Jeff Rueter

Do you think?

If you could even call it a wall.

I'm not even sure they mixed their mortar before they assembled it.

And so to come back again takes great fortitude.

look you already alluded to it it's not a vintage Uruguay they're certainly struggling up top you know Luis Suarez watching on from the suite offered his services a bit late in the cycle to be able to be part of the squad and isn't it weird seeing him there looking like quite a nice guy the brand reconciliation has begun in earnest I really think it has but I think that they really did miss him and when you looked at the bench it was Darwin Nunez coming off the bench and you know terrible match fitness right now Rodrigo Aguirre has been in very poor form in Mexico I think only nine goals in his last 47 games so

Maybe it's the issues up top, maybe it's that Bielsa has to sit on a FIFA-sponsored cooler, which that's probably some bad juju there too, but yeah, tough one for Uruguay.

Well, I think that the Saudi Arabian performance, I thought, really deserved the scoreline, right?

And it's just interesting because we're now a few years into the pro league experiment, right?

And we're very used to seeing that sort of level of investment for players leaving Europe, especially.

And I think about all of the blather about the Club World Cup and the idea that this would help a lot more domestic leagues because then suddenly you're giving these prize pools where they're reinvesting across the league in theory.

And you see it with Egypt, for example, picking up a lot of players, Al-Ali certainly over the last two years.

And with Saudi Arabia, there just wasn't a lot of domestic talent who really looked like they were challenging, right?

And in the league, they're not the headliners when you think of Al-Halal's run that they made last summer at that Club World Cup.

And you look at this game.

Every loose ball was Spain's.

Every possible switch off with the off-ball movement, they didn't know how to pick it up.

And there weren't really a lot of players who seemed to know how to grab a game and try to wrestle it back into their control.

It just looked like they were really compliant and wanted Spain to be able to have their sort of bounce back after their opener.

They built into the game, right?

And they looked a little bit rattled by that first goal by New Zealand.