Hello, Hello everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell and joining me today to break down the latest U.S. men's national

team roster, the first of World Cup qualifying, is a fellow who's ready to banish the demons

of Kouva, to forget about the last time we tried to qualify and instead focus on the happy, hopefully happy future. It's Joe Lowry. Hi, Joe. We have a roster.

Oh, I'm so, Taylor, I am so ready to banish those demons. I don't think I have the power to actually do that. But if I did, believe me, I would have done it a long time ago.

This roster is, it's a good one. It's an exciting one. and it signifies something greater and hopefully a larger shift or maybe the biggest moment of the shift we've kind of been seeing since 2017. I'm, I'm pumped, man. Joe, you have been expensing exorcism lessons for like the last year now. And I assumed that that was to get rid of the

Kuva demons. Is that not what's been happening? Has that just all been fraudulent? Unrelated. No, those are

unrelated expenses, Taylor. We can talk about this later. All right. That's fair. So we have a 26 player

roster. We'll instead talk about that. The game day roster remains only 23 players, but I think

Barhalter wanted depth, wanted to be able to cover for injuries, but also probably wanted to get looks at a couple different names and faces.

Joe, we're going to break down the roster by position.

We're going to talk about some omissions.

We're going to answer some questions.

But the first thing I wanted to ask you is basically what were your initial thoughts when you saw this roster.

I will say for me, it was a strange combination of like about what I expected, but also still surprising simultaneously. Yeah, no, same here. Like the first name I was, I was really surprised to not see because the goalkeepers are pretty chalky, right? Pretty standard. But the first name I didn't see was Reggie Cannon. And I thought, man, that's a little bit strange. And there were a couple of those other ones. And so I sat and thought about it for a minute and scrolled through Twitter a little bit. And there's a lot of logical explanations and some people just theorizing, but a lot of things that make sense as to why certain players were omitted. That's not to say that I entirely agree with this roster, but I tweeted this out. It's hard for me to find real things to complain about. I can split hairs. We can split hairs. And there are some people who have real passion and are not as ambivalent about some of these things as I am, maybe. But overall, I think this is a strong squad with,

as you said, Taylor, maybe a couple surprises here and there. Yeah, I agree with everything you said,

Joe, because there are definitely going to be folks out there who have very strong opinions about certain players. I'm going to assume Julian Green's father wanted Julian Green to be on this roster.

And so I don't begrudge people that. I just think it's worth acknowledging that, like, not everybody feels that passionately

about certain players.

And there's not an overall conspiracy if your player isn't selected.

I do understand why maybe people were confused why say there was no Eunice Musa, but I think

there are, in a lot of cases, logical explanations or at least semi-logical explanations.

...