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

My name is Joe Lowry, and I am joined by the one, the only Graham Ruffin.

Some say the Diego Luna to my Max Arfston to recap the USM&T's 2-1 friendly loss to TurkeyA on Saturday afternoon.

The game was just finished up.

It's afternoon for me, Graham. It's not afternoon for you. I want to know how you explain to your wife and daughter that you're up late, not watching Scotland, that you're up late watching the Yanks play soccer. How does this go down? Hello, Joel Lerbe. Yes, they are used to this scenario by now. To be honest, a friendly between Turkey and the US is definitely not the

weirdest match that I have stayed up late to watch. So this is just the life that, the life that I

lead, the life that we both lead, Taylor and Ryan today, Taylor, I presume, felt too conflicted

about a US Turkey match, considering he's, you know, spent a lot of his youth throwing phones

at players from the stands in Istanbul. And I presume Ryan is too busy celebrating England's 101 over Andorra today. So, you know, football's coming home and all that. So it's just the two of us today, Joe, to talk about this epic. You know, missing Ryan obviously hurts his clever introductions. I'll not be able to match. Missing Taylor is, though, the real blow for this show, not just because of his USMNT knowledge, but, Graham, you make a great point. His pronunciation game is super strong on the Turkish player names, and I just don't have it in my bag, and I know you don't have it in your bag. Oh, absolutely not. we're flying slightly blind. And I do appreciate the image of you telling your family what you're watching. And they're like, oh, that's too mainstream. Like, that's not even a deep enough cut. That's pathetic from you. We were going to talk all about the US MOTES 2-1 lost to Turkey. Grimm, I want to start more generally. And we talked a little bit before we started recording about kind of our impressions of the game and both timidly sort of said, that was fun? What did you make of this game? Like, what's your macro 10,000 foot view of this match? Yeah, I thought it was fun. The tone was set by Mark Shaker, the anthem singer, really going for it with his anthem before the game.

I mean, yeah, settle down pal. Tyler Adams isn't even playing. But I thought it was a fun match.

And maybe it's because the standard has been on the floor with this team over the last few months, really going back to last year.

But yeah, I thought it was pretty good with

exception of a ragged few minutes in the first half. I thought there was a lot to like about the

US performance. And we can talk about the setup and the individual performances, and I'm sure

that we will. But one of the biggest positives, just like the biggest macro positive from

this game, I thought was the spirit of the performance,

because that is a question that has been openly asked of this team. It's been asked by people

within the camp, by Pochitino, reading between the lines of some of his comments recently,

by some of the players as well. Would we see intensity? Would we see speed of play? Would we see

players getting stuck in and rolling up their sleeves? And I thought we saw a good deal of that. And in terms of the actual soccer stuff as well, there was good pressure on the ball. There were some nice sequences as well. So I am broadly positive about what I've just watched. Yeah, I completely agree. It was not a perfect game from the U.S. men's national team in

that little window in the second half where all of a sudden it's one-null up to two, one down,

and kind of the blink of an eye was a good illustration of that, and the U.S. had given up some other looks early in the first half that we'll get to as well. Not a perfect game, but the fact that the U.S. hung against a Turkey team that has, frankly, I think it was the more talented team,

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