The United States dropped its second match in a row Tuesday, losing 2-0 to Portugal in a friendly at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta to conclude its March international window.<\/p>\n
Francisco Trinc\u00e3o opened the scoring in the first half and\u00a0Jo\u00e3o F\u00e9lix added a goal in the second half with a sweet volley from the top of the penalty area from a set play.<\/p>\n
The Americans were coming off a 5-2 thrashing at the hands of Belgium on Saturday in their final matches before Mauricio Pochettino names his World Cup squad on May 26.<\/p>\n
The U.S. coach made six changes to the team that lost to Belgium, with Christian Pulisic starting in a central role at the top of Pochettino’s formation. The tactical shift did not help Pulisic break out of his scoring slump, as he was substituted at halftime in his eighth-straight game for the U.S. without a goal.<\/p>\n
Pochettino has two more warmup games with the USMNT before the start of the World Cup — against Senegal on May 31 and Germany on June 6.<\/p>\n
The U.S. begins Group D play at the World Cup on June 12 against Paraguay in Inglewood, California, before playing Australia and\u00a0T\u00fcrkiye in its quest to reach the knockout rounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States dropped its second match in a row Tuesday, losing 2-0 to Portugal in a friendly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-863752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116326804101040514","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}