Since the Osorio days, El Tri hasn’t made notable efforts to enhance team’s mental strength
A preview of sorts ahead of El Tri's Nations League semis match against the USMNT
After the 7-0 defeat against Chile in 2016, Juan Carlos Osorio needed to find solutions after a defeat that almost cost him the México job. It was clear that at that stage of his tenure, he had won over most of the main players of the national team. Many of them, like Chicharito Hernández, had bought into his idea. More importantly, although the loss continues to be one of the most brutal to this day, that team didn’t shy away from facing the media and confirming their conviction in Osorio’s plan.
Osorio’s main move was to include Imanol Ibarrondo into the coaching staff. Ibarrondo worked with El Tri through the 2018 World Cup. Ibarrondo’s title was that of El Tri’s mental coach, and in an interview with the late Grant Wahl, he explained his role in the Mexican national team. “My work is a job of accompaniment,” Ibarrondo said in Spanish. “I accompany others and help them transform themselves, to help convert them into people who deserve extraordinary results.
“This requires a process of change and transformation. It requires that players and teams take consciousness of what they’re doing, thinking and feeling—of their relationships and conversations. Of their connections that are important for the team.”
In that same article, Osorio shared his thoughts on how the team lacked mental preparation to face the debacle against Chile. Osorio described that he didn’t have a Plan B or Plan C. He couldn’t react as El Tri suffered one of their heaviest defeats.
He saw it important to build the team’s mental strength. “Most coaches prefer not to even bother reading about the mind, the brain and the emotions and just say, ‘Football is football, it’s just a game,’” Osorio said to Wahl. “But at the end of the day, it’s a game played by human beings full of emotions. And those emotions are [feeding] the decisions that they take in the game.”
It is unknown what the FMF has done since Osorio and Ibarrondo left. Did they prolong the work left behind? Or did they totally botch it, considering that El Tri was eliminated in the Round of Sixteen just like in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014?
Lots of factors have to be considered to explain El Tri’s poor 2022 World Cup participation, but one of the main ones has to be that weak mental strength shown towards the end of the Gerardo “Tata” Martino era.
There was no punch in that team, with very few high peaks and lots of low ones. The team’s inability to beat Poland in that first group stage game and confusion against Argentina are concrete examples that the team didn’t have a clear idea of how to confront those matches. They didn’t have the conviction the team showed during the Osorio days.
Five consecutive winless games against the USMNT, which finished three points below El Tri in the last World Cup qualifiers, is the product of a mental block.
Diego Cocca and his coaching staff can provide all the information in the world to defeat the archrival, but if the players are not mentally prepared to handle the pressure that this game will provoke, El Tri will enter Thursday’s game without the necessary tools to end this negative streak.
Cocca’s calmness after the draw against Cameroon is a positive sign for the upcoming hours, and there seems to be a genuine desire from his part and coaching staff to win over the players, but with this game coming up, there’s not enough time to build a solid foundation.
How will the team manage the game if they’re up in the score, and how will the team react if they concede first? Their behavior in these scenarios will give us a better indication of where El Tri’s mental state stands.
If what we see Thursday night is something that looks like confusion, mixed with frustration and lack of leadership from the players on the pitch, then the alarming issues seen in Qatar will come back to haunt everybody.