🏆 Lies, lying results & statistics at the Concacaf Nations League semifinals

It's US-Mexico again, but it probably shouldn't be.

Reporting from Arlington, Texas

Mexico 3-0 Panama, U.S. 3-1 Jamaica (AET)

Should the world again produce the type of soccer fans interested in history, these are the crude results they’ll see in 2124 when they look at the history of the third-ever Concacaf Nations League, and if Getting CONCACAFed and other fine digital media outlets don’t survive the data purge of 2100 we’ll go to our graves knowing it’s not true. None of it.

Well, it is true that those were the results of last night’s matches, sending the North American rivals through to the semifinals. But was the U.S. better than Jamaica last night? Was Mexico three goals better than Panama? Not at all.

“I’m proud of the guys because we filled the task, followed every instruction properly and did what we needed to do to get the win on the day,” Jamaica center-back-turned-destroying-midfielder Damion Lowe said after. “We all know it’s not a 3-1 game, but reality is it’s a 3-1 game. We just have to live with it.”

The first semifinal was bookended with goals, Jamaica scoring in the first minute and the U.S. in the last, before an extra time period in which the U.S. finally took advantage of a depleted Jamaica team. “You kind of saw it both mentally and physically in the (extra time) we were missing the power we had in the first 95 minutes,” Jamaica manager Heimir Hallgrimsson said.

The U.S. needed every moment of those 95 minutes