Mexico Preview

England play their last game at Wembley before leaving for the World Cup Finals against a Mexican side that most of us will next see playing the hosts in the opening game of the tournament.

This will be the first time we’ve played ‘El Tri’ since 2001 (a 4-0 win at Pride Park in Derby if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me) and the Mexicans don’t have a good record in England: we’ve won all four games played here and they have yet to score. Despite that, we actually have quite a lot in common with them: until about half way through the qualifying campaign they were managed by Sven-Goran Eriksson and in the last four tournaments they have qualified from their group only to be unable to get past the second round. So…umm… actually quite a lot in common then.

It used to be quite rare for Mexicans to play abroad (Hugo Sanchez is the only name that springs to mind) but that’s changed. The provisional squad named by Javier Aguirre contained ten players who play their club football in Europe: captain Rafael Marquez and midfielder Jonathan Dos Santos play for Barcelona, defenders Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Salcido (five yellow cards and a sending off in qualifying) are team mates at PSV Eindhoven and strikers Guillermo Franco and Carlos Vela play in this country for West Ham and Arsenal respectively.  However, the most intriguing Mexican prospect for years will probably be playing at Bloomfield Road, Blackpool next season: Javier Hernandez (who will only be 22 on 1^st June) joined Manchester United recently and is arguably the best striker to have emerged from the country since Sanchez. I’ve not seen him play, but if I was Dimitar Berbatov I’d be on the phone to my agent if Hernandez starts banging them in during the tournament.

Hernandez is more of a long term goalscoring prospect as Mexico don’t really have a dominant striker – the apparently ageless Cuauhtemoc Blanco is 37, neither Franco nor Vela have really done the business at international level and Nery Castillo wasn’t even named in the provisional squad. The short term solution appears to be Alberto Medina, who didn’t play at all in the qualifiers but has scored in two of Mexico’s last three friendlies including the 1-0 win over Chile last Sunday.

I’ll go for an England win, but if we stop the Mexicans from scoring then I think we can look forward to both the Japan friendly and the first game of the finals against the USA with a lot of confidence. Another point to remember is that the Mexicans are tight defensively and have a decent track record in the World Cup – it would not be a huge surprise if they beat South Africa in the opening game – and so we may have to be patient. And no booing Jamie Carragher either.

In other news, Gary Linekerdecided to leave The D**ly M**l as a football columnist this week…Diego Maradona ran a journalist over (as far as we know it wasn’t one from the Mail)…Michael Ballack and Lassana Diarra won’t be playing in the tournament, which is a shame as I really wanted to use ‘Ballack’s Out’, ‘Never Mind The Ballacks’ or ‘What A Load Of Old Ballacks’ as article titles. It’s also a shame that we won’t be treated to a French player running around with ‘Lass’ on the back of his shirt, but you can’t have everything can you ;-)

Calling ALL Fans Who Support The 2018 Bid

A very sincere thank you from Jerry and myself to everyone who read and commented on the post that appeared here on Sunday morning about the atrocious piece of so called ‘journalism’ that appeared in the Mail On Sunday at the weekend; I’ve spent most of the day at work getting angrier and angrier about this and trying to work out what to do next, so I’d like to thank the person who added the comment from http://toque.co.uk/ for giving all of us a potential outlet for our…ummm…’dismay’: the Boycott The Mail: England Fans United Facebook group can be found here; the Rise Like Lions website (which is associated with the FB group) is here.

There’s also another Facebook group here. If anyone can point us in the direction of any more fan groups, online petitions and such then we’ll be pleased to contribute, pass on any details we get and generally join in; the more the merrier after all!

As fans we’ll all be watching and hoping that the England team can become World Champions this summer: some of us may be lucky enough to be in South Africa in person. As fans we were all hoping that in eight years time we would not have to travel so far. Now hose hopes have been damaged but not destroyed so as fans we need to show the Daily Mail how angry we are but we also need to show the various decision makers exactly how much we want the World Cup in England in 2018.

So instead of finishing off by posting Terry Venables pretending to be Elvis or an advert for a Danish brewery featuring an ex-Scunthorpe United player dressed in a suit of armour…over to Sir Laurence Olivier and William Shakespeare.