I’m not usually big on schadenfreude in sports.
I make exceptions for the San Francisco Giants, the Boston Celtics …
And the Mexican national soccer team.
All of them can lose every time out for a very long time, and their suffering would please me.
That was el tri that was spanked, 3-1, by Honduras in San Pedro de Sula last night. Ha. Ha-ha-ha.
That drops the declining power of america norte into fourth place in the CONCACAF standings, and if Mexico finishes there it has the unenviable task of getting into the World Cup via a back door — defeating the No. 5 finisher out of the South American qualifying.
Good, good, good.
I know, I should be kinder to Mexico. What else does the country have going for it, aside from a vibrant and (generally) thriving soccer league and the national team it produces? Quality of living? Pleasant clime? Good government, good schools, honest cops, lack of crime?
That would be a bunch of “heck nos!”
I should be able to let them carry on in their fantasy that they are the hemisphere’s greatest soccer nation, north of Brazil … a notion the Mexican soccer fan carried well into this millennium.
A notion that has been battered into intellectual wreckage in recent years. Mexico not only can’t beat the Yanqis anymore (for whom soccer is about the fifth most popular sport), they often can’t beat the Costa Ricans and even the Hondurans, countries with a fraction of their population and professional leagues that can’t possibly rival Mexico’s.
What’s going on down there?
From this side of the border, it looks like relentless tinkering, supreme lack of patience, destructive insularity and, now, a lack of confidence in any match played outside their smoggy aerie of Azteca Stadium.
It would show unusual forebearance if Mexico’s meddling soccer honchos allow coach Sven-Goran Ericksson to survive the week. That’s how they roll, south of the Rio Grande. A couple of bad results, and the coach is gone. The sort of self-destructive behavior that George Steinbrenner was guilty of while taking the New York Yankees not much of anywhere for about 15 years in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It’s hard to find equilibrium when you’re always being jerked around.
Mexican players already have complained about Ericksson’s attempt to bring some sort of Euro-level discipline and strategy to their traditional “ole!” based preference for individual brilliance, which used to be enough to overpower the region but now leads to fairly appalling performances any time el tri is outside the country’s borders.
If I were running Mexican soccer, I would stick with Sven-Goran and let him work this out. He’s no fool, though his bluntness at times may not help him — as when he acknowledged the obvious when he said Mexico has no forwards with speed, even with the nation’s sudden embrace of Brazilians, et al, who can come up with a Mexican passport.
But the way Mexico has operated, of late, they most certainly will panic, fire Ericksson and bring in some recycled somebody who perhaps can shore up the Azteca advantage and maybe get a point out of El Salvador — and maybe finish third in the regional qualifying, a whisper ahead of Honduras.
Long-term, Mexican soccer seems to have serious, deep-rooted issues with cultural overtones — much like the rest of the country’s institutions. I ought to feel bad for el tri. Fact is, I don’t in the least. I’ve seen too many Mexican fans jeering the U.S. national anthem, behaving execrably inside stadiums and gloating over 1990s victories over U.S. national teams made up of college kids … to summon up any sympathy for them.
Suffer, el tri, suffer!
7 responses so far ↓
1 John Hollon // Apr 2, 2009 at 12:08 PM
I would add the St. Louis Rams to this list. Not only did they run off and take a half century of football tradition to Missouri, but they now try to act like they never played anywhere else. I root for an 0-16 season for them every year.
2 Chuck Hickey // Apr 2, 2009 at 5:11 PM
And, of course, they fired him today.
Boo-hoo.
3 Guy McCarthy // Apr 2, 2009 at 8:43 PM
Eriksson getting the axe echoes far and wide. Unlike firings of previous Mexico managers, this one rings loud in Europe. Aside from leading England to World Cup quarters in 2002 and 2006, he earned cred in Italy, the Champs League, a bit less in the Premiership.
But he got schooled in Concacaf. For various reasons, not all his own doing. It was an odd fit from the outset.
Like it’s been said before, “Sven is to Mexico what mustard is to a taco.”
4 William K. Wolfrum Chronicles » Blog Archive » From the Sports Desk // Apr 3, 2009 at 5:19 AM
[…] Mexico loses and fires its head coach. Schadenfreude is just delicious. […]
5 joel es latest soccer news // Apr 3, 2009 at 9:11 AM
Mexico is not creating a stable environment for their players. I believe that he would have turned them around. THey wanted a mexican coach
6 Damian // Apr 7, 2009 at 4:58 PM
Sven may be gone now but he’ll surface with a much better job than Mexico before the next club season begins. Don’t expect Sven to be crying in his lager.
I agree I was surprised and found it awkward that Mexico hired Sven to begin with, and with their fanatical fan-base (which includes the media inside a press box and at a news conference) and weak leadership within the national team setup, you knew that Sven would be overrun well before he had an actual chance to succeed there.
Sven’s system and fundamental beliefs in how to play the game are very much different from the style and flair Mexicans like to see the game played. And the problem with Mexico is that they have this myopic view of themselves as a world power and a quadrennial World Cup contender. If this is the case, tell me how many World Cups Mexico has won, how many Mexican players are playing vital positions on the pitch for the world’s elite clubs and why they can’t seem to ever get past the round of 16 at the World Cup. Oh yeah, they let in 2 goals a game when not playing at home because they care about playing defense about as much as Don Markham does. Mexico’s World Cup track record does not give its people a reason to be as demanding as they are. You keep hiring and firing coaches every year or 2, you’ll never have the continutity it takes to win internationally. With each time a team adopts a new coach’s system, you return to square one.
A strong-minded, smart executive committee within the FMF would take heart in Sven’s track record in Europe at club level with Lazio (and what has Lazio done since Sven left?) and England (though England did not win anything major during Sven’s regime, remember that, of the World Cup and Euros that Sven oversaw, England was defeated by Brazil in the 2002 Korea quarters in what was really the World Cup final, if you had watched all of the teams in that tournament, and then went out to Portugal on PKs — a crapshoot that is completely different than being beaten in the run of play — in the 2004 Euros and Germany 2006 after having had the better run of play in both matches. No Euro team scored more and was more dangerous in attack than England when Michael Owen was healthy in Sven’s system.
The FMF should have let Sven have the team through the next World Cup, for better or worse, and would ignore all of the public outcry and skepticism from a dumbed-down media contingent. Let’s face it, Mexico really has nothing to lose in letting Sven stick around. The collective players and style Mexico puts out there now is never going to win a World Cup. They want to play like Brazil and Argentina while fielding the collective quality of talent that has been second-rate. They have a chance with some of the young stars coming up who already playing in Europe (Vela, Dos Santos, etc.) and are beginning to understand the intracacies of the Euro game, but they needed a coach of contemporary football to bring them along and get them to understand how to play against other continental styles.
Sven would have brought discipline, structure and defensive principles and responsibility to that squad over time. The transition to get these guys playing a different style than what they are used to was always going to be rough and carry on its fair share of bad losses. But CONCACAF is so weak that there is never a question of qualifying for the World Cup and having the coaching continuity that is sorely lacking could have helped to advance Mexico further in, say, the 2014 or 2018 World Cup.
Mexico’s problem is public impatience, no vision to the future, a false belief that it is a world power, and a nationalistic pressure to outfit the national team with a Mexican coach and a Mexican style of play. That nationalistic feeling of having a coach of the same ethnicity as your team is the case in most countries, but if a team is winning and getting beyond the first knockout stage of the World Cup, do you think any Mexican fan is really going to care how the team is playing on the way to achieving winning results? Are English fans still criticizing Fabio Capello for not being fluent in English? As much as Sven was detested by English fans, he sure did a heck of a lot better than Steve McClaren and Glenn Hoddle.
But Mexico can keep changing coaches and systems and chasing their tails ad nauseum and see where it gets them. I won’t lose sleep over it. All the FMF is doing is hurting itself and its team in the long run.
7 Doug Padilla // Apr 8, 2009 at 4:27 PM
Was the previous response a translation of the original post?
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