Not without suffering more than expected, the United States national team won 1-0 on the second day of the Gold Cup to practically advance to the next phase of the 2025 edition of the Concacaf tournament.

When the USMNT led by Argentine Mauricio Pochettino was expected to have a performance with authority and could have run over the Middle Eastern team, they once again showed several lapses of tactical ineptitude that ruined the South American coach's plans to be able to add another victory by several goals as happened in their first game when they thrashed Trinidad and Tobago 5-0.

It is true that the result should have been bigger, but in reality the North American team still lacks the fine touch to be able to reflect in the enemy goal the flow of plays that they carry out throughout the 90 minutes, especially lacking the talent of the main reference Christian Pulisic.

Saudi Arabia, for its part, was far from the level it showed three years ago when they beat Argentina under the orders of French coach Herve Renard and where in the end they prevented Mexico from advancing to the next round of the World Cup by not being able to score one more goal that they needed to leave Poland on the way.

Now at least without that accumulation of offensive plays they preferred to assume a more reserved attitude and practically threw themselves to defend their goal to prevent the United States from being able to increase the score and even complicating the situation to the point that the winning goal was scored by Chris Richards until the 63rd minute.

That goal was an incentive for the Arabs, who sought to tie the game in a back-and-forth duel in the last 20 minutes of the match, but where the United States did not allow the rival to get out of control and ended up taking the victory by the minimum difference to secure their pass to the next phase.

In conclusion, the last two victories of the United States calmed the pressure that existed on Pochettino's process,who has one of the highest contractual arrangements in the history of the North American national team, even surpassing the salaries of Bruce Arena or Gregg Berhalter himself, Jürgen Klinsmann and Gregg Berhalter, who had processes in charge of the North American team.