Mexico’s national team silenced a braying country full of soccer cassandras

GOAL

Win Is All It Takes for Mexico to Exhale

By JACK BELL

Published: March 31, 2009

Mexico’s national team silenced a braying country full of soccer cassandras and regained a smidgen of its swagger and a needed injection of confidence with its 2-0 victory over Costa Rica on Saturday before more than 100,000 at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.

An unthinkable loss at home would almost certainly have cost Mexico’s coach, Sven-Goran Eriksson, his post after less than a year on the job.

“There’s a big sense of relief,” John Sutcliffe, who covers the Mexican national team for ESPN Deportes, said in a telephone interview from Mexico City on Sunday. He said Eriksson used an off-color Mexican saying in his news conference to describe his relief. “He said he realized there are unwritten rules in soccer and this is one of them: you don’t win, you don’t have a future with the team,” he said.

There is little doubt, even among the most skeptical Mexican soccer fans, that the national team will qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. But there has been an outpouring of second-guessing and dread over the recent aimless performances by El Tri, as the national team is known. Before the victory against Costa Rica, on goals by Omar Bravo and Pavel Pardo, Mexico had forged a forgettable run of four World Cup qualifiers in the Concacaf region without a victory — road losses against Jamaica, Honduras and the United States; and a tie in Canada.

“If they couldn’t get the 3 points at home, then it would have been a real crisis and there would have been a lot of pressure to fire Sven,” Sutcliffe said. “It was not about style points, just 3 points. In Mexico, even when it struggles, when it does well at home things are O.K. It wasn’t the greatest of games. We have seen Mexico a lot better.”

According to Sutcliffe, the battered Mexican federation, which recently saw its under-20 national team fail to qualify for this year’s FIFA U-20 World Cup in Egypt, was poised to dismiss Eriksson and replace him with the coach of Toluca, José Manuel de la Torre.

Mexico played the match without the Barcelona defender and team captain Rafael Marquéz. He served the first of a two-game suspension that resulted from his ejection from a 2-0 loss to the United States last month and the imposition of an additional one-game sanction by FIFA, the sport’s world governing body. Also unavailable were defender Carlos Salcido and striker Carlos Vela, who were also suspended, and striker Giovanni dos Santos, who was injured. Salcido and Vela are expected to play in Wednesday’s game against Honduras in San Pedro de Sula. After two matches in the 10-game round-robin (from which three countries will qualify automatically for South Africa), the United States in is first place with 4 points. Mexico and Costa Rica each have 3.

There was — surprise — drama worthy of a telenovela before the match when Nery Castillo, who plays in Ukraine and is only now coming back from injury, criticized the often-fervent Mexican news media as being overly critical. He did not play against Costa Rica.

Still, there is an outlandish but palpable sense that Mexican soccer has been left in the slipstream by the United States, which eliminated Mexico in the second round of the 2002 World Cup.

“The big deal here is that soccer in Mexico is No. 1 by far and it’s not in the States,” Sutcliffe said. “It hurts, especially going back to the 2002 World Cup. A lot of Mexicans live in the United States by necessity, not because they want to be there. And anything that has to do with sports, Mexico and the United States is on their mind. Now, there’s even great pride that Lorena Ochoa is winning in golf on U.S. territory.”