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The Disney Lullaby playlist. Listen now. Hello, fellow masochist, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and it's Saturday night.

It could be a relaxing fun time to refresh and recharge from the week,

but the U.S. men's national team played a game, so let the disappointment rain.

Joining me to break down the USA's 2-0 loss to the Republic of Korea is a man who, if nothing else, got to celebrate at least one brief moment from this game. Joe Lowry did the introduction of Florin Balligan in the second half make up for the entire rest of the performance. I mean, how could that not make you smile? Balgan came on immediately had some successful battles with Kim Min-J,

then proceeded to miss two shots right on the doorstep, like racked up the XG, had some impactful moments. This is my Super Bowl, Taylor, this whole thing. We'll get into this much more in detail. Did you feel better or worse about Balagan at full time? Better. I mean, well, actually the same, the same, because I've been high on him the whole time, and I thought he was quite good in this game. All right, all right. We will certainly dive into that later in the episode. For now, setting the stage, as of today, we have 279 days until the 2026 World Cup. We're recording this Saturday night, as I said. including this current one. We have four international breaks between now and the beginning of the tournament. That does not count a potential January camp, nor the international window just before the start of the World

Cup, because we would assume that squad is going to be ideally finalized by then. So not a ton

of time. With the loss, the U.S. Record under Pachitino is now nine wins, one draw, seven losses,

very little in between with this team, 23 goals four and 22 against.

And for this loss, there were a few players that came out relatively unscathed,

a few who did the opposite of that.

And overall, a feeling that this was certainly not a surprise result,

which is kind of a bummer given the World Cup is right around the corner. Joe, is there any reason for this not to be just kind of a straight up disappointing result for you? No, not really. I think what you said is true, Taylor. There are players here that came out of this game with their hands fairly clean. Some of the players off the bench, I think, were quite good in this game. We've already mentioned one of them. Although we should note that South Korea basically stopped playing in the second half because they had that two-no lead heading into halftime. I think the U.S. outshot them something like 14 to 1 in the second 45 minutes. It was 14 to 1. But the game was basically over, right? I mean, the U.S. still didn't show that many signs of going in there and finding goals other than that Chris Richards' chance off of the Sebastian Baralther set piece, which I think that just needs to be the whole U.S. game plan, right? It's just said Baralther booming the ball into the box for Chris Richards. Who is working the Gold Cup? Maybe aware that that ball was coming in. I don't know if he actually meant to do anything on that. Taylor, their connection. There's a connection there. Don't overthink it. Okay. Outside of that moment and then the balligan, a couple of chances. Like those were the U.S. moments to equalize in the second half. But really, yeah, you didn't see a ton from South Korea in that second 45, all things considered. and really just an interesting game like across the board one thing I said to you before we started recording you know you can look at the U.S.

from a whole lot of different angles right now the angle I'm choosing to look at it from is that this team is a very very interesting one to talk about right now like I truly have more juice for these shows than I have had in quite some time

because I think a lot of things are going wrong. I think a lot of things are preventable in

...