Thursday, January 29, 2009

El Tri, Losing Again

Mexico's national team, which has more players thriving in Europe with each passing year, yet whose performance as a group steadily declines, lost a friendly to Sweden last night 1-0. I can't remember el Tri playing a decent 90 minutes against a halfway decent team (no, Peru doesn't count) since the Copa America, when they beat Brazil and crushed Uruguay. As disappointing as the team was under Hugo Sánchez, I don't think there's much question that they've been worse since he was replaced by Sven-Goran Eriksson.

With such a gloomy climate surrounding them, Mexican soccer fans are turning to a new tactic ahead of the World Cup qualifier against the Americans on February 11: voodoo:
An advertisement in the sports daily Record on Tuesday invited fans to clip coupons and redeem them at their local Radio Shack store for a voodoo-doll likeness of a U.S. player. The hope was that a little black magic might help Mexico break a decade of futility on the road versus its northern neighbor.
A nice idea, and certainly at this point one has to think that the team won't go anywhere without a little supernatural support, but we gringos don't lose in Gringolandia.

2 comments:

Erik Loomis said...

By sheer chance, I happened to be eating in the market in Oaxaca when the national team lost to, I think, Honduras in May 2007. There was much anger and kicking of tables.

pc said...

Yeah losses to Honduras are unforgiveable. And unless they get it together, there's going to be some more eruptions of anger in the coming months, because that team is looking bad, bad, bad.