm like supporting Manchester United, I have those moments where it's like, oh, this isn't going well. They're like, oh, I hope they see this game out. but it still is never really going to resonate with me as much as I think U.S. teams will.

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