Early Numbers on the Home Guard

As the Home Guard prepare to take on Mexico this week, we're going to look at some of the early-season stats for these U.S. men's national soccer team hopefuls.

This is the last U.S. national team game before head coach Jurgen Klinsmann names his preliminary 30-man World Cup roster. After this game, Klinsmann's evaluations of a player's form will come from games in Major League Soccer.

Soccer is a notoriously stat-starved sport. If you look at a "box score" for a soccer match, you see relatively rare events like goals and assists along with more mundane factoids like the match attendance, red and yellow cards, the number of corner kicks taken and substitutions.

Recently, several soccer news outlets have beefed up their stat reporting, but the raw data doesn't tell you much and the various attempts at graphical representation (heat maps, passing charts, etc) don't tell you much about the data that goes into those images.  

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