Yes, but that's the kind of thing that you sense when you're dialed in, you just know that run's coming. Being out of season for over a month means that you're not yet used to thinking at game speed, much less "going against Bale looking for an equalizer in a World Cup" game speed. I mean I know that you can't prove a counter factual, but I'm not at all surprised that it was Zim and not Ream that made that error. Ream's dialed in. He's playing the best soccer of his life right now, and he's been ramping up to that for months at Fulham. It's not out of the clear blue at all. I think that Zim's getting himself back up to game speed. I think he'd be much less likely to make a bad error like that again on Saturday.
I sort of feel like Dest will be our WCXI selection. Has the club pedigree. Has an offensive contribution Has a history of warming into tournaments. It's going to be hard for Tyler to beat out MFers who have scored. Ream is the next best possibility.
Relevant to all three gs games, not just Iran but the defense has outperformed every other US team in a WC since 1990, most by a significant margin. With two shutouts, we matched the *total* number of shutouts we got in the WC from 1990-2014. The only two were Mexico 2002 and Algeria 2010. From 1990-2014 the mean and median number of goals conceded in the group stage was 5. We bettered that by 4 this group stage. The next best number of goals conceded was 3, in 1994. Fwiw the mean and median goals scored in group stages from 1990-2014 are 2.7 and 3 respectively. We slightly underperformed that number but not by anything like the margin wrt goals conceded.