Take two in St Louis and, for entirely different reasons, each side will take caution.

The hosts, for reasons almost entirely due to the nightmare scenario visited upon them in Austin, when one of their array of key forwards but arguably the best and most experienced, Mallory Swanson, saw her dream of a World Cup hat-trick haul implode.

For Vera Pauw, she must be mindful that, albeit her strongest available line-up doughtily restricted their opponents, the fact that her side wilted late on will require her to make obvious changes.

Nonetheless, the respective strength of these two squads cannot afford her scope for too much dilution.

One must suspect that key performers such as Denise O’Sullivan and Katie McCabe, may start, at least in order to acquire some possession, although Sinead Farrelly, Saturday’s remarkable debutante, and Aoife Mannion will not.

Whether the likes of Heather Payne and Marissa Sheva can be asked to double up with another shift of endless running is another question, particularly in temperatures tipping the mid-20s.

“The challenge is the quick turnaround,” conceded Courtney Brosnan, still seething after narrowly failing to extend the longest clean sheet record in the international game.

“The girls are tired but we can see what worked and what didn’t and take that into the next game and hopefully be better.”

The margins remain cigarette-paper thin but their impact significant; Ireland had chances to lead, didn’t take them, while defending poorly for the goals conceded.

“We still want to raise the standard, we still don’t want to concede, we need to finish our chances but it was a good performance overall and a quick turnaround now,” reckons O’Sullivan, who will win her 101st cap after Saturday’s landmark occasion.

This game will be the final 90 minutes available to USA boss Vlatko Andonovski before he finalises his squad and, though Megan Rapinoe is not here, she is certain to be included once fit and demonstrates the vast arsenal at their disposal.

As if they haven’t enough scoring options in their side, whether through arrogance or sentimentality, they even designed a play last weekend to try to ensure that veteran defender, and St Louis native, Becky Sauerbrunn, could break her duck in the 215th game of a goalless career.

“We did have one design for her in the last game but credit to Ireland for defending well,” smiled Andonovski.

“Maybe we won’t plan this time. I do want her to score in a game, I will be very happy for the team because I enjoy scoring goals but also for her.”

“I don’t think anything surprised us,” he said. “We knew they were going to be a tough team. We knew they were going to be organised. We knew they would be disciplined and positioned very low on the field, defend well and then transition and look for their one or two opportunities.

“They’ve showed that in the last eight or nine games that they played and then they showed us that they’re very good at it. The fact that we scored two goals and created four or five opportunities against Ireland, for us that was pretty good.

“In game one we checked the box that we needed to check and in game two we’re moving away from that and it turns into a more evaluative game now with lots of changes on the roster. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new 11 from what we saw in game one. Is Vera going to do that? I don’t know.”

She cannot afford to but it would be trite to dismiss any competitive edge, as some of the US starters are bound to be on the selection bubble and determined to prove their worth.

So too Ireland, for that matter, as anyone who witnessed the impression of a whirling dervish wrought by the introduction of Ruesha Littlejohn the other evening.

Although there is another window of opportunity against Zambia, Pauw would like to be in a position to have almost every single one of her 23 slots filled by that stage.

Injuries to some candidates complicate the issue but there is nevertheless a sense that tonight may become defining for a host of players, from veterans like Aine O’Gorman and Littlejohn, to recent arrivals like Sheva, while domestic starlets like Jessie Stapleton and Abbie Larkin will be eager to convince sceptics of their readiness.

Also, it will be interesting to see if Pauw maintains her approach of playing someone like Kyra Carusa in a more orthodox hold-up role, rather than deploying a flyer in behind.

Her sense of Saturday was that the former approach allowed her side to develop play with more composure and intent; though this was not always evident.

“They’re good at what they’re good at,” Kristie Mewis tells us. “They kind of came out with what we expected and we followed our game-plan and did a really good job with it.”

Ireland will be close enough to touch the World Cup trophy, on display here and they hope for another performance of credit against the side who currently own it.