Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to an international break episode of The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell and I'm your host for the day as we here at CSS try to honor Ryan Bailey's strict adherence to never discussing the international break.

Instead, I'm joined by Desert American Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe.

Shout out to the desert, baby. Hello.

An honorary American Graham Ruffin. Hello, Graham.

Shout out to the hells, baby. Hello, Taylor Rottwell.

This is my question. You are an honorary American. If you got to choose your state, I'm assuming it would be Florida, but there are no hills.

There is no cold rain there that I know of. It feels like Seattle. It feels like Portland. Pacific Northwest would be more significant to Portland. I've never mentioned it at all. No, I've never mentioned that once. I was going to say, to preempt Joe's point, I was going to say Oregon when I went there was like, this is home. Everything's a little bit bigger. The trees are a little bit bigger, but it's the closest I think that the US has to Scotland. So maybe I'm a Portlandian by nature. I think you're not allowed into Portland as a resident unless you have at least two tattoos, Graham. Where are we on that front? Have you gone to your barber tattoo artist slash bar slash tackle salesman?

I don't have ones that I can show you, but it depends what the test is.

It's just Joe, Joe's smiling face on his lower back. We all know that's Graham's tattoo. He's gone

for. We're not here to discuss Graham's body art. We are here to discuss the US men's national team

upcoming Cocky Calf Nation's League Games against Jamaica. We've got one on Thursday night in Jamaica and then a second four days later in St. Louis. Joe, if we're doing some opening table setting, what's at stake? What are we most excited for? Concaf Nations League, baby. I'll do the granular stuff first quarterfinals. You talked about where these games are being played. Should the U.S. advance, they'll play in the Conca Calf Nations League Final 4, which will be in March, I believe, in California. The favorites in each of these quarterfinal ties are the U.S. over Jamaica, though it's not a given because Jamaica are a decent team. Canada over Cernan, Mexico, over Honduras, and Panama over Costa Rica.

If all of those teams progress, the U.S. would play one of Canada, Mexico, or Panama.

Of course, all of that is still yet to be determined. What's at stake in a granular sense,

then, is winning games against regional rivals and pushing to play better regional rivals

in March, which you hope will prepare you better and

better for 2026.

To zoom out slightly, the big picture takeaway, and the one I think everybody cares about a whole

lot more, is this is another reason, another chance, I should say, to see what Maricio

Pacitino's version of the USM&T looks like.

We've only seen it in two games so far, one window so far, last month in those games the U.S. had against Panama at home and then against Mexico on the road and just outside of Guadalajara. Those are the only glimpses we've gotten to see of what Apache USM&T looks like. And maybe we'll do a bit of a refresher on that later on. We have some questions and talk about the squad and all of that stuff. But these games matter because they represent just the second of 10, only 10,

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