The coach of Mexico, Gerardo Martino, during a press conference in California.Marcio Jose Sanchez (AP)
The Mexican adage says: "There is no chair hotter than that of the coach of the Mexican team."
The position of coach of El Tri is a stormy journey that has an expiration date, a maximum of four years, although they are doing well.
The pressure is high for a country trying to be among the best in the world in its favorite sport, but in the last seven World Cups it has been stuck in the round of 16.
Generations and generations of promising footballers have suffered the same fate.
At the World Cup in Qatar, expectations have dropped to the point of talking that getting past the group stage will be seen as an achievement.
The Mexican Federation, with Yon de Luisa in his first experience as president, appointed Tata Martino as coach in 2019. The Argentine was preceded by his experiences with Paraguay and Argentina, as well as a season at Barcelona.
Things seemed to be going well, with 11 wins in a row and one Gold Cup won.
Then came a 4-0 win against Albiceleste in a friendly.
Five more victories added to the pocket of a comfortable Martino and the pandemic paralyzed everything.
Ten months later, El Tri was able to return to the field after the cancellation of a handful of games in 2020. The little contact with the soccer players and the suspension of activities caused the work that the coach had built to rust.
“Martino's numbers are ones before and after the pandemic.
The team began to play badly, it affected a lot.
And the health emergency also affected Mexican fans who wanted to go out, go to the stadiums.
They wanted to go see a show, but when they didn't see it, they began to criticize the coach, to shout the homophobic cry, which people use as punishment”, considers Carlos Calderón, Mexican soccer historian.
The 2020-2021 statistics show the team's decline: from starting with victories against the Netherlands (1-0), South Korea (3-2) and Japan (2-0) to losing to the United States in the final of the Nations League after playing a very irregular tournament.
There began the bitterness between the fans and the team.
El Tri played in the Gold Cup and lost it again against the US Another hook to the liver.
The qualifiers for the World Cup showed that the team had difficulties to win although, at the end of it all, they won it.
The defeats against the USA and Canada sentenced the attitude of the Mexican fans: no more Tata Martino.
According to the Mexican press, Martino even threatened to resign, but they did not allow it.
“Mexico has a result-based fan base, which does not analyze the matches.
What the country is going through is a cyclical situation, no matter who the coach is, when the results are not given it seems that the public enemy is the coach”, considers Fernando Schwartz, a Mexican journalist who has followed El Tri for more than three decades.
If Martino was booed at the Azteca stadium, in the United States the federations thought they would find an oasis in the stands.
It was not so.
There were also hostilities when El Tri lost even in friendlies.
Despite everything, the Mexican team won their ticket to the World Cup.
In the last preparation matches for the World Cup, the Argentine has left crestfallen.
"It seems to me that with everything that has been worked on, not only by Tata but by his entire coaching staff, the results have been truly positive for the Federation," Yon de Luisa defended just a month ago in an interview with EL PAÍS .
"We are convinced that it was the best choice," added the manager.
“In Mexico, there is an illusion that things are going to change by magic every four years.
They do not believe in long processes ”, reproaches Schwartz.
It was in the 1986 World Cup when El Tri played a quarterfinal match, the cliché of the fifth game, where the Mexicans put their aspirations.
There have been seven World Cups without exceeding the round of 16.
Another fact that contributes to the trend is that the country has not had a coach who has been in office for more than four years.
Thinking of a Vicente del Bosque or a Joachim Löw is a chimera.
“Our soccer is marked by neoliberal parameters: so commodified, that it demands immediate results and where there are no projects”, analyzes the sociologist Sergio Varela.
The Mexican challenge will begin with Poland, then with Argentina and with Saudi Arabia, the most accessible rival.
“I feel happy, excited, wanting to face this challenge, the same as I have since day one.
I don't have any negative feelings today," Martino said in September.
The negative sensations of the press and fans go through the absence of Javier
Chicharito
Hernández, Mexico's top scorer and who, since 2020, decided to play in US soccer. The coach refused to call him up due to indiscipline off the field and his friction with the group.
He couldn't attract Carlos Vela either.
“Mexico will have a great World Cup because the sport is of ascending and descending curves.
This is played game by game”, considers Schwartz.
For Carlos Calderón there is a parallelism between the Tri of 2022 and that of 1998 because both teams arrived with doubts and with a series of previous defeats.
“That selection was called Tri-tanic, in reference to the movie,” he mentions.
In that World Cup in France, the Mexicans qualified for the round of 16 after beating South Korea, drawing with Belgium and, agonizingly, against the Netherlands.
“This year I am confident that the footballers will play even above Martino's indications”, he adds.
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