Friday's friendly between the US national team and Canada may not have the intensity of the Americans' other border rivalry, but bragging rights are still on the line (10:15 pm ET; FS1, UniMás in US, TSN in Canada).
At the same time, however, the match is a friendly, and an opportunity for USMNT head coach Jurgen Klinsmann and staff to evaluate the full training camp, which wraps up after the game.
And much like Sunday's friendly against Iceland, which resulted in a 3-2 comeback win for the US, expect a similar approach to the lineup for the hosts.
"In looking at the Canada game, we will have a similar approach we had with Iceland because we have two big objectives now: getting the older or established players into a rhythm, into a good start in 2016 because we're just a couple weeks away from end of March games and World Cup qualifying," Klinsmann said in a series of videos released by US Soccer this week.
"The other part is to use substitutions for players that you want to see and give them a taste of the senior team level."
Klinsmann also highlighted the upcoming Olympic qualifying playoff series against Colombia, set to take place in March, which the manager noted was "huge." With the US needing a win in the series in order to book a place in the Rio 2016 Olympics men's soccer tournament, the training camp and game against Canada becomes a final opportunity to look at age-eligible players before players are released to their club teams.
"We hope it will be a huge benefit that we brought along 10, 11, 12 younger players in this camp and gave them really good, intense sessions, gave them a feeling for the next level of tempo of speed and all the demand on the senior level," he said. "Hopefully that all comes to fruition in a couple weeks down the road when they face a very strong Colombian U-23 team then it would be awesome."
Above all, expect both teams on Friday to be working towards varied goals of fitness and impressing the respective coaches. But with Canada set to face a pair of key World Cup qualifiers against Mexico and the US also set to jump back into World Cup qualifying and the Olympic playoff, local bragging rights will likely take a backseat in the list of priorities.
"The goal is qualifying for Rio with the younger group and obviously the senior group has to get the done job against Guatemala to qualify for the hexagonal," said Klinsmann. "Looking at all these things, it's going well, the January camp and hopefully they get rewarded at the end of the day."
