Spectacular venues like the 1.3 billion dollar Krestovsky Stadium will greet the 2018 World Cup, which begins Thursday in Russia.
“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life so much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” – literature, philosophy and art scholar Joseph Campbell
“I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” – Larry Slade, The Iceman Cometh
Neil W Blackmon
One of life’s great tragedies is that, even with good health and good fortune, it lasts only twenty World Cups, and in truth, only fifteen to sixteen that we remember.
Another one begins Thursday in Russia, and my body is ready for it, even as my mind is wary of it.
Wary because distilled to its core, the World Cup is, on one hand, a tool for neoliberal plunder, or in this instance, perhaps, a signifier of what ails the global order at present.
Russia 2018, arguably more than the 2022 “Winter in Qatar” that will follow it, is a maelstrom of malfeasance, a cauldron of structural corruption, both from an institutional standpoint (FIFA) and a government standpoint (Putin’s kleptocratic regime). Awarded to Russia under a veil-of-secrecy and quid-pro-quo insinuations opaque even by FIFA’s historically low standards, this tournament will be played under a cloud of political ironies befitting the turbulent times providing its backdrop. As Europe and America lurch ever-slowly towards an authoritarian and nativist brand of populism, there is a serious risk of racism and neo-nationalist fan violence, even as the Kremlin itself pushes back.
Putin doesn’t much care for soccer. He cares even less for some of the countries that will visit his country this summer, but there’s little he loves more than the chance to put on a show and make Russia appear strong. Russia’s involvement in military conflict in Crimea, unabashed and unapologetic support of the genocidal and murderous regime in Syria, open interference in democratic elections from the United States to France, its demand, supported openly by President Trump, to be again included in the G-7 despite these atrocities and maladies, and a domestic systematic doping scandal that forced the resignation of the head of the World Cup organization committee will all rest on the backburner for at least a month, as a vibrant and proud Russian people take center stage.
Against this vide noir of a backdrop, viewers in the expected billions will be treated to spectacular venues, from the glorious Krestovsky Stadia in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg to the glass domed Cosmos in Samara.
The Krestovksy alone cost a clinically-insane 1.3 billion dollars to build, and the tournament, by a recent account at least 600 million over budget, has been financed in large part by the Putin government, who have, of course, suppressed dissent to such costs, all while the Kremlin continues to grapple with an economy plagued by anemic growth forecasts, largely due to a lack of government investment in social services and a lack of foreign investment everywhere.
Fears of Russian hooligan violence and racism plague the upcoming World Cup, despite Putin assurances of Kremlin pushback.
Combine the lack of investment with an aging, shrinking workforce; weak infrastructure; overwhelmed and understaffed bureaucracy, and trademark Putin corruption, and the short-term advantage in labor and employment and cost gained through World Cup construction and pushed along by sharp devaluation of the ruble and you get a sense of the economic malaise, forever in a holding pattern.
But if you build it, they will come, and so these gorgeous venues will welcome football, splattered with an endless array of corporate sponsorships, from behemoth mainstays like Coca-Cola to apparel and footwear giants Nike, Puma and Adidas to financial giants like VISA to 2022 primaries like Qatar Airways to oil and gas empires like RasGas and Russian giant, Gazprom.
In the middle, somewhere, but no less important in an international game long defined by great international performances, will be the players, tarrying on in a world that, thanks to the global proliferation of social media technologies, sees players earning more than ever before, but playing under an endless barrage of fan and media scrutiny and pressure equally unrivaled in the history of the world’s sport.
There’s enough to worry about to be weary.
The show, however, must go on.
From Russia with love.
*** *** ***
The show will be beautiful because World Cups are always beautiful, when evaluated wrapped in a cocoon and vacuum from the circumstances that engender them.
It’s the final World Cup for two of the greatest players ever to grace a soccer field, the chiseled, brash and bold Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and the elegant, diminutive Argentine magician, Lionel Messi.
On Ronaldo’s resume, three consecutive times the leader of storied Real Madrid, club champions of Europe, and perhaps his signature accomplishment, the stunning Portuguese victory at the 2016 EURO.
I bristle and offer visceral eye-rolls at those who belittle Ronaldo’s achievements at the 2016 EURO, where Ronaldo, gamely as always, took on every comer and defender while sacrificing himself for the collective cause. He didn’t play the final, of course, but he was the largest reason they were there, and even in a difficult group that includes Iberian Peninsula-rival Spain, it’s hard to count Ronaldo out as he takes the world’s largest stage the final time.
This image, from the 2016 Copa America Centenario, describes the loneliness of the magical Messi’s international career.
As for Messi, his practically peerless career remains, fair or not, defined internationally by what he hasn’t won, and maybe by this image, against Chile in the 2016 Copa America Centenario Final, a maestro on an island surrounded by swarming Chilean bees.
Rightly, I think, many have written that Messi doesn’t need a World Cup to secure his legacy, or his place as maybe the best of the three greatest players to live (Pele, Diego Armando Maradona). His accomplishments are legion, from the record number of La Liga goals to the incredulous 79 goals in 2012 to his five Ballon d’Or awards to the La Liga titles to the Olympic championship to the Champions League trophies.
But some part of me also has an image of Messi, deep in his fifties, sipping his morning coffee on a tax-sheltered island somewhere in the Caribbean or French Polynesia, and tasting, as he glances out over a magnificent vista, a touch of regret.
Like the American wunderkind LeBron James, Messi carried his team to a World Cup final in 2014 and the Copa America Centenario final in 2016, but on paper, those were better Argentine teams, with an all-time complementary piece in holder Javier Mascherano and just enough talent around Messi to create constant danger away from the storied playmaker. This incarnation of La Albiceleste would not even be here but for Messi, who managed to do what almost no one in the world’s most difficult qualifying region, CONMEBOL, does and steal three points in the mountains of Ecuador to save Argentina from abject failure. Now, with the young Juventus starlet Paulo Dybala playing the role of his Kevin Love, Leo Messi will have his last shot at slaying the unconquerable World Cup dragon.
Pele won three World Cups. Diego Armando one, albeit with a little bit of God’s handiwork. What of Argentina’s little lion?
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Beyond the incandescent star power of the big two, other names, known, unknown and unexpected, will emerge to steal the spotlight, shine for a month and command exorbitant, heat-of-passion transfer fees in the World Cup’s aftermath.
Two seem to best exemplify this contemporary moment.
Paul Pogba, who has been told to focus less on hair and more on football, is a player of this contemporary moment, and one to cheer for in Russia.
Paul Pogba will be in Russia, despite last-minute whispers and, let’s be honest, it’s a French national team, so clamors, that he be benched in favor of the less interesting, less polarizing Corentin Tolisso.
Pogba, like many of the sons who will play for France, was born in France to parents who come from a far-flung former French department in Africa; in Pogba’s case, Guinea.
Pogba isn’t France’s best player, or even its best player with roots in French-speaking Africa. Kylian Mbappé isn’t either, though the 19-year-old Parisian is the son of a Cameroonian father and Algerian mother and so good that France build attacks around him.
No, France’s best player would be N’Golo Kanté, the quiet, space-eating, forward-swallowing automaton of a number six who is so dominant he won the Premier League at Leicester City (Leicester City, for heavens sake!) and then followed the feat up by doing it again with Chelsea a year later. Kanté’s parents immigrated from Mali before he was born, and if France are to win their second World Cup, he’ll play a pivotal, if unassuming as ever, role.
But Pogba is perhaps France’s most interesting player, especially in a World Cup like this one, played on Russian soil against a backdrop of creeping authoritarianism and globally, the ever-present specter of racial animosity and violence.
A lightning rod of criticism for all manner of behaviors and happenings, Pogba is a player for his time and place, one whose strengths appeal to the game’s celebrity culture and one whose limitations inspire nativism and racism of the lowest denominator.
He helped author the revitalization of Italian giant Juventus, in the process establishing himself as one of the brightest young talents in the world, and did it with aplomb, signing every autograph, visiting children’s hospitals, joking openly about his fondness for video games like FIFA and Football Manager (of course he signed himself, making the line between simulation and reality even harder to find). His star turn commanded a then world-record €105 million transfer fee to return to Manchester United in 2016, but with it, scrutiny on and off the pitch.
But Pogba has struggled with consistency under Jose Mourinho at United, some of that about Mourinho’s confusion as to precisely where to play the French midfielder.
Naturally his attitude has been questioned and banal remarks made, critiquing his work ethic (that old black athlete chestnut) and his frequently changing hairstyles (because you can’t care about hair and be good at soccer, I’m told).
By most accounts, Pogba has handled the criticisms with grace, even as Jose Mourinho has not, to the surprise of no one who studies his history, rushed to his star’s defense.
Playing against these false, race-tinged narratives in a country where racist and nationalist soccer violence is a unique concern, Pogba strikes me as a unique candidate to be this World Cup’s dynamic star. His talent is prodigious, both as a bulldozer who can take on defenders, and as a crosser of the ball and creator behind the French embarrassment-of-riches front three of Kylian Mbappe, Antoine Griezmann, and Barcelona’s Ousmane Dembele.
That Pogba helps lead the attacking charges for Les Blues, a team of immigrants and dual-passport holders that define an emerging new France, seems fitting. Only a year ago, the world watched as Emmanuel Macron routed the National Rally Party Leader Marine Le Pen to secure an election that placed a tourniquet, at least for the moment, on a rising tide of nationalist proto-fascism in Europe.
Now, 20 years after Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen called another team of French immigrants “artificial, unnatural and un-French”, this group of musketeers can do what that team, led by the French son of Algerian Kabyle immigrants Zinedine Yazid Zidane, did.
They can win the whole thing.
*** *** ***
Mohamed Salah, soccer king from the land of pharaohs, as the great English football journalist Jonathan Northcroft put it, will be in Russia too.
It was supposed to be the Summer of Salah, at least that’s how it was playing out in my head, until a Champions League final tangle with the Spaniard Sergio Ramos, soccer’s version of Thanos, nearly saw the soccer gods suck the bone-marrow of our joy away.
It isn’t the most scientific test of allegiance and inclusion, but it’s impossible not to notice the ubiquity of Salah jerseys in my travels. Here’s an incomplete list of sightings, dating back to late February: covering long sleeves on a cold spring morning run in Gowanus, Brooklyn, on tourists battling subtropical heat at Epcot Center, in subway stations and airport security lines, at an Orlando City match, at the Cape Canaveral National Seashore, at Wrigley Field.
That American fans, and European fans generally find so much affection in a Muslim named Mohamed is a nod to soccer’s way of piercing identity and drawing out the better angels of our nature.
The joyous football of Egypt’s Mo Salah, injured shoulder and all, will be on display in Russia.
Salah smiles about everything, his joyous face and unflinching optimism a big reason the former American coach Bob Bradley found the willpower and urge to move forward while coaching the Egyptian national team through the Arab Spring in 2012-13.
“After the Port Said stadium disaster, we started having opportunities to bring young guys into the camps and immediately you knew that Salah was special. He was hungry, smart, he wanted to get better. He played with joy, fire. We formed an immediate connection and a productive relationship that was fruitful from the beginning,” Bradley said of Salah earlier this year.
In the years since, Salah has gone from player whose league was canceled to Ballon d’Or candidate and Liverpool renaissance man, having just led the Reds to the stunning, but ill-fated Champions League final.
Watching him play, identify and attack space, and make electric, intelligent off-ball runs is unadulterated joy, and when Egypt qualified, I found myself, a malcontent and morose Everton fan, absolutely giddy about a summer watching a Liverpool hero.
Such is the scale of Salah’s meteoric star turn that when Egypt arrived in Russia, the forward, still recovering from his shoulder injury, was rustled from his sleep by the famed Chechen strongman Ramzan A. Kadyrov, who thought waking Salah up from a jet-lagged slumber would be a fine way to help rehabilitate his image with the locals.
Soccer has always made strange bedfellows.
Egypt’s group includes the hosts, Russia, an aging Luis Suarez and Uruguay, and surprise qualifiers Saudi Arabia, making it one of the more navigable groups in the field. But so much depends on Salah, and his shoulder, and what, if anything, Argentine manager Hector Cuper can get out of his teammates, including three Premier Leaguers: Arsenal’s Mohamed Elneny, West Brom defender Ahmed Hegazy and Huddersfield Town by way of Stoke City winger Ramadan Sobhi.
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Deft in touch and blessed with blazing speed, Tottenham Hotspur’s Son Heung-Min is the best of a new crop of Korean footballers.
There will be other players too, of course, and I’ll get to them in the weeks to come.
Two others from the diaspora to touch on from the outset are the brilliant Son Heung-Min of South Korea, the blinding fast winger with the deft touch and dribbles of Premier League outfit Tottenham Hotspur.
The Taeguk Warriors, as South Korea are known back home, are younger and more promising than they’ve been in a while, but in one of the tournament’s toughest groups, with Mexico, Sweden and Die Mannschaft, it is difficult to imagine South Korea advancing past the group stage for the first time since South Africa 2010.
Still, Son Heung-Min is clever enough to beat any defender in the world 1 v 1, and if he finds space on the break, a fair enough proposition given the proclivity of the Koreans to counter, it will be television worth watching.
Peru will also be must-see TV.
La Blanquirroja stole a playoff spot in brutal CONMEBOL on the final match day, then weathered a physical, cagey playoff against New Zealand to reach their first World Cup since Teofilo Cubillas led the Peruvians to Spain in 1982.
Many will fancy Iceland, the smallest nation to ever qualify for the World Cup, as their Cinderella in this competition, and who could blame them after the side from the land of ice-and-fire Viking-clapped their way into our hearts at the 2016 Euro.
But for me and mine, it’s the darlings of CONMEBOL and Arriba, Peru!
The game has changed, and it’s been 16 years since a team from beyond the old firm wall of Europe lifted the World Cup. To be sure, Latin America and South America still produce breathtaking talents, Neymar, Messi, Suarez, Gabriel Jesus, and conspicuously, sadly absent from these proceedings, Alexis Sánchez.
But for those who didn’t watch the high-pressing, frenetic Chileans barnstorm their way to two Copa América titles in 2015 and 2016, a truly mesmerizing South American side, playing collaborative, beautiful football where all players understand movement and play with and for each other has been lacking.
Peru are that side.
Watch this goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm4dD7sUAf0
The player threading that ball to put the forward through?
That’s Christian Cueva, a late-blooming jitterbug of a number ten who plays his professional club football for Brazilian power São Paulo FC.
In a group with France, Denmark and aging Australia, Peru are clearly the second best side. But on one day, playing collectively, they may be good enough to fell the historically drama-prone French, and if they do, there’s a reasonable path to the semifinals, and for the line-breaking, slick-passing, playmaking Christian Cueva, probably a big contract in Europe.
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Finally, there’s the stories of teams.
I’ve mentioned first-timers Iceland, but Panama are also here for the first time, a reward for an aging generation of Los Canaleros who were so close to qualifying in Brazil 2014, and a testament to a government that believed enough to pour money and infrastructure into a fledgling national team program a little over a decade ago.
There’s a sense Panama won’t stay around long; the best Panamanian players ply their trade in MLS and the roster lacks a single established player in a top European league. But their Colombian manager, Hernán Darío Gómez has made the side difficult to play against, and that matters at World Cups, and matters more in a group with star-laden Belgium, star-crossed England and cagey, defensive-minded Tunisia. Don’t be astonished if Panama’s final group stage game, against Tunisia, matters.
The Super Eagles, dressed to the nines on arrival in Russia.
The Super Eagles of Nigeria are the class of this tournament’s African delegation, another team right for this time and place, and from the outset of this World Cup, the runaway fashion winners.
Nigeria have qualified for the fifth time in six chances – a true feat given Africa’s quirky qualifying system – and the Super Eagles have long embodied everything we love about African football, it’s passion, relentless, graceful athleticism, joy and attacking spirit, while also providing a quiet commentary on the continent’s sadness and colonialism’s long shadow.
Nigeria’s youth system is a sight to behold, conquering international youth tournaments and churning out prospect after prospect and for many years, feeding the boys’ teams of the world’s largest clubs.
But there’s a sadness there too, as too often marvelous attacking talents see their careers, and sometimes, their spirits, snuffed out by European managers who feel that to make it on the continent, they should play other positions, with center back and holding midfielder the most fashionable choices.
Call it the Makélélé effect if you’d like, as the French midfielder and Real Madrid and Chelsea star was so good he transformed the way the game was scouted, cultivating an obsession on the European continent with scouring Africa to find the next holding midfielder cultured on the ball, physical in defense and fast enough to cover immense range and swallow attacking space. Ghana’s Michael Essien fit the bill, so surely there were others, managers and executives thought.
The irony, of course, is Makélélé isn’t even Nigerian – but there’s the colonialist remainder and racism there too – this notion that the young African prospect with speed and size and physicality could be the next Makélélé, and not whatever they were when they arrived.
We saw it with the Nigerian captain, Jon Obi Mikel, the former Chelsea player who now is happy again, making his millions in China’s burgeoning league.
Mikel arrived at Chelsea a playmaking number ten, an attacking prodigy who was the central creative piece on elite Nigerian youth sides. He was immediately moved to a misfit role as a number six, his joy snuffed out as Chelsea’s Jose Mourinho chased his own Makélélé. Mikel was such a good footballer that like Essien, he powered through the changes at the outset. But he was never the same revelation of a player.
For his country, Mikel is now the captain and glue, playing with freedom again in an attacking role in front of two-ball winners, Ogenyi Onazi, who plays professionally in Turkey, and Leicester City’s Wilfred Ndidi, a 21-year-old bundle of movement and intellect. Arsenal’s Alex Iwobi, a 22-year-old forward is the side’s joy, earning praise from none other than Leo Messi himself, who will face off with the Super Eagles in their first group stage encounter.
In a sport deliciously saturated with examples of colonized revenge, Iwobi’s decision gives Nigeria a fitting one in Russia, especially for a side outfitted in jerseys that recall Black Panther’s Wakanda. He graced a matchday fixture team list sheet for Arsenal in 2013, at 16 years of age, and played his youth internationals for England, but was cast aside by England just before breaking into Arsene Wenger’s rotation after an impressive Asian tour in the 2015 preseason.
Iwobi’s uncle, Jay-Jay Okchoa, is Nigerian football royalty, and it wasn’t long before Iwobi was playing with the Super Eagles, his unique blend of speed and physicality a handful for opposing defenses.
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The emergence of Gabriel Jesus, after a decade of searching for a true number nine, has Brazil on the verge of another World Cup title.
Brazil haven’t won the World Cup since Korea/Japan 2002, and the last global memories of Seleção in competition haven’t been kind.
Part of the mysticism surrounding Brazilian football is the reverence the culture has for its footballing past, and after Germany’s 7-1 Destruktion of Brazil at the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte at the 2014 World Cup, the country turned, reluctantly, reverently, hopefully to Dunga, who had captained the side to World Cup victory in 1994, albeit without the beauty and magic associated with the greatest incarnations of Seleção’s past glories.
Dunga promptly cut ties with large portions of the squad that lost 7-1, employed constant defensive squad rotations, and tried to get Brazil to play with a deep-lying midfielder and without a classic number nine. After some promising early returns, the bottom fell out, with Brazil bowing out in the Copa America quarterfinals to an average Paraguay in 2015 and then failing to survive group stages for the first time since 1987 at the Copa America Centenario in 2016. Tired of being embarrassed internationally and with the side sitting sixth in CONMEBOL qualifying, one place out of a playoff spot, the CBF fired Dunga, replacing him with Corinthians manager Tite.
A patient man and a devout believer in privileging personnel over system in tactical decisions, Tite has liberated Neymar from his role as captain and primary creator, settled on a central pairing of Thiago Silva and the Inter defender Miranda, and replaced the steady but limited Renato Augusto with a reinvigorated by Zidane version of Casemiro, who can help win the ball in the scrum and build possession from deep while allowing Neymar the freedom to wander by filling the gaps he leaves behind on the left.
Tite doesn’t really have natural wingers, but he doesn’t need them, with the timeless Marcelo pushing the envelope up the field on the left and Danilo a more than capable deputy for the injured Dani Alves on the right.
The real revelation, and what makes this Brazilian team a legitimate favorite, is the front three of Gabriel Jesus, Neymar and Coutinho.
In Gabriel Jesus, the Brazilians have the number nine that’s been missing since Ronaldo, a player who can help press high up the pitch, force defenders to punt the ball back to the Brazilian midfield swarm, and finish at a clinical rate (10 goals in 17 internationals is a compelling stat-line, especially in CONMEBOL).
After a decade of failures (Jo, Robinho, Pato, Hulk, Fred, Jonas), the dominant Brazilian number nine is back.
Whether it is Coutinho or Willian that plays on the right of the triumvirate, the idea is nearly the same, with either player drifting into the channels and making menacing off ball runs and interplays with the central midfield. In the Brazilians final World Cup tune-up, it was Coutinho inside, playing as the left central midfielder with the freedom to work off Marcelo and do what he does best in the final third, run into the ball in the channel, cut in left and shoot. What he’ll offer defensively is a fair question, but Brazil have Fernandinho off the bench to answer such concerns.
Brazil aren’t without questions: how does Coutinho function in the center of the field for an entire tournament? Can Miranda, no spring chicken, hold-up? And of course, the million-dollar “Will teams be able to exploit the space behind Marcelo and Neymar?”
But at least we have Brazil back. Style, skill, power, flair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YePFGhCC7ro
Joga Bonito.
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It’s fair, I think, for an American soccer writer set to watch a World Cup from home for reasons not of his choosing, to write last about Mexico.
World Cup cycles are long, tedious exercises and they pass not in slowly building swells, but rather in specifically demarcated high-water marks and rocky bottoms.
The nadir, of course, was watching from yards away in the humid slog of Couva, Trinidad, as a stunned and panicked American sideline saw its dreams flickering away, the silence and sadness only occasionally interrupted by the thundering voice of Michael Bradley telling teammates to “push, push” and a loud, engaged Ale Bedoya offering encouragement from the bench.
The high-water mark though, was a trip to Mexico, and not just because of Michael Bradley’s divine chip that staked the US to a lead in the early moments at famed Estadio Azteca.
Two days before the match, we went to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, not far from our hotel in Paseo de la Reforma. What we found was one of the great places in the world.
After staring with childlike wonder at an entire room devoted to old Aztec temples, complete with archaeological ruins, we found an exhibit about a pre-Columbian sport called tlachtli, where villages fielded teams of warriors to toss a ball through a hoop. The winners were awarded a village feast. The losing team sometimes saw its captain sacrificed.
The Estadio Azteca, the magisterial stadium in the clouds the Mexican National Team call home, isn’t quite as savage, but it does the job more often than not.
Nowadays, however, Mexico’s El Tri play more games in the United States than they do in Mexico, playing in front of gargantuan, energetic crowds even in friendlies and tapping into the immense demand for what the brilliant American soccer writer Brian Straus at SI called sentamilismo, an idea that Mexican-Americans feel home in America but feel a stronger connection to the futbol team from the nation they once called home.
When the United States failed in Couva, Mexico suddenly had the spotlight in the United States all to itself.
Mexico haven’t advanced to play a fifth game at the World Cup since 1986.
After missing Italy 1990, El Tri supporters have seen their team through the group stages only to watch them eliminated in the Round of 16. The curse and the search for a ‘quinto partido’ is a myth befitting Mexico’s tortured history, partly magnified by Mexican mistakes on the field and partly by psychology.
Mexico is a place so achingly beautiful everything hurts.
It is a mosaic of different colors and identity and experience and there is an incredible sense of accomplishment and spirit of kindness and warmth in the place and her people but ineffable sadness too. The Mexican people can create beauty from almost nothing at all, but with raging gang violence and kleptocratic tendencies, there is also ugliness.
Perhaps because Mexico’s history is so colored by the betrayals of neighbors and conquering explorers, Mexico is insular, and its soccer culture, until recently, was no different. Mexico’s press is notoriously difficult on managers, especially those of the foreign variety. Historically, most the players of the Selección came from the domestic league, and the idea of a foreign coach was treated with skepticism (Juan Carlos Osorio is an American-educated Colombian). Even in Mexico City, where streets are named for foreign (and domestic) playwrights and poets, there existed an unhealthy cynicism about the world beyond Mexico’s borders.
A new Mexico, less insular, more talented, ambitious as ever, will have center stage in the Americas this summer. Here they celebrate a historic win over the US in Columbus in the autumn of 2016.
But this is a different time.
The majority of the Mexican players speak English and play in Europe, and the country’s iconic stars, Chicharito, Andrés Guardado, Memo Ochoa and Rafa Márquez are seamlessly bilingual. The club has embraced new techniques in nutrition, training regiments, wholesale squad rotations and psychology that would have been anathema only a decade ago. They even broke a nearly two decade stretch of futility by defeating the United States 2-1 in World Cup qualifying in what had been their own house of horrors, Columbus, Ohio.
If ever there was a time for a breakthrough, this feels like it.
El Tri are not a perfect team.
There are questions in defense and the side are often disjointed in midfield despite the immense talents of Porto’s Hector Herrera and the wonderful Guardado. They maintain possession with consistency, but not aplomb, as it often isn’t possession with a purpose. And Chicharito remains, as ever, an on-the-shoulder of the last defender forward, reluctant to get too involved in build up play. I love the bench, especially the dynamic Carlos Vela, who can create magic from the air he breathes, and Hirving Lozano, who offers blistering pace and ability from the left.
The draw did them no favors, especially given their opening game is against Germany. But if they avoid their historical pitfall of playing to the level of their weaker opponents, Sweden and South Korea, they should advance, and they are talented enough to take on any comers in the Round of 16.
As my friend and Sirius XM FC host Jason Davis said recently, “It’s tough to cheer for your archrival, and Mexico is that to the USA.Red Sox fans don’t cheer for the Yankees when the Red Sox miss the World Series.” He’s right.
But this is America, a land built by immigrants, many of whom will find themselves waving the tricolored flag of Mexico over the next few weeks.
Others will pull for their ancestral homelands, or cheer a certain style, or a blossoming star taking center stage, or an older one exiting stage left.
As for me, I’ll be watching, wary and worried, but appreciative with wonder.
Who knows?
Maybe Germany won’t win.
Neil W. Blackmon is the Editor-in-Chief of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.