Hello and welcome to the total soccer show.

My name is Daryl Grove. I'm joined by a man who just watched USA versus Venezuela with me. And he's got some thoughts. His name is Taylor Rockwell. Hello. Hello. I do indeed. And I can tell that you do too because the level of joy dictates how happy you are. That was only a slightly happy introduction, which means that you are miserable.

It's a less enthusiastic hello and welcome than people are used to. I think so. I think so. I think so. Justifiably so. Did I mention that? I just watch USA Venezuela. Yikes. So we're going to do this, right? So USA lost 3-0 to Venezuela in the final Gold Cup warm-up game, if that's really what it was. I even have questions about that. As do I. Rather than just complaining, which I know it's very tempting to do, we've kind of done that affair, right? We're going to try and analyze what went wrong. Yes. And we're going to think about how could it be fixed? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think to the extent that we can, that is the case. I'll just say like, I've done shows before where it was not with you.

It was after negative results and it was me and another person. And ended up just being kind of ranting. No one wants to hear two people just complain for the entire game because that's why you have Arsenal fan TV. You don't need us to do that. Well, if you are looking for rants, think of this as a more focused kind of rant with a point. There'll be some rats in there.

I'm pretty sure.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to get mad.

All right.

So three north of Venezuela.

All the goals in the first half. I mean, let's start with what went wrong. Any sort of major, like, tactical or personnel type things? I mean, nothing, like, that jumped off the page aside from, like, I guess I'm starting off very negative by saying that like

aside from that it wasn't a very inspiring lineup that this was kind of what we thought it would be

given injuries and trying to kind of rotate some players but you and I both looked at this and we were

like okay but we're missing and then we listed four players who will probably end up as starters yeah

and it was a lot of first choice players in this thing.

If we're going to do Gold Cup starters, I think you would add obviously Pulisic, you would have Tyler, add Tyler Adams, you would add Michael Bradley and Josie Alton do all to start. And apart from that, this is basically the lineup, right? So 7 of 11 feels like mostly the lineup. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so seeing that and kind of knowing that like when you look at the, say, attacking subs that we did have coming off the bench. Yeah. Morris and Holmes came off the bench. Yeah. Morris and Holmes. And then Alodore was on the bench. He could come on. It just, it didn't feel like a team that was necessarily, it didn't make me excited to watch. I wasn't like, this is going to be fun. It was more of me like, okay, I'll watch this because we need to know what's going on. But let's think of it this way, right?

Sure.

Only four starters missing to our calculations. I think the problems were with this system and the way that Greg Behalter wants this team to play, which I've mostly been in favor of until I saw it come up against this Venezuela team playing a 451 that made it difficult and then we didn't adapt at all.

So I think I until I saw it come up against this Venezuela team, playing a 451 that made it difficult, and then we didn't adapt at all.

So I think I want to dig into the tactical thing of why the Greg Berthelter 433 did not work against Venezuela.

And we talked about this during the game because I didn't quite understand what you were getting at.

Neither did I.

To be honest, it started as a complaint, and I think you kept essentially interrogated me until you made me say something that made sense. No, it was just, it was more like, like, because you were technically right. Basically, you were just saying that, like, it feels like we have a lot of possession, but we're not. Like, is that what we're going for? Yeah. and we kind of kept watching and kept kind of fine tuning it until

I think you're correct that basically it was possession but not necessarily the type of possession

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