with a war of words brewing off the field<\/a> between media pundits, the fight will continue on it.<\/p>\nPochettino\u2019s halftime speech was captured in Episode 5 of the HBO docuseries around the team called \u201cU.S. Against the World\u201d, as well as in U.S. Soccer\u2019s own \u201cBehind The Crest\u201d series. In the second half, the U.S. took those words to heart and showed up with more fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey come and they fight,\u201d Pochettino said in his speech. \u201cWhen are we going to fix that? \u2026 Match their aggressiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the end of the game, Chris Richards said if he didn\u2019t get a \u201cs\u2014 yellow card\u201d, he \u201cprobably would\u2019ve killed somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. won the game 2-1, behind two Haji Wright goals but, more importantly, fought for each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember going to halftime, the coach wasn\u2019t too happy with letting them punch us, in a way, without punching back,\u201d Wright said. \u201cSo I think going into this game we\u2019ll be able to prepare a bit more, knowing how they\u2019re going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Surprisingly for such a physical game, there were just two yellow cards handed out. By fulltime, the U.S. was called for more fouls (16) than their opponents (13).<\/p>\n
\u201cThat game in Colorado was fun,\u201d winger Tim Weah said, with a big grin. \u201cThat experience was fun. It was aggressive. I think from that game, we\u2019ve changed a lot. We\u2019ve gotten a bit more aggressive as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Friday\u2019s match will be even more intense and the U.S. is waiting to find out the status of Pulisic. The star forward exited the team\u2019s win over Paraguay at halftime with a knock (calf). As of Tuesday he was still in modified training, not with the group, and is labelled as \u201cday-to-day\u201d by the team. His teammates have said this week that they expect him to be ready for the game, though.<\/p>\n
Either way, no matter who is on the field, the United States is ready for the fight. So is Australia, who won\u2019t back down, either. Both groups of players respect the other locker room. Whoever wins will control their destiny in Group D, as finishing first place sets up a much more manageable knockout round path than sliding to second or third.<\/p>\n
Neither team is thinking of that yet, though. Just trying to pick up three points and fight like hell for every blade of grass.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a great game, they\u2019re going to fight,\u201d Berhalter said. \u201cWe like teams that have that brotherhood, you know? We like teams that you can see they\u2019re hungry, they want to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IRVINE, Calif. \u2014 Going into halftime the last time the United States played Australia, head coach Mauricio Pochettino…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":708085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,1246,113962,6090,3,403,21,19,22,20,25,47812,24],"class_list":["post-708084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-australia","tag-fifa-mens-world-cup","tag-international-football","tag-news","tag-soccer","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-mens-national-team","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/708085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}