Incorrect. What actually happened is the Swiss did not play with the same urgency in the second half, nor did they need to.
We’ve all seen numerous games where teams blow their opponent out of the water and coast in the second half. We’ve also seen numerous games where the second half subs in a friendly look better.
I think we all saw this to be true. It’s conjecture to say had they not taken their foot off the gas they would have been just as dominant in the second half. No way of knowing that, just like I can’t say had we started Tillman and Luna the first half would have looked a lot different. I believe that, but I can’t know that.
Posting the mins averages between Landon, Clint and Puli is an elementary way to look at this. First issue obviously is the intensity and stress within the mins themselves varies widely between levels and that's common knowledge. Second would be why are Puli's mins less? Because he's missed considerable time due to injury, particularly at Chelsea. Which of course ties into the question of durability and long term impact - he obviously doesn't have the bursts and explosiveness he used to. Third would be rest year on year. Landon benefited from the long MLS offseasons. Clint obviously had year between both the shorter EPL offseason and MLS. Puli since about 17 has had 3-4 weeks most summers in comparison. Even accounting for all this between the three it doesn't really mean shit. Puli isn't as durable as the other two given his own history. It doesn't matter where or why that lack of durability came. Would it have been different elsewhere? Doesn't matter. It is what it is. Puli structurally isn't on the high end of durability and it was compounded repeated muscle injuries around the hamstring/hips which can be ongoing.
The physical output numbers, based on tracking, we have for MLS vs European and other significant leagues show that MLS is pretty similar and the differences can easily be explained by the much more difficult the weather conditions are that MLS teams face. Added stress does have added negative physiological effects. Pulisic is less physically durable than Landon and Clint. He is more prone to injury at a lower workload threshold. Therefore he misses more games and plays fewer minutes. Clint played more minutes when he was Fulham’s talisman than Pulisic has as one of Milan’s main men. That’s likely due to that lower level of durability. Pulisic needs to be subbed earlier and he needs to have his minutes managed sooner. His need to take extra time off is also evidence of that. If Landon is playing more minutes in a year than Pulisic, and he is taking a longer off-season (don’t forget the playoffs), then that means he is playing a more intense workload during the season. Of course what really happened is that Donovan missed fewer national team matches, played a good deal of non-FIFA window offseason National Team games, and played 4ish MLS+Partial Euro season years. Do we think that lower durability level has contributed to Pulisic scoring and assisting against notably weaker international competition than Clint and Landon?
Disagree, we mentally broke El Tri in that game, and they went full Ardido. That's not an overrated performance. The Canada match is more nebulous, but I tend to wonder if we would have struggled w/chances in the 2nd half so much if Canada hadn't deliberately broken Gio's leg in the first. Will agree that El Tri and Canada were unusually bad in those games, however that was of a piece with are matches with El Tri the previous 20 months or so (dominating '21 victory at home, dominating should have won at Azteca), but Canada was in bad form from November '22 until Marsch straightened things out, so perhaps can agree on that. There's also the question of how much them sucking was us making them sucking? That window was for me the high water mark of this generation of players along with Window 5 of WCQ.
And no gigantic drop-off in many of the effort metrics from the Swiss. Switzerland(1st half) Fouls committed: 5 Tackles: 5 Ints: 3 Clearances: 9 Duels won: 21 Recoveries: 20 Switzerland(2nd half) Fouls committed: 5 Tackles: 2 Ints: 6 Clearances: 5 Duels won: 17 Recoveries: 26
I agree w/most of that, the only area of disagreement is rest. Dude played every window for the USMNT, and also spent 4 winters with Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, and Everton when he wasn't playing camp cupcakes and weird Gold Cup's like '22 (and weird friendlies against South Korea like earlier that winter). I just don't think Donovan got the rest you think he did, particularly considering he never skipped any US anything for more than a decade, some of this even included youth stuff (playing in the Sydney Olympics in '00, playing in the U20 WC in the summer of '01 (not sure if he helped us qualify in March of '01), trying to get us qualified for the '04 Olympics in winter '03-'04). I think he was quite clearly run into the ground from '98-'12, which is why he gassed out in '12 and didn't know if he ever wanted to play again. On Pulisic, the key reason I'm not up in arms, or not as pissed as normal is I agree. I think he's fragile, remarkably injury prone, and it's probably unwise to press our luck a year before the WC after he's managed to make it through 7000 minutes the past two years unscathed. He spent his entire Chelsea tenured, scathed, for lack of a better word, lol, and was repeatedly dealing with a variety of nagging issues at Dortmund. Like Tyler Adams health in '21-'22, I tend to think Pulisic's relative health '23-'25 is more an aberration than the injuries of the past. So I am cautiously optimistic that a net benefit of not playing this summer is him being healthy next summer, but that's based on nothing but intuition and vibes, not fundamentally sound scientific reasoning or anything. There's little doubt if he gets injured anyway, repeatedly in '25-'26, we'll feel like absolute idiots to some degree, and that's totally possible, honestly, I think likely. It's hard for me to believe after watching his '15-'22, that he could go '23-'26 w/o any injury problems. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Mexico individually and collectively played well below their level, we embarrassed them (in part by being clinical), they lost their shit. Completely consistent with what happened. The home WCQ was a better performance from us but they were also better. The away WCQ was a worse performance from both teams than the home WCQ, but in a tighter match and we finished poorly (Pefok and Pulisic missed the best chances). Our NL performance was almost as good as the home WCQ and their performance was worse than the away WCQ. Canada was just a bit flat and not at their best going into it. Once we got the lead they weren’t built/able to come back. Most games they’ve played against us they’ve been up for it. The other recent-ish game against them with a similar dynamic was the NL group stage second leg where we also scored early and got to play with a lead. You can suss out “forced” and “unforced” errors and then work through the more debatable elements with a little effort. Like say the performance in the 4-0 loss to CRC under Klinsmann was different, and more troubling, than the performance in the 4-0 loss to Argentina. Same thing can happen in wins. The basics of this are also useful for evaluating individual performance level where you need to adjust for team effects.
Using the second half against Switzerland for serious analysis is a fools errand. Really all it is is a test of fortitude.
Pochettino ... On Pulisic's reaction to USMNT staff's decision not to take him to Gold Cup. "Players don't need to understand or not understand [our decision]. They need to listen." "I respect and understand him. I don't need him to understand." Pochettino says he has good communication with Christian and other players. (But he adds he is not going to go all over the world to see every player. That's what his staff is for.) 1934016263015243969 is not a valid tweet id
There is much more culture correction going on behind the scenes than we know. There is much more culture correction that needed to happen than we were aware of.
Yeah, he went out of his way in that interview to demonstrate that Pulisic is not going to get treated differently than any other player. We can apply that to other guys like Weston and Weah as well. It was also made clear that Dest was willing and thought he was ready to go but they deemed him unfit for the duration of the tournament.
More here The Pochettino sound byte here is….something. “We” is said over 5x…. #USMNT pic.twitter.com/oWk5KivdGo— Taylor Twellman (@TaylorTwellman) June 15, 2025
Well they say any publicity is good publicity and there have been about 20 pages of discussion the few days since I last clicked on this thread.
Did I miss something? I thought it was Pulisic’ decision to not play in the Gold Cup. The authors lead in to this quote completely misrepresents things as I understood them.