IRVINE, Calif. — During a recent moment of downtime, Haji Wright and Auston Trusty started scrolling through the photos on their phones. They got as far back as 2014, when they were 16 years old, trying to break through in U.S. youth camps. Neither is likely to start Friday when the U.S. men’s national team opens its World Cup against Paraguay. It doesn’t matter. All 26 men on the roster could tell a similar story. So many of them are around the same age. They
were in the same youth camps together, rising through the ranks simultaneously. They traced the calendar in the summer of 2018, when the U.S., Mexico and Canada won hosting rights to this World Cup, realizing it would fall in the middle of their primes. “You want to fight for guys like that,” Christian Pulisic said Thursday. “I’ve played with some of these guys for so long. Don’t want to let them down. You want to give everything. You want to have their backs. Always.”
USMNT, World Cup, Paraguay, Christian Pulisic, Haji Wright, Auston Trusty, youth camps, 2014, 2018 hosting rights