4 hours ago
11
There are ways of leaving a tournament. You can go out with a sheen of glory, having gone to-to-toe with a great opponent. You can be unlucky and go home raging at referees and the fates. You can self-immolate in a blaze of red cards or own goals or spectacular errors. Or you can slink away without leaving a trace – and that was the path followed by the Czechia. Nobody in 20 years will remember they were involved in this World Cup, other perhaps that Ireland fans reflecting on what a mess the Czechs made of the place they pinched from them in the playoff.
A win would probably have taken Czechia through but that never looked likely. The Czechia coach Miroslav Koubek left out two of his most experienced campaigners in Patrik Schick and Tomas Soucek, and the way was left clear for a 17-year-old to control the game.
Soucek did come on, but then landed awkwardly and left the field in obvious distress. There had been calls for Gilberto Mora to start both Mexico’s first two games of the tournament, and it was easy to see why. He had impressed even before playing a part in the first two Mexico goals.
Mora, the youngest player to start a World Cup match since Nigerian Femi Opabunmi in 2002, and the sixth-youngest of all time, looks impossibly small, even for somebody only 17 years, seven months and 28 days old. When he was born in October 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers was already a month in the past. Mora is only 5ft 6in, and slight with it; Norman Whiteside, who remains the youngest player in World Cup history, would have towered over him despite being six-and-a-half months younger when he set the record in Spain in 1982.
What marks Mora out is his touch. One turn, just after the first-half hydration break, taking the ball with the outside of his right foot and spinning away from traffic, had an air of Lionel Messi about it, not just in terms of the technique, but the scurrying gait. It was his pass to Luis Romo six minutes into the second half that carved the Czech defence open for the first time, but the midfielder who got the winner against South Korea rather rushed his cross and the chance was lost.
Mora is enormously popular and understandably so, the general hubbub transforming into rumblings of anticipation every time he got the ball. Fans expect him to succeed, and they want him to succeed. When he went off after 72 minutes, it was to a standing ovation.
Five minutes later there was a similar ovation for introduction from the bench of the goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, a month shy of his 41st birthday, appearing in his sixth World Cup and becoming the sixth-oldest player in World Cup history. The Mexico coach Javier Aguirre called this “the night of Memo Ochoa”.
after newsletter promotion
The left-back Mateo Chávez got the first goal, surging through in the inside-right channel and finishing calmly 10 minutes into the second half. That was the Czechs pretty much done, and they were finished off six minutes later by another run from a full-back. This time it was Jorge Sánchez who broke through and, when an attempted clearance cannoned off his tumbling body, Julián Quiñones tucked in his second of the tournament. The substitute Álvaro Fidalgo slammed in a third in injury time.
Aguirre was in the Mexico side that beat Iraq 1-0 at the Azteca to reach the knockout stage at the 1986 World Cup, but he described tonight as “the most emotional moment” of his career. “Forty years ago, something similar happened,” he said, “but now I’m older and more sensitive.”
With Mexico already guaranteed to top the group thanks to head-to-head replacing goal difference as the primary means of separating sides level on points, their coach Javier Aguirre had made five changes to his lineup. Mora’s inclusion was the headline, but César Montes returned to the heart of the defence after suspension. Although Raúl Jiménez stood aside for Guillermo Martínez, fears that Aguirre might rest the majority of his team and so impinge on the integrity of the tournament proved happily unfounded. Mexico were far too good for the Czechia.
Of the four sides who made it through the Uefa play-offs, Turkey are out, the Czechia are out, Sweden are struggling and, while Bosnia and Herzegovina are probably through, they had the enormous advantage of being drawn with an extremely disappointing Qatar.
Koubek seemed intent on staying in the game as long as possible and, as a result, his side lost their place in the tournament without putting up anything resembling a fight. Czechia became the 14th side in a row to fail to score against Mexico in the first half of a World Cup game – the last to do so were Argentina, for whom Carlos Tévez and Gonzalo Higuaín struck before half-time in Argentina’s 3-1 win on the last 16 in 2010 – and they didn’t come much closer in the second either.
“It was probably our best performance of the tournament,” said Koubek, unconvincingly. “But unfortunately, we let the opponent break us.”
And so, unmourned, Czechia depart the tournament while Mexico, after three straight wins without conceding a goal, march on.
