The last thing I want is to sound like some know-it-all Brit telling the U.S. men’s national team — and its fans — how to do things. Far from it. Nevertheless, it has been fascinating spending the past month really close to the team during their trip across California, Missouri, Texas and Minnesota as they’ve tried to go from caterpillar to butterfly.

The U.S. team that I got to know is an articulate, interesting and determined crew that’s laden with potential. It has been engaged just as much in the process of radical cultural change as much as it was in attempting to lift this Gold Cup.

It’s a culture change that can be summed up by one voluminous word: aggression. Aggression with and without the ball, plus aggression toward opponents (and critics) who dare to give the Americans anything even approaching a dirty look.

Given the team’s horrible defeats to Turkey and Switzerland prior to the Gold Cup, June began with the U.S. soccer community either picking at its own scabs or embroiled in the often-bitter debate about missing stars versus emerging prospects.

What I thought I saw, as an outsider, was a team far too conservative with its use of the ball. I thought Mauricio Pochettino’s players were more scared of making mistakes, being lambasted in the media or — worse still — defeated again by what many fans would consider “minor” opponents than they were eager to try to carve out creative space and goal chances.

This is a youthful, relatively inexperienced bunch. So savage have the past few months been that when this Gold Cup began, the squad was subconsciously keen not to expose itself to risk.

One small example: Against Saudi Arabia on June 19, the strategy was to drag play over toward the right side, overload the opponent there, then repeatedly switch at speed and release Max Arfsten (a likable success in this tournament) down the left. Over and again, this exciting defender, who performs somewhere between a wingback and a winger, felt the fear of risk over the attraction of reward.

After the match, he admitted that it had felt so vital to conserve the 1-0 win that he made choices on the day that were less daring than what he might normally do. “I’ve always been a naturally attacking player,” Arfsten said, “but at the same time, the key is understanding the right moment to take that risk and be as unpredictable as possible.”

In light of what happened afterward, he arguably chose correctly. The Americans won. They grew. And they eventually reached the final.

But back then, Pochettino’s guys generally received the ball with safety in mind, usually returning it to the teammate who gave it to them. Sterile circulation of the sphere. Their body shape on pass reception was closed, opponents were blocked off instead of U.S. players receiving the ball on the half-turn and trying to punch into space or force their opponents to turn, chase and devote resources into areas they didn’t really want to go to.

There was nothing cowardly or stupid about those decisions. It just spoke of a culture that is the polar opposite to what the players, and coaching staff, actually want to achieve.

On the general subject of critical scrutiny and pressure, 37-year-old center back Tim Ream told ESPN: “When you get into the knockout stages, the atmosphere, the intensity of the pressure, everything is ramped up and heightened, so it’s important to understand that and not be afraid of the pressure but to use it.”

Another proviso: There’s no question that the aggressive mindset Pochettino is trying to instill wasn’t on show in the Americans’ 2-1 loss to Mexico in the Gold Cup final Sunday night. The U.S. badly lost the possession battle, became embattled and thus couldn’t assert a daring, attacking attitude.

But … back to the process. It was no coincidence that Tyler Adams‘ return to fitness helped the team’s trajectory. I’ll hand the pulpit to him.

“Every great athlete, my favorites like Thierry Henry, LeBron James, have gone through failure, have had to fall down before they were successful,” he said. “Growing up in the Red Bull system, I learned that it was OK to make mistakes in the way that you play, if you’re trying to play forward and do the right thing.

“I just haven’t felt under pressure in any situation I’ve been in. Fearlessness was always part of my attitude because it was an aggressive style of trying to play forward, to take risks … It doesn’t matter that your pass percentage is 90% if you play backwards every single time you get the ball. I was taught to try to play forward, try to put your teammates in dangerous positions to be able to affect the game. That’s the right thing to do.”

If Adams epitomizes the Pochettino ideology in midfield, the epitome in a creative sense (a title that will go to Christian Pulisic when he returns) is Diego Luna.

After the U.S. defeated Guatemala in the semifinals, I asked Luna about the correlation between the number he wears on his back (10), its mythical status and how he plays.

“Psychologically, carrying the No. 10 on your back is significant,” he said. “Having that No. 10 gives you a kind of freedom. You’re meant to create. It’s what everyone thinks about when you’re wearing the No. 10: ‘This guy’s going to change the game in a second, he’s going to do something special.'”

Examples can be found in the engine room, in the artistic area … and there’s also an ongoing effort to unleash aggression, attitude and — dare I say it — arrogance in the goalkeeping department, too.

Pochettino’s keeper coach, Toni Jiménez, is trying to encourage his pupils to break out of the tram lines, to think outside the box and to become the type of big, booming characters who spring to mind when you think of Peter Schmeichel, Manuel Neuer or Thibaut Courtois. He’s making progress there, too.

Think about Matt Freese against Costa Rica in the quarterfinals. With Keylor Navasone of the modern greats, in the other goal, it might have appeared to be an open-and-shut case that the penalty spot-kick competition would shoot the USMNT out of the competition. But it didn’t, because as Freese put it, “Penalties are my thing!” His performance that night, snarling self-belief, with chest and chin jutting out proudly, symbolizes what Pochettino is trying to achieve.

Then there’s that different version of aggression. Not quite the adage of, “Hurt one of ours and we’ll hurt 10 of yours,” but a spiky all-for-one-one-for-all growl that so many have accused this generation of U.S. players to be lacking.

Another example from that quarterfinal: When Malik Tillman missed his penalty, Costa Rica’s Juan Pablo Vargas got in his face, sneered at him and tried to provoke him. The result was instantaneous. Without realizing what he’d done, Vargas was mobbed, put in his place, and any of his teammates who tried to join in were given short shrift.

“The togetherness and having each others’ back has been important for us,” Ream said. “It hasn’t always been that way. When that incident happened, we all recognized what was going on and we wanted to support Malik and also to let their guys know: ‘Listen, we’re not going to be pushed around … that may have happened in the past, but we’re here together and you’re not going to bully any of our guys.'”

None of this ignores the fact that the U.S. soccer public (and media) want skill, daring and opponents to be skewered. They want a sniff, even the vaguest sniff, of a run deep into next summer’s FIFA World Cup.

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Pochettino talks ’embarrassing’ no-call on apparent Mexico handball

USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino talks about a penalty not being issued after Mexico’s Jorge Sánchez’s apparent handball in the box.

That’s a lot to ask, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Pochettino won’t be in this job forever. There’s a market for the Argentinean, and one can argue that coaching the U.S. diminishes in attraction once the World Cup is finished.

Nevertheless, he hasn’t been together with a group of sportsmen for this length of time since he was part of Argentina’s World Cup playing squad in 2002. He has used that time to good end. There’s now a greater unity — of purpose and in mutual support.

Take what Ream said about Luna: “I thank Diego for making it seem like fun again. I’ve only known him six months, but I absolutely love him.”

Toward the end of the tournament, I specifically asked Pochettino whether we were witnessing both an attempt to win a trophy and a campaign to significantly intensify how this group of men behaves on and off the pitch, and how aggressively competitive and loyal the U.S. soccer public is.

“Have you secretly been with us for the last 40 days? You’ve described it perfectly,” he joked.

Pochettino’s confirmation was there in a lengthy, insightful response.

“As you said, this is a culture that is very proud of its nation, and we saw the July 4th shows of patriotism, but I think that this sport is still not properly understood in the deepest sense, in how it originated. This isn’t an ‘entertainment’ industry,” he said.

He paused and carefully searched for context.

“If you play NFL or basketball or hockey in this country, you always play within the same culture, where the entertainment idea is fundamental,” he said. “The teams or franchises play amongst themselves within America — it’s entertainment. And if soccer was a USA-originated sport, played within this nation, for entertainment, then fine. But the problem is that you have to go compete with people who play for their lives, for survival, for a lot of things that go beyond simple entertainment. Of course soccer needs to be entertaining, but in other countries, it is a religion, and that always gives you extra when it comes to struggling hard to win.

“We face teams of players who cry when they stand to attention for their anthem prematch. I’m saying absolutely nothing critical about the patriotism of the U.S. player or fan in general, but if the focus is currently more like, ‘We are going to entertain the crowd … and if we win, then, terrific,’ then I think that is what my players are trying to change. That’s what we’re all changing. And of course we have to transmit all this to our fans so that they feel the same way and come to push us onwards.

“The legacy we can leave for the future is that the next time we qualify for a Concacaf final here in this country, the stadium is full of 90% USMNT fans and only 10% are the rival supporters. That’s what we want to transmit to U.S. soccer fans, that’s the legacy we want to leave.”

Not a bad goal.