Pre-match: USA v Australia Game 2 6/19 3 pm ET

The King with a sore calf!
The land without a King!

 

Environment here is unreal today. My buddy was downtown at 9am and it was already too full, had to decamp to over by Seattle Center.

 

How reliable is that source? I still don’t see anything official?

 

Bar

 

Goff is 100% reliable.

 

The lineups are straight from the FIFA website.

 

Gronk has a job where he gets paid to talk?

Wild.

 

A reminder to everyone that the in game thread is in USA Men, not USA Men News & Analysis

 

Alexi pontificating..... snore

 

Two strikers... very interesting.

 

I think Balogun is likely to play a little back and left of Pepi. Poch is likely hoping the change from last week is a minor one. But I’m happy to see a 3-5-2 if that’s how it plays out.

 

Pepi will do some poaching for Poch. I like it.

 

One sign of our growing maturity as a soccer nation will be moving on from this guy.

 

Wondering how serious puli injury really is…

el tren avanzaaaa

 

Fox in the box.

His movement is great.

 

I’d rather see us move on from Zlatan tbh.

 

Yep and it's worth noting they lost to Italy on one of the worst penalties you'll ever see given in a knockout match (An Australian goes down, falls, while defending, and an Italian proceeds to deliberately dribble at a leisurely pace into him, and fall like a 92 year old senior breaking their hip on their stairs. It was absolutely ludicrous).

But, he's also significantly overrating that Australia's talent. They had some legit studs, but they were filled with spackle all over the damn place, and relied almost entirely on 2 guys for their attack.

This US team rolls out a defense that is 3 EPL guys and a Barcelona 20+ mill buy (who crashed out), a MF of an EPL guy, a Bundesliga guy and the best dude at Juve in multiple years, our WF's are a Champions League Winner with EPL and Serie A study years in his backpacker, our strikers have double digit CL goals between them and have 38 goals this past year combined despite missing more than a dozen games etc....

They played better and more consistently as a team unit, while we had and have orders of magnitude better talent.....the better team wins, but if Poch has figured this out (and so far we have had basically a bad experimental march and otherwise, excellent windows in October, November and now our opener, well.....)....

But what do you really think he'd say? That the '06 Australian side had half the talent of this American side? That American side in '06, dramatically inferior to this one, tied that same Italy playing with 9 men for basically a half and this team is about 10x better, again, than that one....

 

Funny, I was doing the same thing in 100 degree Nevada, came in, washed that off, and thought, "You know, the best solution is probably just Pepi, and Balo together," but I figured I was crazy and here we are, he did it!

I think it's the right decision, my only concern is if we just should have rolled Weah into that slot, but honestly, with twin attacking weapons playing in front of McKennie, Tillman, Jedi, and Dest should work.

 

I think what it was was a prior injury that got aggravated in training, then he took a kick in the same spot again against Paraguay. Pretty sure that's what happened.

 

Anyone else feeling that this is a trap game? Australia will bunker and counter and will absolutely burn Ream. Yeah, sort of cliche, but the first goal here will be so, so important.

 

I like it a lot. Robinson can stay high and wide to provide width which is important against 5 across the back. We shouldn't need an extra number to control the game in the midfield, and put their center backs under pressure with two true 9s. They both are comfortable dropping in the midfield too, which could drag their centerbacks into positions they do not want to be in and open up space in their backline.

 

Agreed AND everyone now knows where to kick him.....