Taylor Collins

“I think this is personal. It's a real personal attack on this young man.” Scottish legend and former Chelsea midfielder Craig Burley has come to USMNT star Christian Pulisic’s defense and hits out at pundits from FOX Sports. 😳 “I don't like it,” Burley said on ESPN FC about Pulisic’s critics. “I get it, he's had a tough tournament because he started well, got injured, hasn't really found his flow again, ends the tournament the way he pretty much started and got injured. “But the pile-on, the pile-on to an individual, is way over the top. “It's like, if Christian Pulisic had a great tournament, the U.S. would have gone all the way. That's kind of how the talk is. “And I get it, he has a responsibility, and he didn't come into this tournament to try and be under par or play badly. “But to me, if I was Christian Pulisic, I would be big-time annoyed. In fact, if I was Christian Pulisic, I think I'd be digging some of these people out, personally. “Because it seems to me it's almost a personal attack on an individual rather than an analysis of the football that's gone before. “Because if it's an analysis of the football, you could go through pretty much the whole team and say, well, he had a bad game, he had a bad game, the goalkeeper made a mistake, you saw Sergiño Dest had a terrible game, letting balls bounce in the box, all that sort of stuff. “But it seems that he has been painted up there as the poster boy, and now that some of them, who should know better by the way, some of them, because they've been in that position, want to kill him. They're absolutely killing him. “It’s people from FOX. It's the same people that when Flo Balogun was told he could play, they were on that network, and they embarrassed the hell out of themselves for about half an hour. “They all danced around the fact that it was wrong, and said, this is the greatest decision in the history of U.S. sports, Flo Balogun's going to play. That's how embarrassing these people are. They have no shame. “You're criticizing a player for not carrying a team, no further than you yourself never carried a team. “You know, it’s not like some of these past players got to the semifinal or whatever and they said, well, he had a disrupted tournament. “Look, do I think he's perfect? No. But I'll tell you one thing about Christian Pulisic, and going back to [Landon] Donovan and one or two others, at least he's had the stomach to go to Europe over a long, long period of time and forge out a pretty good career for himself at Dortmund, at Chelsea, at Milan. “He’s gone over there for a long period of time and he has produced some very good performances. “Some of this lot sitting on their cozy sofas, they can't say that. Yeah, they can talk about what they did in MLS, they can talk about what they did now and again with the national team, but they didn't have the stomach, some of them, to go over there and train your butt off and play at elite level for years at a time. “They dipped their toe in the water and they jumped back over the pond. But yeah, they want to sit here and kill him. “And listen, they can analyze games all they want. I don't care. That's their job. But here, I think this is personal. It's a real personal attack on this young man.”