The 2023 Concacaf Gold Cup semifinal round kicks off on Wednesday with the U.S. men’s national team facing off with Panama.
After outlasting Canada in Sunday’s quarterfinal showdown, B.J. Callaghan’s squad now turns their sights towards a Panama squad seeking a first finals appearance since 2013. Panama steamrolled Qatar 4-0 on Saturday thanks to Edgar Barcenas’ opening goal paired with Ismael Diaz’s first international hat trick.
The USMNT needed a late tying goal to force a penalty shootout before Matt Turner made two key saves in the 3-2 result. Brandon Vazquez scored his third goal of the competition while Gianluca Busio and James Sands also impressed in the victory.
Jamaica and Mexico go head-to-head on the other side of the bracket with the chance of a finals berth. Jamaica remains unbeaten in the 2023 Gold Cup ahead of its clash with El Tri and will look to reach its first final since 2017.
Jamie Lozano’s squad cruised to a 2-0 victory against Costa Rica in their quarterfinal matchup, but will face a dangerous Jamaican attack led by in-form Demarai Gray.
Major League Soccer rages on with a busy midweek slate of action kicking off Matchday 23.
In the Eastern Conference, Nashville SC hosts sixth place Philadelphia Union in a battle of two conference contenders. With just four points separating the two clubs, Wednesday’s match will be crucial at Geodis Park.
Nashville SC suffered a shocking defeat to 11th-place Chicago Fire at the weekend while the Philadelphia Union lost 3-1 at the LA Galaxy.
San Jose’s home showdown with the Seattle Sounders is also a must-watch affair despite several players missing due to Gold Cup involvement.
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Here is a look at This Week’s Top 5 Matches to Watch, as well as a full rundown of This Week’s Soccer on TV and Online:
This Week’s Top 5 Matches to Watch
1. United States vs. Panama – The USMNT is just one match away from reaching the Concacaf Gold Cup Final for a second-consecutive edition.
2. Jamaica vs. Mexico – Jamaica and Mexico square off for a chance to play for the Gold Cup trophy.
3. Los Angeles FC vs. St. Louis City SC – Defending MLS champions Los Angeles FC hosts the No. 1 seed St. Louis CITY SC for the first time.
4. Nashville SC vs. Philadelphia Union – Hany Mukhtar and Daniel Gazdag headline the endless attacking talent for both Eastern Conference clubs.
5. San Jose Earthquakes vs. Seattle Sounders FC – After back-to-back draws, the San Jose Earthquakes welcome second place Seattle to town.
Click HERE for this weeks’ schedule:
So why is their no replacement for Aiden Morris since he left camp? Also they need to start calling up Tayvon Grey from NYCFC 🗽 ⚽
there are perhaps a few different aspects on morris. 1) i think he’s committed USA now. he was 21 when he played a friendly last year, and even if canada squabbled about that, he just appeared for a couple gold cup games and that’s official senior competition. 2) is he upset he did that? it was called “personal reasons” but this wouldn’t be anything he could undo. 3) gold cup roster rules said you could only swap for injuries. he’s not hurt.
i think they have far too much DM cover, what they needed was an AM. to be fair, i advocated jesus be played as AM or wide if need be, but still call another AM as depth/injury cover/sub. callaghan is slowly sorting out who to play but not as quickly as during nations league. this tournament he feels more like a berhalter clone with the same affections and blindspots.
Ahh okay, thanks for that TIV. So no replacement since no injury.
striker: i see it as a compromise of sorts. if you’re jamaica you don’t have several dozen more quality players sitting by phones. you don’t want shift changes like we were doing. it makes it harder for you to win the tournament and allows us to get off the hook for roster mistakes. so they got rid of the swaps entirely for a while. but then if you have a couple guys get hurt, you’re stuck, everyone is. so maybe jamaica agrees/votes, ok, everyone can swap out literally hurt players. jamaica doesn’t want to have to carry hurt players any more than we do and an isolated swap is less unfair than us doing a shift change of a half dozen new A team players like jozy and bradley back in the day. i mean we’d go from barely escaping group with a B team tying haiti to in the final or winning with an A team infusion. but this was also before doubling up with Nations League and what are now effectively “split squads.” not sure if we’d call a bunch more A team if we could. and that may be another reason we aren’t pushing for more.
gray as wingback or as CB?
I would not mind trying him as a wing back or a rcb in a 3 man back line to dee which one he is better at.
Can’t replace him for non-injury reasons. A fellow Crew fan thought they saw him in training in Cincy last week. I watched the video and thought it was him too but apparently it was not. No one at the Crew is saying what’s going on either. So if it was something NT related he’d just be back with them. Crew fans were worried he was working out a transfer but no rumors of that have come out and it’s been a long time.
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Gray is Olympic eligible, so I’d think he’d be looked at for that. Should have an U23 camp at least one of the windows this fall. Reynolds is Olympic eligible as well but less likely to be released for Paris 2024.
Can we not see the schedule of the actual games this week on TV anymore? Sort of misses the point to have an article talking about the top games on TV this week, but yet their dates / times / etc aren’t listed on this page.
The games are indeed listed you just have to click the link that is in the article. It is very time consuming to type every game out by hand. I am sorry for inconvenience.
David thanks for all your work. Could you add the dates and times for the top 5 you pick each week? Appreciate you and the rest of the staff.
After such a lack-luster performance by the USMNT and the strong performance by Panama against Qatar I actually see the US losing their Semi-Final match. The Mexico Vs. Jamaica game is a coin toss IMO….so I could see us facing Mexico in the 3rd place match.
Hmmm…. Don’t know about that. The US rarely has two underperforming games in a row.
I see it being another tight contest. Panama was a bit lackluster in the group stage and Qatar barely made it to the QF’s to begin with.
I see the US coming out flying in the semis. Especially if BJ gets the starting 11 right.
And what is the right starting 11 hour highness?
Why the snark Owen? 2tone’s comment seems spot on to me. Qatar did not put up a fight the way Canada did, and our starting lineup did not work well against Canada. Given the effort our guys put in, some preferred starters may not have the legs yet for tomorrow. Getting the lineup right is the biggest challenge yet for BJ as a coach.
owen: i rewatched the 2022 WCQ panama highlights and the goals were a mix of headers, PKs on headers, and ground passing. my initial reaction was start vazquez and hit crosses but i think the key is not so much that as get dangerous balls in the box and make them defend, because they seemed undisciplined like they will make mistakes or commit penalty fouls. you then need defenders with footspeed who can run and mark until they get sloppy with the ball. keepaway for keepaway’s sake would be ill advised — what punishes them is creating chances they have to defend. pressing did not seem to work because of their footspeed.
the way to lose to panama is run out some semi-skilled bunch of clods to play team defense not good enough to create chances, and not fast enough to actually stay with them. the couple times i can remember us losing to them it’s usually we don’t line up better skill and they beat us in footraces, ie, the game becomes athletic as opposed to technical. i am slightly concerned because a 3 DM lineup with players chosen to press and slower backs is within our roster and tendencies. you need to match their athletes and then be the more accurate and skilled team.
IV when in this tournament have we played 3 DMs?
JR: sounds clever except (a) one can debate whether that’s what the A team actually often tries to do (whether musah and mckennie are out there almost more for defense, offensive reputations aside — cause we could use reyna and pulisic and others central if we wanted to emphasize a more precision attack), (b) my bet is there might be some late game time periods when we subbed in a stalemate unit, but i’d have to go through and look, plus (c) we are running out of AMs to even run out there, and need to manage djordje’s minutes through the final. i want an AM element out there, but we have 1 AM left, 2 if we double book jesus, and folks often neglect the “holland” downside of running out the same players game after game.
I don’t see that happening at all, and Qatar were missing like 5 of their starters plus their goalkeeper through yellow card accumulation, so that Panama result was misleading. I will say that Panama typically gives us tough games, but we tend to always figure it out and get the result needed