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Message: [QUOTE="Forza Azzurri, post: 4706702, member: 1452"] I have been out of the country for the last couple of weeks so have not seen the lead up games. As a result, I am looking at this game in a vacuum and will be making a bunch of assumptions. My first assumption is that the cumulative minutes from prior games impacted this game. We simply looked a step slow all game and we committed a lot of really bad turnovers all game long. To me that looked like heavy legs from minutes logged. Am I wrong about that? While Holden kept focusing on the space behind the wingers and in front of the backs (and I agree there was a lot of it), the bigger issue for me was the number of times Panamanian midfielders were able to receive the ball in the middle third and turn and go. This then allowed the ball to be spread wide or to run at us. So, to me, the biggest issue was the lack of pressure by our midfield on their midfield. Busio and Mikahlovic (sp) were bypassed far too easily and Sands simply doesn't cover enough ground and is not strong enough to make up for that. The lack of our physicality in midfield was a real issue yesterday. As was the fact that neither Cowell nor Ferreira dropped back to help. Nor did Reynolds or Jones really try to get forward This created all the space on the wings. This may have been tactical but the combination of the three made for a really bad first half. I think the subs in the second half really helped to make the game more balanced. I believe this was Panama's A team versus what was, in effect, our B\C team. As Orangezoo pointed out, we had a ton of youth and inexperience on the field and it showed. One thing about a young team. They have no idea how to manage a game. They just go-go-go and late in a tournament under those conditions that is a very hard thing to do. This game could have gone either way and penalty shootouts are always a crap shoot. This time we lost. Looking forward to seeing Musah and Pulisic at Milan and Weah at Juve. Hopefully, they can get on the field. [/QUOTE]

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