Three Things: After a half of optimism, USMNT get a painful lesson from Belgium
Mauricio Pochettino tossed the dice on a new (old) tactical approach and, after a halftime adjustment, Belgium forced the US to pay the price
"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."
― Enrico Fermi
The end of a World Cup cycle is not the time for experiments. But sometimes fate intervenes – sometimes necessity is the mother of invention – and I'm certainly not going to throw any shade at Mauricio Pochettino for digging into his bag on Saturday afternoon for a 5-2 loss vs. Belgium. His hand was clearly forced by the injuries to Chris Richards and Miles Robinson, and as has been the coach’s way since last September.
But it was a brutal second half, on par with what we saw last year in the loss to Switzerland. So now we’ve got a new set of tactical questions, which I will get into in a second. But the bigger-picture takeaway is that after 45 minutes in which the US largely continued the good play and the good vibes from last autumn, and did so against a top-10 team that certainly did not seem to be taking it easy, in the second half all of that evaporated.
Ok, let’s talk tactics:
