Hello everybody and welcome to the total soccer show.

I'm your host Taylor Rockwell.

Daryl Grove is not with me instead

i'm going to be having a long long long conversation with mr joe lowry of the athletic as well as

many other publications and sites uh i talked about this a little bit earlier in the week we've had paul

ternario on we had filippe cardenas on to help me kind of make sense of U.S. from a more general perspective and the results against Uruguay and Mexico. With Joe, we talk a little bit about that up front, about like kind of the state of the team, the styles we've seen, the patterns we've seen so far, but then we get pretty in depth on some of the players that we've enjoyed, some of the players we didn't enjoy, what we saw, what these players need to work on. That was the thing I enjoyed immensely, was kind of trying to find things that we want to be able to track and see how players improve in terms of individual abilities, could be passing, could be on the ball decision making, could be defensive positioning, lots of different stuff in there. We get to sort of what our ideal U.S. squad looks like right now, combining what Burrhalter does with what we want to see done.

And we close it out with some long-awaited, if you are in the kind of American Southwest discussion of Phoenix Rising, the U.S.

Championship side, who are far and away the best team in USL championship, an 18-point lead

at the top of the Western Conference. They have broken the record for, I think, longest winning

streak in any U.S. soccer system that at least has been tracked. I'm sure somebody will email

in to say that this team in 1904 did it better. But I'm sticking with Phoenix Rising for now.

So we talk about that.

We talk about individual players.

We talk about the national team as a whole.

We talk about Burhalter's style and tactics.

Lots of great USM&T chat in there.

So I will stop talking and instead say.

Joe, thank you very much for taking the time to come back on the show for the second time in fewer than two weeks. Not bad.

Of course. Thanks for having me back on, Taylor. I like coming on and doing it a couple times in a couple weeks is great with me. It's a new one. So we did a sort of preview of the Mexico game and it's sort of a general look at the camp. now that that camp is done,

the international break is over,

we can sort of look back on it,

and I think a good way to start

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