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

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and I'm assuming at least a few of you are listening to this with pitchforks in hand,

because tonight we're talking about the U.S. men's national teams 1-0 loss to Panama on the road in World Cup qualifying.

Here with me to talk about a game that was so, so bad, that we watched it twice. It's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching that game twice. Oh, you got it, Taylor. I think you can tell how bad a game is by the number of people that message us on Twitter offering their condolences that we have to watch this again or that we choose to watch this again? And I got several of those and I assume you did as well. Taylor, this was not a good game. The thing that I do appreciate though and you can start to gauge is when people say like, you don't need to watch that again. Don't watch that again. You shouldn't watch that again. When people are like, I'm sorry that you have to watch it again, to me that says everybody did not enjoy that game, but everybody wants answers and is as confused as we definitely were. Because after the Jamaica game, I think we were feeling somewhat more positive, but I think there are some caveats in there that are worth exploring later on. But I want to go back to the Jamaica game, because with that game, Joe, I asked you sort of how different things were from first viewing to second viewing. I'm going to ask you the same again tonight. I will say, and not to start us off on too negative of a foot, but this is one of the few times I can remember that it was pretty much completely worse the second time I watched it. I turned to you to ask, how are you feeling, Joe? Well, maybe this is a slight positive. I felt about the same when I watched it the first time and the second time, which is to say it was really bad both times. So it's not like a major positive there. But my outlook on the game stayed fairly similar. I learned more things the second time through as we always do. And so maybe just taking more extensive notes that time through and figuring out a short list of, man, this went wrong and this went wrong and this went wrong because this went wrong. Going through that process isn't especially fun. And so maybe that's why you left feeling a bit worse about things, Taylor, and I guess I kind of did too, but it largely stayed the same for me. Well, I think that's a good reminder that, like, in watching it again, even if it looks worse, at least we can come up with some ideas and some answers for what clearly did not, where it clearly was not going right, and then hope that we avoid those or properly deal with them next time. I'm also really excited to listen to lots of other different podcasts about this game because I think you could watch this game two or three or four times and come away with different conclusions a lot of the time. Some of them will be the same and I think you and I are going to have some similarities. Maybe we'll have some differences. Joe, let's get into this one though. let's try to figure out what maybe specifically went wrong. We'll see if we can come up with a list of sorts. What we learned, where we go from here, hopefully somewhere positive. But let's start with the lineups and the overall approach for the U.S. I think this was a, for me at least, the first kind of miscalculation across the board for Greg Burhalter. And I would say that with that in mind, when I first saw the lineup, I wasn't too surprised. It seemed like a lot of what we expected, of player rotation of the players that we knew wouldn't be there because they weren't permitted to travel. So no Weston McKinney, no Anthony Robinson, no Zach Stephan.

But I think in retrospect, this is where I'm trying to own the fact that this is definitely a hindsight opinion for me.

Thinking about seven changes from that Jamaica game and the point that you Joe made in that Jamaica game,

that it wasn't a very compact Jamaica, it wasn't a high-pressing Jamaica.

It was this sort of mixed approach Jamaica that left tons of space and tons of openings. And I think you're not like to start again negative, but I think

your takeaway was a little bit that we don't quite know that much more because Jamaica didn't

play a way that kind of lets us figure them out and find a way through. And so I think coming into this

one, with those changes, you don't have the

kind of cohesiveness you would if you had more, maybe starters that had played together in more

games and more meaningful games at that. I do feel like a little bit that sense of complacency we

saw in the first three games of World Cup qualifying returned. What did you think of the lineup

when you first saw it? And have you had

similar hindsight of 2020 changes of heart? I think everyone has to an extent, right? And that

includes Greg Berlter. When I saw this lineup, I thought, this is fine. We expected rotation,

maybe not quite this much. But I mean, I'm of the belief that in a lot of spots, not every

spot, but in a lot of spots in the U.S. 11, there's not a ton of difference between two and three or at times between one and two on the depth chart. So I wasn't especially bothered that we're seeing a line up with seven changes from game one of this window to game two because game three is coming up right around the corner, right? That's the challenge of this particular World Cup qualifying cycle. And Greg Berothor, I think, rotates more than other coaches do, certainly than Panama has done and a lot of other teams in Concaf as well. But he talked about this after the game. This was with an eye to Wednesday. And if on Wednesday they don't have a good result, then you look back and think, man, the rotation for this window really did not work. And it certainly didn't work for this game. But I saw this lineup and I immediately thought to what Greg Berlter was likely thinking at the time we learned after he was. This is maybe not entirely about this game. This group should have been good enough to get a result. And it turns out they weren't. but they should have been able to get a result, and it should have allowed Berhalter to use that best 11 or as close to a best 11 as he can get for that Wednesday game against Costa Rica. So the talent should have been there. And I can understand the reasoning behind what he's doing, but it clearly did not pay off. And I think that it's, it is, again, I don't think I'm just trying to explain myself here, but I think it's okay to not be so upset about that lineup. And I know there's a ton of people that would have liked to see Luca de La Torre or see Jean-Lugabuccio. I think we've talked about reasons why maybe they didn't start in the past. But largely, I just agree with you, Joe, that I think there aren't huge drop-offs, but I think there aren't huge drop-offs when we're playing the same way. And against Jamaica, it seemed, again, like we had turned a page. We had learned some things that there was less directness or less consistent directness. If the ball was on over the top, they would hit it, but there was also a lot of passes through the middle. There was sometimes it was slow, sometimes it was fast.

We got different styles of buildup, and it felt like there was better communication,

better organization, better defensive solidarity, essentially.

And I don't think we saw any of that in this game.

...