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LurkingHorn

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Posts posted by LurkingHorn

  1. 1 hour ago, Napoleon said:

    Was it COVID seating rules?

    Or was ICE set up all around the stadium?

    Puliaic was right to skip this shit. T&T thought that they were playing rugby. No reason for any play of any level of talent to play in this shit tournament.

    I still don’t think he should have skipped it. Glad to see the group rebound though. 
     

    Watching this Haiti-Saudi Arabia game and they are terrible. Not sure if Saudi is missing some players due to club World Cup, but it’s tough to understand how they beat Argentina. 

  2. 45 minutes ago, Mittens said:

    Never thought I would have said this, but I miss the good ol' days....

    image.png.6190b56de38cf02b7d88ea46b32012a7.png

    WC Qualy: 2-0 over Panama

    I will say, a shitty part about hosting the WC is not having qualifiers. The whole process is a roller coaster but the games actually mean something. 

    1 hour ago, tokamak said:

    OK but isn't that a big problem in and of itself? We have precious few opportunities to actually play games together between now and the WC. Especially opportunities to play against a credible European opponent. Is the talent pool so thin that we have to waste one of those games on a bunch of guys that have no business being part of the '26 team?

    That's my biggest issue. We are simply squandering the precious few opportunities we have to build. This team isn't good enough to flip a switch and make a run. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  3. 1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:


    If this was the #1s, I agree with this, but it wasn’t. I mean this was a C squad at best out there. It was a chance to see some guys under pressure and a lot of them wilted. It was bad yes, but like others have said a lot of this squad is not going to sniff the field next year.

    One thing is the gap between the A and B squad is huge (not to mention to these C guys). I get what Poch wants to do, see if he can get guys to bridge that gap, but that is a huge jump, I don’t know if it happens. I don’t see any guys ready to make that jump.

    In the short term what do we do? We gotta hope we have our #1s ready for next year. If we e don’t we at fucked.

     

    Someone else said fire all of US Soccer. They aren’t wrong. The state of the entire program is a major indictment to nearly everything that transpired post-Klinsmann. He said what the federation should do, and they did just about the opposite. They used to foster hungry guys, now everyone is entitled and soft. Yes, Berhalter was a problem, but more symptom than the real illness.

    I think some of the recent changes (the appointment of Brian Crocker for example) are attempts to fix things, but they’re way, way too late and also not deep enough into the core of the federation’s mission. 

    Last night was a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with US Soccer. Players sitting out, the coach throwing a terrible lineup out there, and on top of it, charging extremely high prices for a friendly so the stands aren't full. But thank god they're maximizing revenue. Sure are making good use of that. 

    Going to US games, even friendlies used to be so much freaking fun. It felt like a brotherhood in some ways. I know the attendance said 20k yesterday, but color me skeptical. Can't help but thinking back to when I first really became a fan. In 2007 when we played Ecuador in a random friendly in March, 30k+ people showed up to watch it. Think about how empty the stadium would be if we were to play that game this year. 

    • Hook 'Em 2
  4. 50 minutes ago, tokamak said:

    So what the fuck do we even do? This thing needs a full on reboot but there’s not enough time nor enough games left for that. The pool is either disinterested or sucks and Poch is pretty much just here to chill for 18 months between European jobs. 

    There’s nothing meaningful that can be done at this point. There’s no time left which is why this tournament was so important to have our best players for. Now we go back to starting from scratch after the Gold Cup.
     

    We are in for a South Africa-type World Cup at this pace. Which is embarrassing considering how much money is poured into the game in this country. 

  5. Like most things, these 2 comparisons are not apples to apples. Landon is probably not the right person to present these messages, but he's not wrong. 

    Christian Pulisic is 26 years old and didn't even play as many minutes this year as some of the players playing in that final yesterday. He also will not be playing Champions League ball next year, so the likelihood of fatigue will be greatly diminished. 

    You can agree or disagree with Donovan taking his sabbatical, but he was 30+ years old at the time and had played in 3 World Cups, a Confederations Cup, and however many Gold Cups prior to the sabbatical. The major controversy around LD not being included on the squad was that Klismann actually brought him back for the Gold Cup and the last 2 qualifiers against Costa Rica and Mexico where he started and went 90 in both. He actually got an assist and goal against Mexico, which clinched our qualification for the World Cup. The fact that he didn't make the squad so we could bring Chris Wondolowski is still perplexing to me. 

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    • Like 1
  6. I'm signed up with FIFA for the ticket announcement or whatever. What are my actual odds at landing a couple of tickets to a US group stage game? I honestly don't know any other way to try to get them except paying crazy fees on the secondary market. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  7. On 5/25/2025 at 9:30 PM, tokamak said:

    I hope this doesn’t qualify as a hawt take, but tbh my interest in this World Cup cycle is waning pretty badly right now. This version of the USMNT isn’t extremely likeable and chronically underachieves, Poch doesn’t seem to give a fuck, ticket prices will be astronomical, and it’s going to be one giant corporate fuck fest. FIFA is a giant corrupt piece of shit, Infantino is a disgusting human being, and there’s the kind of cloak room aspect that I won’t get into because this isn’t the right place. There was a time when I was really looking forward to this and would have told you I’m ready to pay whatever price to go to a game. But at this point, I can’t predict the future, but I think it’s equally likely that I barely even pay attention next year. 

     

     Come back to this post on June 11th, 2026 and tell us you still feel that way. 

    My dad HATED soccer so I never even knew we had the World Cup in the US in 1994, much less that we had a game 20 minutes from my house. I have a 7-year-old who is now super into soccer and I will be taking him to as many games as we can possibly go to. 20 years from now, the memories of having that experience is going to far outweigh any cloak room aspects that are happening in our current time. 

    I don't disagree with any of the other things you mentioned, but my unsolicited advice is not to let those things rob you of an awesome experience we will likely not have again in our lifetime. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  8. Count me as one that has the alarm bells ringing with Poch at this point. This dude does not seem to understand the timeline he's on.  You can heavily rotate the squad in the group stage in the Gold Cup so the players avoid getting run down. 

  9. 5 minutes ago, immamac said:

    I think podcasts are just the medium in which they need to get the message out, not necessarily because they are podcasts, but because in large amounts people that aren't just mainlining fox news are getting the majority of their worldview from the podcast realm. it's not exactly a small portion of eyes and ears -- it directly competes with the reach and size of traditional broadcast networks, especially with millennials, zoomers and alphas.

    Exactly. My BIL was always leaning Trump anyway, but hearing him and his buddies talk about how Trump went on podcasts for 3 hours, they had a lot of respect for him putting himself out there in the places they consume media, even if they thought some of the stuff he said was idiotic. They knew nothing of Kamala but what they were told on these platforms. 

    Obviously, some shows simply aren't going to have Dems on, but you cannot gift the GOP 3 hours to spew BS without trying to counteract it--not when the reach of these shows are what they are. 

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