Hello, hello everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell and with me today to discuss the USA's dramatic come-for-behind win on the road in World Cup qualifying against Honduras is a man who always gets both his starting 11 right and his substitutions right, which makes

him at least 50% better than Greg Burhalter on the evening. It's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe.

Taylor, if you'd seen me play FIFA, you would know that that's not true. But I appreciate the compliment

nonetheless. Yeah, man. So we are here to talk about the game that had us both scratching our

heads for a good long while afterwards last night.

Joe, what was your sort of approach to processing this one?

Did you rewatch right away?

Did you take a breather?

What did you go through?

I took a quick breath.

I'd already rewatch the first 10, 15 minutes at halftime.

So I took a breath.

I was comforted by the fact that I didn't have to watch the entire first half all over again right after the second half ended. But then, yeah, I kind of just got right back into it. And, and, you know, I don't know, I felt like it was better to just rip the band-aid off the second time rather than wait until the morning because it would have been early for me to wake up this morning. I kind of wonder if that will influence the way we perceive this, because I think I, as I tweeted, went out onto my porch. It was like 12.30 at night. I drank a drink. I thought about some things. And I think what I kept going back to, and you and I texted a little bit about this last night, is the idea that, like, though they get this resounding win and fight back and in other situations, if they won against El Salvador and then drew Canada or vice versa,

and then they got this win, I think I'm much more positive.

But because it was so poor at times, but then so much better at times, I left feeling like

I still don't have a very good read on this team.

And I think the goal for today is maybe for us both to figure some things out and get some clarity. Joe, like, where were you heading into that rewatch, though? Were you feeling pretty pessimistic? Yes. And to be honest, I know this is kind of what you're getting at before. I'm still feeling a bit pessimistic. And I'm not sure. Maybe that'll change over the course of the show. Maybe it won't. I'm excited to talk some of these things out. But man, the first half was just terrible. I don't, that was a pretty strongly worded tweet for me, for me, not for everyone. But I tweeted out at halftime. That was a terrible half of soccer from the U.S. men's national team. And it genuinely was. And like you said, the second half was better in a lot of different ways. I'm still not wholly convinced.

And I think it might be unrealistic for anyone to be totally convinced about this team

after one solid 45 minute stretch relative to maybe 225 minutes that weren't as convincing

over the other stretches of this window.

But still, there are positives to be found here.

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