The fans paid $100-plus to see a training session. U.S. Soccer would never admit that. Nor would its highest-paid employee. “No, we are in this to win,” USMNT coach Gregg Berhalter said Monday in St. Louis ahead of his team’s next challenge, a Tuesday friendly vs. Uruguay (8 p.m. ET, FS1).

But a majority of that team’s fans are still fuming about Friday’s 3-0 loss to Mexico, a loss which Berhalter claimed represented “progress.” His words gave off strong friendly-results-are-meaningless vibes. And so, on second thought, did his team’s tactical approach.

By now you’ve probably argued about it. Heard about it. Read about it. Argued about it some more. And yes, this is another article about it. Another take.

But this is also about context. About the reasons for it, the objective of it, and the details that doomed it.

View photos Gregg Berhalter's USMNT lost 3-0 to Mexico on Friday. But the coach saw "progress." (Getty) More

The USMNT’s overcorrection

The USMNT’s absolute insistence on playing through Mexico’s press was an extreme overcorrection for the Gold Cup final. Specifically, for the second half, when the U.S. neither possessed the ball nor progressed it into dangerous areas. Berhalter felt the answer was more possession. Some players felt otherwise. Berhalter, between then and now, evidently informed them that his answer was the right one.

And so he set up a training session Friday. To correct the undesirable behavior of July – “in the Gold Cup, we were too direct” – he taught undesirable behavior at the other end of the spectrum – “in this game, we were not direct enough.” The idea is that the exercise will help yield desirable behavior as a long-term compromise.

But the exercise was extremely flawed. Viewed as an experiment, it was unsuccessful. If coach did in fact instruct players to resist their own best judgement, refrain from playing long, and plunge into the teeth of the press at all costs, Friday was almost something less than soccer. It was blind adherence to ideals. Stubbornness that won’t serve the USMNT well in the long run.

The USMNT created space ... and didn’t use it

Soccer is a game of space. The USMNT, at times, created it just fine on Friday. But space is worthless if a team doesn’t use it. And the U.S., on so many maddening occasions, refused to.

The refusals were individual and structural and tactical. Some American players seemed allergic to ball progression, choosing to play backwards when more ambitious passes were on.

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Some breakdowns stemmed from off-ball movement, or a lack thereof. The U.S. committed to building from the back, along MetLife Stadium’s carpet, but often didn’t have a defined, coordinated plan for how to do so. When a fullback received the ball from a center back, for example, the near-side central midfielder would bolt diagonally up the sideline ... and nobody would check into the space he vacated.

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On other occasions, sloppy first touches led to turnovers. Slow thinking interrupted flow. U.S. center backs rarely, if ever, carried the ball past Mexican opponents and into midfield. U.S. midfielders rarely eliminated their counterparts via dribbles.

Mexico knew it had a talent advantage. It recognized that its rival had no scheme to neutralize that advantage, nor the technical ability to solve an aggressive press head-on. So it pushed its line of confrontation higher and higher, loosened its pressing triggers, and hunted the ball. In doing so, it left its defenders isolated.

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