Archive for the ‘Internationals’ Category

Every country has them. Some call them traitors. Others refer to them as trophy hunters or self-serving opportunists. In Canada, the names Jonathan de Guzman and Owen Hargreaves have become synonymous with national betrayal. But it’s presumptuous to approach the topic of nationalism and football from this angle alone.

In his book ‘Imagined Communities’ professor Benedict Anderson once said that nationalism is a state of mind rather than a tangible reality:

“It is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”

Anderson makes a plausible case that the collective bonds of nation and country exist only in our heads. Following that self-evident premise, should it matter if an individual within this ‘imagined community’ opts to represent another? After all, why are we bothered by something that perhaps is nothing more than an illusion? Or perhaps the illusion itself is all that fuels the passion of international football.

There was uproar in Canada when De Guzman chose to choose the Dutch national team. While de Guzman has been covered extensively in both media and on the Counter Attack blog, it may be refreshing for some Canadians to hear that we’re not alone in feeling a sense of deep betrayal.

From Brazil to Turkey, players are often vilified for the choices they make, especially when it comes to citizenship and international representation.
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I mean, they do, but there is something singularly wonderful about a world in which 90,000 people will watch a team that represents a country with 30,000 citizens. James Tyler has a great piece up on the importance of respecting the little guys:

But such suggestions ignore the important point: these qualifying rounds are all about the minnows, not Steven Gerrard’s comfort or Franck Ribery’s accruement of air miles. Though the bulk of attention invariably fixates on the minor dramas of big players, niggling injuries or monotonous press conferences, the minnows and their stories enliven normally drab, perfunctory bouts of football.

It’s about Andy Selva, the 35-year-old Sammarinese striker with a lifetime spent in Italian soccer’s doldrums and scorer of eight goals for San Marino, a country that has scored just 19 in 112 games dating back to 1990. Davide Gualtieri versus England, 1993! Or Leweck scoring in a 2-1 WCQ win in Switzerland, one of the biggest shocks in recent memory.

There is a romanticism in this argument, and it could be argued that the qualifying rounds shouldn’t exist in their current form just for the sake of a perky narrative now and again. But I’ve made the case before (and will make it over and over until I’m sick of the sound of my keyboard clacking) that there is a principle to be upheld as well. As I wrote the last time this subject came up:

This is football. There are in-built competitive advantages for certain countries based on population, GDP, and footballing history. But a nation is a nation, regardless of size or footballing prowess. They deserve a fair shake against the best of the best teams in their federation, regardless of the likely but not absolutely guaranteed results. The boredom of fans of so-called big nations (you know, the ones that get booted out of the first WC round against Slovakia) shouldn’t overrule the principle of fair play…

There are some cases where these provisions cannot be realistically made, as in CAF or CONCACAF where many of the smaller nations don’t have the financial means to slog through a giant group stage in geographically daunting federations (the Guyanese manager has to coach his team over SKYPE against Mexico). But Europe isn’t like that, and so we get the group stage in their current form.

DEAL.

Spain’s exit from the 2012 Olympic football tournament was as early as it was ignominious. Two matches; no goals scored; nine bookings and one ejection—the final moments of Sunday’s 1-0 loss to Honduras spent in a rage after referee Juan Soto’s decision not to award a penalty to the world and European champions near the end of normal time. La Furia, indeed.

Perhaps they underestimated their opposition. Perhaps, given their recent success on the international stage (they arrived at the Games having already won two titles in July—Euro 2012 and the UEFA U-19 crown) they figured they could get results just by showing up. Perhaps they merely had a poor week.

But to say they didn’t care would be to devalue the importance Olympic football has had on the sport in this country over the past 92 years. It was at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, after all, that Spanish football carved out a place for itself in the national psyche; it was in 1992 in Barcelona that a star-studded team including the likes of Santiago Canizares, Luis Enrique and Pep Guardiola finally conquered the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Brazil were the entertainers during the past week of international friendlies, but on Sunday at Cowboys Stadium it was all about Mexico.

It’s been all about Mexico at several levels of the world game the past 14 months as El Tri have racked up title after title. The run began in April of last year when Ulises Dávila scored twice in the final of the CONCACAF U-20 Championship to secure a continental crown, and at the FIFA U-20 World Cup four months later Mexico progressed all the way to the semifinals before being beaten by eventual champions Brazil.

Dávila, who became the first Mexican to sign for Chelsea when he joined the Blues last summer, helped ensure his side would at least come away with a medal when he scored against France in the third-place game, and he was also part of the U-22 side that put in a series of impressive performances against Uruguay, Peru and Chile at last year’s Copa America.

Mexico, of course, are also CONCACAF champions at the senior level, having annihilated their regional rivals at last June’s Gold Cup. Pablo Barrera and Andres Guardado combined to score three times against the United States in the final at the Rose Bowl and both players were exceptional against Brazil on Sunday.

Barrera, 24, spent most of last season on loan to Real Zaragoza from West Ham while Guardado, 25, recently joined Valencia after five seasons at Deportivo La Coruna. Manchester United striker Javier Hernandez, who was named Most Valuable Player of the 2011 Gold Cup, scored the second Mexico goal against Brazil; Giovanni dos Santos, still on the books at Tottenham Hotspur, scored the first with a delightfully chipped effort that may have been intended as a cross.

Despite his struggles at club level, dos Santos continues to play a vital role for the national team and has now tallied 13 times for his country. He has scored exactly the same amount of goals the past three seasons combined while at Spurs, Ipswich, Galatasaray and Racing Santander.

These players, along with goalkeeper José Corona, right-back Severo Meza (who absolutely dominated Neymar on Sunday), defender Héctor Moreno, midfielder Ángel Reyna and forward Aldo de Nigris should combine to make Mexico a legitimate World Cup contender in two years’ time. Solid at the back, strong on the wings and lethal in attack, they have lost just two senior internationals since the 2010 World Cup. They might also be the best counter-attacking side in international football.

And the future is only getting brighter. On Friday Mexico beat Turkey to win the 2012 Toulon Tournament—an annual under-age competition that previously helped launch the careers of Alan Shearer, Rui Costa, Juan Roman Riquelme and Thierry Henry. Pachuca midfielder Héctor Herrera won the Golden Ball at this year’s instalment, and Guadalajara playmaker Marco Fabián led all players with seven goals. Both players will be at the London Olympics just over two months from now, and Mexico will be one of the favourites to win the Gold Medal.

Mexico are also world champions at the U-17 level—a title they claimed last July after beating France, Germany and Uruguay in successive knockout matches. They previously won the U-17 in 2005, and a trio of stars from that tournament—Dos Santos, Moreno and Edgar Andrade—contributed to the 2-0 win against Brazil on Sunday.

A word about Brazil

Brazil controlled much of the play against Mexico at Cowboys Stadium but could simply not find an opening through Meza, Moreno, Jorge Torres and Francisco Rodriguez. That said, the past week’s wins over Denmark and the United States revealed a lot of positives, and manager Mano Menezes should feel good about his side’s chances ahead of the London Olympics.

The side Menezes put out against Mexico averaged under 22-years in age, and robust performances from Sandro and Rômulo in the centre of the park, powerful attacking displays by Hulk and the silky-smooth skills of Neymar and Oscar have the national team looking more competitive than it has at any time since Menezes’ appointment in 2010.

The manager, it should be said, stumbled upon this current team quite by accident.

In a late-February friendly against Bosnia-Herzegovina, Menezes started Ronaldinho and brought Elias off the bench just prior to the hour-mark. Neither player should be anywhere near the senior Brazil squad, and the same can probably be said for Robinho, Maicon, Jadson, Michel Bastos, Lucio and Julio Cesar.

That said, it took Menezes more than a year-and-a-half to completely dispense with the old guard, and he only did it because preparations for the U-23 Olympic tournament required it.

What’s become obvious over the past week is that this current U-23 side—augmented by the likes of Thiago Silva, Hulk and at some point David Luiz—is easily the best Brazil side of the Menezes era and will likely look a lot like the team that opens up the 2014 World Cup in Sao Paulo.

Menezes didn’t intend for it to work like this, but it has happened nonetheless. Sometimes the best ideas are little more than an accident.

Follow Jerrad Peters on Twitter @peterssoccer