Hello and Welcome

Hello and welcome everybody to The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and joining me today to recap the weekend performances of some of our best and brightest soccer players is a man who has a better record than Christian Pulisic when it comes to FAA Cup finals.

He has yet to lose.

It's Joe Lowry.

Hello, Joe.

That is 100% factual. Come at me, Christian Polis. Like, what are you? I mean, Captain America 2, as Ryan Bailey calls you? Come on. Get on my level. Right. I mean, he's lost the one. You've lost the none. So I think right now you have the advantage. We'll see how it plays out over the course of both of your careers. I'm not ruling anything out. We are going to talk about Christian Pulisic later. He is one of the players that I wanted to spotlight this weekend. We are going to be talking about six Americans who did things this weekend, maybe a few other ones in there at random points. But Joe, since I did the intro with Europe, let's start with Major League Soccer, shall we? Oh, let's do it. I wanted to talk about Eric Williamson. As we were getting together and trying to figure out, okay, who are we going to bring up, who are we going to discuss? Basically the first player that came to my mind, certainly the first domestic player, but kind of the first player in general, that came into my mind was Eric Williamson. He started and played the full game for the Portland and timbers in their 2-0-0 win over the San Jose earthquakes on Saturday.

Taylor, he had both assists playing in a role that he really hasn't played in, at least for Portland before, and looked really, really good.

I think this is just an all part of some sort of elaborate Portland-based scheme to make Jason

Christ look really bad.

It really does seem to happen.

Like, every week or every other week, there's another clip in which somebody can snarkily,

but accurately say, I wonder if this would have been of youth when we were trying to qualify for the Olympics.

But let's not have snark, Joe.

Let's instead talk about that new role you mentioned and what he's doing with Portland.

Yeah, so he started as the deepest central midfielder in Gio Savarais's midfield. So he started as essentially the defensive midfielder, which is not usually his job. Usually it's Diego Chara and Eric Williamson playing next to each other. We saw that all through last season. We've seen it multiple times already in this young Major League soccer season. But Diego Charra wasn't in Portland's Game Day roster. So Eric Williamson then slotted back a little bit further in midfield. He had Yimmy Chara and Andy Polo playing in front of him. Sometimes those guys looked like dual eights. Other times they looked like a little staggered. It doesn't matter so much. The key point here that I'm

trying to make is that Williamson was that number six. And he did really, really well, almost

surprisingly well in that role. And he still exhibited a very similar set of skills that he uses

higher up the field. He wasn't shackled by that defensive midfield role like I thought he might be.

He still drove forward. He still was an influence in the attack. And that leads right into his first assist of this game, which is the one I really want to focus on. He had one in the fifth minute and then one in the 74th minute. That last one was a nice little clipped cross to the backpost from Marvin Laria for Portland to ice that game against San Jose. But the first one, Taylor, fifth minute, early on in the game,

Eric Williamson picks up the ball at the edge of the final third kind of.

And he drives it forward, absolutely toasts former Atlanta United midfielder Eric Remedy,

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