Thoughts on CONCACAF Qualifying

The United States crushed Bar­ba­dos but not much can be taken from the match. Bar­ba­dos miss­ing four of their five best play­ers got rolled by a fired up US squad 8–0. While the score­line was impres­sive, many con­cerns still per­sist for the U.S. like keep­ing proper spac­ing between attack­ers on the pitch and play­ers know­ing their respec­tive roles while on the pitch. I’ll save these dis­cus­sions and crit­i­cisms for another day because the US did what they had to do to avoid the pit­falls oth­ers faced in qual­i­fy­ing this past week­end. The issues with the US remain today the same as they were last week. How­ever, other nations that the US com­petes with such as Mex­ico are show­ing them­selves to be much weaker than anticipated.

Mexico’s per­for­mance Sun­day against a team ranked 51 spots below Bar­ba­dos in the FIFA world rank­ings made the rest of CONCACAF look like world beat­ers. Mex­ico used two con­tro­ver­sial calls to notch late goals against the 172nd ranked team in the world, Belize 2–0. In what can only be described as a shock­ing dis­play of foot­ball, Mex­ico was so bad that from minute thirty onward Belize was tempted go for­ward and attack. Par­tic­u­larly bad for Mex­ico from my eyes was Andres Guardado who was repeat­edly dis­pos­sessed and sev­eral times lost his composure.

Mexico’s two goals were con­tro­ver­sial. A late foul call just out­side the box in minute 67 led to a free kick which Car­los Vela cleaned up for a goal, and then deep into stop­page time after a Mex­i­can shot went far wide, The ref­eree stopped play and called a penalty because a Belize defender had clipped the Mex­i­can shot taker on his fol­low through after the show was taken. Jared Bor­getti, calmly booked the PK, and Mex­ico ran out a 2–0 vic­tor. This per­for­mance paled in com­par­i­son to the impres­sive dis­plays pro­vided by Mexico’s likely sec­ond round group oppo­nents: Hon­duras is already through to group stage with an aggre­gate 6–2 win over Puerto Rico, Canada crushed St Vin­cent 3–0 in the first leg even with­out injured Rob Friend, and Jamaica beat the Bahamas 7–0 in the first leg of their series, and 6–0 in the sec­ond leg.  Rene Simoes return as man­ager of the “Reggee Boys” seems to have had the desired affect at least ini­tially for the Jamaicans. So in other words, Sven Goran Eriks­son has a momen­tous task ahead of him, as Mex­i­can foot­ball is suf­fer­ing from a cri­sis of con­fi­dence and run of about two years of indif­fer­ent, if not sim­ply poor results.

Trinidad and Tobago has been in a steady decline since thrilling the world in Ger­many 2006. Now T&T is in seri­ous jeop­ardy of being dis­missed from World Cup 2008 qual­i­fy­ing just two years after par­tic­i­pat­ing in the last tour­na­ment. Bermuda went to Port of Spain and won 2–1 yes­ter­day. If Bermuda advances they will be grouped with the US, Guatemala and the Cuba/Antigua win­ner. Panama strug­gled to defeat El Sal­vador 1–0 at home and now must be con­sid­ered a slight under­dog in this weekend’s return leg. Costa Rica who has qual­i­fied for the pre­vi­ous two world cups and actu­ally won the CONCACAF hexaganol qual­i­fy­ing for the 2002 cup, had to mount a valiant come­back to draw Grenada 2–2. The sec­ond leg is this week­end in San Jose.