essentially turned the US national team

Milutinovic had essentially turned the US national team into a club side. With only four professionals playing abroad at the time, they developed an edge that couldn't be matched by any other team going to the World Cup.

"A lot of us had never been on the books of a club before, so our careers were completely backwards," Lalas continues.

"Bora recognised he needed to blood us and use this to our advantage, this strange silver lining that he'd found.

"We all know one of the biggest challenges for national team coaches is the limited time you have together, so for the core of the team to be based in residency and basically play seasons of games meant that when we stepped on the field to play at the World Cup, international football was just something we did."

Life inside the training camp was anything but ordinary, though. Milutinovic's eccentricities became more pronounced in that environment and his methods led Lalas to describe him as the "most amazing and most frustrating coach I ever played for".

Sampson, who had been appointed as Milutinovic's assistant to provide some balance as a homegrown coach, soon learned that being adaptable would be a valuable skill working beneath the Serb.

"In today's football and the last generation in most of the world, the head coach would sit down with his assistant and go over training, but Bora never did that," says Sampson, who went on to manage the US at the 1998 World Cup.

"One day I asked him: 'How come you never let us know what you're going to do for training?' He said: 'My friend, I must smell the grass to know exactly what the need is every single day'.

"So we'd get out on the field and he'd play soccer tennis with the players for 40 minutes as part of the socialisation period prior to training and he'd see what the needs were for the day.