#679: USA v Portgual recap
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Scuffed (USMNT & World Cup)
World Cup 2026 expectations
The reason you schedule these teams is to find out where you will get beat by these teams in June. We aren't a top 8, 12, or 16 team in the world, probably, but can we do enough that on a day where the breaks go our way, we don't go down in flames?
Tactical analysis
You have this hilarious line of three defenders taking who should be able to combine to take away the entire far post, but they end up directly stacked behind each other in a conga line. If any of them takes a quarter of a step towards the far post, then he cannot score.
They can rondo in a phone booth and we can't, and that's basically the story of the game.
The wedding cake failures of the past have been that the opposing attack gets into our wide zones, and you've got to have that protection in front of goal. In this window, we got bodies back, but we over-recovered and turned it into a sheet cake.
World Cup 2026 outlook
I guess it is kind of just we are where we thought we were a long time ago. It's like there aren't going to be any big accelerations and development before the World Cup. It just is what it is, and we gotta hope for kind of a magical run.
Player form
We seem to lack that last touch and a half quality, certainly from the guy we lean on to always be able to deliver that quality when it counts in Christian Pulisic.
Ricardo Pepi is a poacher, he's a goal scorer, but in the run of play, he has a rough time contributing at this level. That seems to be where PSV have landed on him.
Manager decisions
I was not blown away that Ricardo Pepi wasn't starting, but I just never expected that Pochettino would be like, 'Well, then I'll just not use one of any of the other strikers.'
USMNT squad depth
If Aiden Morris and Sebastian Berhalter can play on the same field as these Portugal players the way they did, and not be total clown shoes, that buys you something for the World Cup itself.
Player potential
Having anyone who can throw off a defensive shape on their own that way, like Patrick Agyemang can, is just massive. Even more so in international soccer.
