“We’ve been excellent” says USMNT captain Tim Ream

Tim Ream spoke to the media ahead of the upcoming World Cup Round of 32 game between the USMNT and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Captaining the side at a home World Cup would be a weight too heavy for many footballers’ shoulders, but it is all part of the job for Ream.

Not only is he in charge of setting the standards on the field but off it, and in his most recent public appearance he was certainly setting out just how tough a task it will be for his teammates to overcome the Bosnian threat.

But that’s not to say he didn’t leave room for hope. Oh, there was plenty of that.

Ream set the record straight from the off, saying that he didn’t expect Bosnia and Herzegovina, ranked 61st in the world, below both Tunisia and Uzbekistan, to “just be defensive.”

“I think we have to expect the unexpected as we proved against Australia,” he warned. “So you see similarities, but then there’s also things that we’re going to have to solve that they throw at us in situations in-game and that’s then down to us as players to figure those puzzles out. But yeah, there’s definitely some similarities, but we’re not going to sit there and think, ‘Okay, it’s going to be exactly the same,’ because no two games are ever the same.”

“I’d argue that our attacking set pieces have been excellent”

“Set pieces defensively and attacking can decide games and we know this,” he explained when asked about the importance of dead-ball situations, a particular strong point for the Europeans. “So again, we’ve done a lot of work just about every other training session on set pieces, both defensively and attacking wise. I’d argue that you look at our attacking set pieces as well, the last couple of games and they’ve been excellent. So yes, listen, we know that especially in the knockouts, one mistake on a set play can send you home. So we’re fully focused on all aspects and all phases of the game and that’s something that we’ll continue to look at obviously.”

On that pressure that he is so good at both dampening from the outside and controlling from the inside, he admitted that: “we felt more pressure for that first game against Paraguay than anyone and that’s coming from ourselves, not from anything on the outside."

“So for us, for me, it’s a game we want to win. It’s a game that we have to put everything into and put in a performance to the way we have in the group stage and then we see where that takes us. But in terms of pressure, there’s nothing added or nothing extra and that’s the way we’ve approached every single [game].”

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