AUSTIN, Texas — A year after making his touchline debut with the U.S. men’s national team at Austin’s Q2 Stadium, head coach Mauricio Pochettino is back in Texas’ capital to mark the anniversary as their World Cup preparation enters a new phase with just eight months to go until the tournament on home soil. The origin story of how Pochettino reassembled the USMNT in a mold all his own, though, arguably began in March in the Los Angeles suburbs when two crushing defeats at the Concacaf Nations League forced a wake-up call.

“That was a time to assess, to see and the moment that we identified the problems,” Pochettino said. “We start to destroy the things we need to destroy and start to build the house from the ground up.”

Those losses to Panama and Canada offered the most notable series of trials and tribulations in Pochettino’s first year on the job but seven months on, it also laid the foundation of the USMNT’s proverbial house. This month’s friendlies, which includes a test against Australia on Tuesday, mark the first time Pochettino will work with a first-choice squad after a year’s worth of player pool expansion, a healthy mix of mainstays and fresh faces.

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The tactical evolution was a long time coming but Pochettino defended the amount of time it took to get the team moving in the right direction, describing it partially as a construct of the international schedule that forces coaches to work with players intermittently rather than day in and day out.

“I think it’s really important when you arrive at a new project, [you have] to let the people act in a very natural way and then see what is going on and to process the situation, to make the decisions that can help, to build in a different way, to act, to behave and [in] the end, to perform,” Pochettino said.