Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. I am your host Taylor Rockwell. Daryl

Grove is not with me in studio

today uh he will be back with me tomorrow when we will review the usa's friendly against uruguay

and we hope for a better result than we got friday night against me speaking of that i have sam

stage school with me of the athletic uh sam is going to be helping me make a little bit more sense of the

u s three no loss to mexico uh we talk a little bit about what Sam's expectations were heading into the game and sort of what he thinks went wrong and why it went wrong. But then there's larger conversations about Greg Berhalter and how he kind of approaches dealing with media, dealing with the players, dealing with changing his approach. We talk about the game against Uruguay, which will happen Tuesday night. Obviously, six U.S. players sent home, so how maybe the roster will look and what that lineup might look like. And we close it out by talking a little bit of the collective bargaining agreement. Sam wrote a great piece about that for the athletic, sort of looking back at the negotiations in 2015 and all of the kind of craziness that went on there, and then looking ahead

to the upcoming negotiations, how things might be different, how they might not be different,

and what just the overall future may hold. So lots of great topics in there. Sam, as always,

is a great guest with, I should say, like, different thoughts to my own, but the type of differences

that, like, I appreciate because they expose me to new ways of thinking or new ways of understanding. And I mean that sincerely, Sam is great for that type of conversation. So I very much enjoyed this one. Hopefully you will as well. And with all that said, I will stop talking. With me now, making his return to the Total Soccer Show is Mr. Sam Steskell of the Athletics. Sam, thank you very much for taking

the time to speak with me today. Of course. Thanks for having you. Of course. And I'm excited to have you on. I'm excited for you to help me make sense of the game Friday night as well as the kind of fallout from that game. I don't know if you were there or like how much attention you were paying to it. I'm assuming a decent amount, but I'm wondering for you heading into that Mexico

friendly kind of what were your expectations, how were you feeling heading into it, and then obviously how are you feeling at the end of it? Sure. So expectations heading into it were, I mean, I don't want to say I was predicting that it would be that bad, but I wasn't expecting

the U.S. to win. Certainly. I was expecting Mexico to win. They have better players, better team,

better roster. They're certainly more in sync, I think, than the U.S. are right now with what

they want to do stylistically. So I was expecting the U.S. to lose the game. I wasn't expecting it to be quite that

bad. I thought it would be more competitive than it was. But, you know, Greg Burhalter is pretty

clearly committed to the style over results in friendlies, which I think, you know, you can argue

that that's fine. I personally don't really get it, but we can get into that a little bit more later.

So, and then after the match, I mean, it was pretty comprehensive loss.

You know, the U.S. couldn't do anything.

Mexico were pretty overwhelming.

And I thought kind of the talent gap as well as kind of the the like I mentioned earlier the comfort in the

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