USMNT 1 - Brazil 4: USA GetS Waxed

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If you were to read through the headlines this morning, though I'm not sure I'd advise doing that, you'll likely find a good share of articles that talk about the United States' inability to keep the ball or build possession to penetrate Brazil's defense and create goal scoring chances. Others will mention a lack a terse focus for a back four that surrendered multiple goals that should probably have never happened. The rest will consist of sharp lashings that end with the inevitable and deserved questioning of leadership within the hierarchy of US soccer.

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Gold Cup Team Preview: United States

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On July 7th the United States Men will play their first competitive match in nearly a year, and in so doing begin their defense of the Gold Cup. A successful run through the final in Philadelphia would guarantee their place in the Confederations Cup in 2017, and confirm them as the dominant force in CONCACAF. Failure to win would not be the end of the world, but it would put a damper on the momentum the team has recently built with a positive World Cup run followed by overall strong performances in this cycle’s friendlies. In the end, a Gold Cup win keeps the U.S. on Jurgen Klinsmann’s aggressive path to improvement. An exit of any kind will start to raise doubts if the team has the talent to make a serious run this cycle.

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Herculez Gomez: What 52 Goals Look Like

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By Drew Olsen (@DrewJOlsen)

In August and September we collected data on the last few years of Herculez Gomez's incredible career, and Harrison wrote a great article about it. As a follow up to all that work, we wanted to show our readers what 52 goals actually look like.*

Herc is one of the best pure American strikers of all time, and we hope this infographic does a little to drive that point home. You won't see any xGoals or advanced statistics, but we think these numbers speak for themselves.

*Harrison's article only shows 48 goals. This is because for a few international games we were able to find Herc's goals, but not every shot he took in the game. We excluded the incomplete games from that dataset used to calculate xGoals.

HercInfographic