Hello, hello everybody and welcome to the total soccer show. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and today at long last, we get to talk about an actual U.S. men's national team game. And to do so, I'm joined by a man who's been doing some whales watching. It's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe.

Oh, Taylor. That was brilliant. How are you doing? Not too bad. Not too bad. I felt like it's been so long since we talked USA. It felt only right to begin with a pun. It feels like what Darrell would have wanted. So I want to continue that legacy, even if it physically hurt me to make a pun that early in the show. That was very big of you. I think Darrell would appreciate that. I appreciate it as well. I'm not a fully pun guy, but I do appreciate a good pun every once in a while. I'm not a fully pun guy. I need that to be part of your Twitter biography from now on, Joe, if you don't mind. We might be able to make that happen. But I was indicating how excited I am in the beginning of this one. I am, I think this is the most excited

I've been to watch a soccer game in a very, very long time. Where are you with this national

team? Are you as hyped or are you a bit more cautious with some of the new names and keeping a

level head and whatnot? Deep down, I know I should be cautious. I know I should be taking a more

measured approach. But man, it's hard.

I'm so excited to see the U.S. play an actual game of soccer. Yeah, there's lots of difficult factors here. They haven't trained a whole lot. The U.S. hasn't trained a whole lot. A lot of new faces coming into the group. There's a lot of reasons to be measured. But man, it's hard, Taylor. And I appreciate that you're sort of right along with me on that.

And I think almost everyone listening to this show will be right with us on

that one. Yeah, I hope so. I will say I, to distract myself from election coverage, did put out a

post on Reddit about what are people excited for. And it was a good reminder that number one,

so much has changed between when when we last saw

the United States play in February and now, not just from a coronavirus standpoint, but from

what players have done and how players have evolved or moved on. Mitchell Marshall wrote a really

nice piece. Here's a quote from that. This time last year, Christian Polisic was trying to find

his footing at Chelsea. Giorina was just a whisper of a name outside of Germany. Weston McKinney was holding Shaka together with rubber bands,

and Sergenio Dest was just a backup for Iax. All of those players have had drastic changes

in where they're playing or how they're playing. And it's the first time, say, we've seen

Tyler Adams in 18 months. And I sort of forget all of these things

because my brain can be a little bit short-termy and not so much long-termy, but also just because

I think as we talk about as much soccer as we do, when the team isn't playing, it's easy to sort of

forget how much joy they can bring. And I think that was a big thing that I kept seeing in those posts was people were just being excited to see the national team play, being excited to see how this person has evolved and how they'll fit in or how this player's adjustment to a different position will factor in. And it was just a reminder of how many exciting players are in this pool and that Burrhalter has a few of them at his disposal. I think it's, we've only seen what

Adams McKinney and Polisick play together once. I'm not sure we'll see that this time. But just those, those reminders of how we still haven't really gotten to see the full strength U.S. team makes me all the more excited to see this team, even if they are not the full strength team. I mean, and there's names in this group, too, who if you'd asked me back in February,

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