Memo Ochoa flies to deny Toni Kroos’s free kick in Mexico’s 1-0 upset of reigning World Champion Germany Sunday.
Neil W. Blackmon
A little over a year ago this week, ahead of the US-Mexico qualifier at Estadio Azteca, I took the time to make the short trek from my hotel to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, one of the world’s great places, along the Paseo de la Reforma in the heart of Mexico City.
After a tour of an entire room dedicated to 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.
Things aren’t quite as savage these days, but dating back to early centuries, Mexico has taken its sport seriously.
Take for instance the difficult challenge of managing the Selección, Mexico’s national football team.
The job is a heavy lift, saddled with expectation rooted in a peculiar permutation of pride and belief in the nation’s talent but an ever-present specter of dread and understanding of the team’s tortured history, riddled with underachievement. When Mexico fails, it’s treated as a referendum on the country and her people, regardless of station, from the law offices in La Condesa to the women peddling soaps and dolls in Mercado Merced.
Complicating matters is Mexico’s history itself.
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 football press, forever short-tempered, is tough on players but especially brutal to managers, especially those of the foreign variety. Combine all of these things with an FMF that often buckles under the chest-collapsing weight of public expectation, and you get a sense of how odious treatment of national team managers can be.
When I arrived in Mexico City, El Tri were breezing through qualifying, but the press were still relentlessly questioning the approaches of the current manager, Juan Carlos Osorio, an American-educated Colombian.
They asked questions about Osorio’s decisions to insert a bit of what they perceive to be outsider influence into the Mexican national team and program.
One paper wondered whether Osorio’s squad and tactical rotations were rubbish. Another wondered why the manager (allegedly) fixated on psychology, going so far as to bring in psychiatrists to conduct individual sessions with players. A telecaster didn’t understand why Osorio insisted on training and nutrition changes, especially for a young generation of talent that had recently captured Olympic gold.
Andres Guardado helped Mexico control the midfield in the first half Sunday. He says Osorio’s changes were hard, but rewarding.
The questions were framed genuinely, but given how well Mexico had played in qualifying, it was hard not to view them as pretext, all rooted in bitterness over Osorio’s first loss as Mexico manager- a 7-0 embarrassment to South American champion Chile at the 2016 Copa America.
A day prior to my trip to the museum, I had the chance to speak with Mexico’s captain, the affable, gracious Andrés Guardado, about Osorio.
“I think Mexico have always been confident,” Guardado said to me.
“What is different under (Osorio) is the way he wants that confidence to be built from preparation, from a plan, from a belief in your teammates. In our part of the world, there’s this idea that Mexico are supposed to win. He wants to do away with that feeling of entitlement and remind us and push us to earn our place.”
In a soccer culture that has long-emphasized its regional preeminence, earning what you deserve seems a complicated notion. It wasn’t one that was easy to latch onto, Guardado said. But it helped that in the process of implementing his changes, Osorio listened to his players, genuinely cared for them, and wanted them to feel comfortable.
“There’s intense pressure to win in Mexico because of expectations in our country, too,” Guardado said. “Osorio understands that pressure. He reminds us he lives it too, and has balanced what he demands of us individually because, to him, that’s the best way to get the most from each player and the most from the team.”
What’s clear, both from the extensive writing of Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, both here and in his new book and chat with another Mexican star, Chicharito, is that Osorio’s players bought into their manager’s unwavering commitment to the cultural changes he felt were a prerequisite to winning.
That commitment and belief began to reap fruit in qualifying, when Mexico vanquished its demons in its own personal House of Horrors in Columbus, Ohio, garnering three points it would use to jumpstart the easiest Mexican World Cup qualifying campaign in a generation.
But even as results piled up, cynics endured.
You can talk all you want of a different Mexico, they said, but until they show us at a World Cup, the hype is just that- talk.
It was more than “just talk” Sunday, when a new, improved, confident, at-times mesmerizing El Tri beat Germany, the reigning world champions, 1-0 in Moscow to open their 2018 World Cup.
In many ways, the score line flattered the Germans, as the Mexicans played the game largely on their terms, flawlessly executing the well-laid tactical plans of Osorio, the manager Guardado happily described as “obsessed with futbol.”
Outside of the last 20 minutes, as Mexico bravely withstood a furious German effort for a late-equalizer, El Tri were in complete control, and had they been a bit more competent at finishing any number of dangerous counterattacks, they would have led by two or three goals, rendering the ending a mere formality.
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Osorio’s plan, to press Germany in a 4-2-3-1 and man-mark the German playmaker Toni Kroos, either with the fast, hard-working Carlos Vela or, more surprisingly, a more-industrious and willing-to-drop-deep than usual Chicharito, worked wonders in the opening half. A flummoxed Germany struggled to build possession from the back, often resorting to hopeful long balls, and found itself consistently outnumbered in the center of the midfield as well, as a marvelous Miguel Layun tucked inside to assist Guardado and his central midfield mate, Porto’s Hector Herrera.
With Kroos largely neutralized, Germany became highly predictable in attack, with Joshua Kimmich doing his best Marcelo, bombing ridiculously high down the Mexico left flank, trying to create space on the overlap for Thomas Muller. Kimmich won some battles with Mexico’s right back, Carlos Salcedo (once deemed surplus to requirements at Real Salt Lake!!), but he lost others, and when he did, Mexico were in business down the German left flank in the space left behind, with Germany’s other deep midfielder, Sami Khedira, simply too slow to provide cover.
El Tri’s winning goal was the product of perfect counterattacking soccer.
The goal came on such a sequence in the 35th minute.
Kimmich was caught too high charging on an overlap, and Lozano boldly darted into the space behind. Meanwhile, a silky one-two between Guardado and Chicharito beat Mats Hummels, leaving only Jerome Boateng and a late-arriving Mesut Ozil rushing to try to cover Kimmich’s area. Ozil was too late, and Lozano turned inside and slotted just under a diving Manual Neuer to give Mexico the lead.
When Germany threatened, Mexico were game, especially goalkeeper Memo Ochoa, who saved beautifully on a Toni Kroos free kick in the first half and commanded his area bravely as Germany pinned El Tri deep late.
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When it was over, Chicharito cried on the field, and where I watched, at a watch party hosted by Mexicanos en Miami in the Brickell neighborhood, grown men fell to the ground with him. Women called family members back home, crying before they got through Hola.
As much as Sunday’s momentous win was for all of Mexico, it was Osorio’s moment too, as even his most strident critics fell joyously silent, his methods redeemed. Osorio, a student of philosophy and deeply respectful of Mexico’s tortured psychology as a footballing country, understood the balance.
“I want to dedicate this victory to all the Mexico fans, the ones that have supported me, but also the ones that haven’t,” Osorio told the media following the match.
Watching the game, it was hard not to actively root for El Tri, even if it grew markedly easier not to when Rafa Marquez, wanted for questioning for assorted conspiracy crimes by the Treasury Department and FBI, entered the game to help Mexico see out the final fifteen minutes.
As the whistle blew, a young man caught my attention, standing outside the Consulate General of Mexico across the street from the watch party, waving the Mexican flag for what seemed like an hour, weeping openly in song.
Miguel, I learned a few minutes later, was a freshman at the University of Miami. He was born in Juárez before moving to the United States at twelve. We chatted for a few minutes, him waving the Mexican flag all the while, until he left to look for his Dad, to “give him a Father’s Day hug.”
His joy in sharing this game with his father was palpable.
It remined me, for a moment, of Robert Frost’s 1915 poem “Mending Wall.” In the poem, Frost famously- or infamously- writes “good fences make good neighbors,” in what has become one of the more misquoted segments in literary history. Frost was, of course, being ironical.
Fences and rigid boundaries don’t make good neighbors. On the contrary, they alienate us from one another.
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As Mexico played Sunday, arguments about alienation raged in America, litigated in soccer through the medium of a debate as to the merits of an advertisement released by Wells Fargo Bank featuring Landon Donovan, the former American star who for many years menaced Mexico on the field. In the advertisement, Donovan, who recently made an unavailing comeback in Mexico at Club León, urges American soccer fans to pull for Mexico in Russia.
Some American fans and writers lambasted Donovan as a Judas, decrying the implication an American soccer fan should cheer for the US Men’s National Team’s archrival simply because the United States failed to qualify for the World Cup.
Others blitzed Donovan for shilling for Wells Fargo Bank, earnestly critiquing Donovan’s selling-out to Wall Street overlords while live-tweeting a World Cup brought to you by Gazprom, VISA and Qatar Airways.
Donovan, who once relieved himself on a Mexican practice field, did little to cultivate support for his chivalrous turn when he openly criticized his former teammate and Mexican-American US Men’s National Team captain Carlos Bocanegra, with a bizarre Twitter lecture about true solidarity.
Never tweet, y’all.
Donovan’s advertisement was really a culmination of a months-long debate in America over whether US fans should set aside the rivalry and cheer for El Tri, an immensely popular team in the United States in their own right, at the World Cup.
Mexico fans celebrated deep into the night across the globe Sunday night.
At the new, wondrous The Athletic Soccer, the terrific journalist and Mexico supporter Cesar Hernandez delivered a column rebuttal to the idea, noting a sense that the call for unity (behind Mexico) was rooted in “the fear of corporate America that their customers won’t be as interested in watching a World Cup that doesn’t involve the United States” and the idea that supporting Mexico “would improve their bottom line.”
I’ve no counter to that, but not because I agree with it. It’s just beyond where my subject space is situated.
I’ve written about soccer in the United States for nearly a decade, and the work has brought me great joy, but not at the benefit of my bank account. Fortunately, I’m a trained journalist that went to law school. But in soccer, as a co-founder of this website, I’ve mostly lost money, even as I’ve earned outstanding access, a handful of promising freelance opportunities, some friendships and a lifetime of memories.
For me, rooting for Mexico doesn’t mean, as Hernandez writes, I “need to go to see a doctor,” though I appreciate Cesar’s concern. It also doesn’t mean I will feel awkward when I hope Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie and the next American generation beat El Tri soundly the next time they play, starting this September in Nashville.
I understand the other side, too, to an extent.
As my friend and Sirius XM FC host Jason Davis says, “It’s tough to cheer for your archrival, and Mexico is that to the USA.”
He’s right.
But there’s another point to be made here, I think.
I also write about SEC football.
Of all American sports, college football most simulates the parochially-charged passions of association football.
Most Gators fans didn’t cheer for rival Georgia last year in the national championship against Alabama. Auburn fans weren’t for Bama. Red Sox fans don’t cheer for the Yankees when Boston misses the playoffs. The rivalries themselves don’t allow it. They are too institutionally ingrained.
But cultural identities and national identities are a little more complicated, aren’t they?
For many households (like mine), the pull of one identity doesn’t necessarily foreclose an openness to other identities and cultures.
When the US lost to Trinidad and Tobago in October and missed the World Cup, they did so at Ato Bolden Stadium, a thirty-minute car ride from where my wife grew up. After my press obligations, my wife, who holds dual passports, waited up to greet me at our hotel in Port-of-Spain. As I entered the hotel, weary and heartsick, she gave me a hug, wearing a Stern John Trinidad and Tobago jersey.
Our story isn’t unique.
Auburn alums marry Alabama graduates. Duke-UNC marriages happen too. Both rivalries thrive on gamedays, even as the homes, we hope, contain great respect and love.
Identity isn’t homogenous. Inclusiveness is good.
This is, after all, despite the creeping authoritarian undertones, still America, a land built by immigrants, many of whom will find themselves waving the tricolored flag of Mexico over the next few weeks.
You don’t have to cheer for Mexico to embrace this reality either. I get that.
But it’s okay if you do.
Especially in this contemporary moment, at this World Cup.
If you see an American President that initiated his campaign with a speech calling Mexicans “rapists” and decide, I hope Mexico wins every game, that makes sense.
If you see politicians happily threatening to continue to hold children in cages separated from their families, unless they get money for a border wall the President once insisted Mexico pay for, and, as a small act of solidarity in addition to other forms of active rejection of that politics of hate decide, “Hey, Mexico should win,” that makes sense.
If you feel shame and guilt about the way the current ruling class in America has normalized hateful stereotypes of Mexicans and deployed them as weapons of voter mobilization and hate, and think, “Vamos El Tri”, I’m here for that.
If you’re for all those things and still won’t root for Mexico because the rivalry is too big for you, that’s fine too.
But none of this is normal, and at present, the rivalry isn’t either.
After Sunday, Osorio has Mexico on the verge of never being the same too.
Neil W. Blackmon is co-founder of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.