A dearth of coverage on the handful of Mexican soccer portals I check regularly caused me to wonder who exactly these Mexican players were. Increasingly implausible scenarios popped to mind. Maybe the Mexican side were winners of a contest offering the chance to don the national team jersey against high per-capita milk-consuming rivals.
Or perhaps the Milk Cup was like the well-meaning multicultural festivals held in small-towns, where due to a lack of anyone actually from anywhere else, they randomly assign countries like Vietnam or Bolivia to locals who wear representative costumes and man the pavilions. In this sense, the “Mexican” U20 team was really an amateur pub side from Ballymoney made up of guys called Liam and Tomas.
The tournament website wasn’t a great help. The first paragaph one finds after clicking the ‘About’ tab is as follows: Who would have thought that the Northern Ireland Milk Cup would have become such a magnificent event, one which is eagerly anticipated by football people all over the British Isles and farther afield?
I for one, certainly wouldn’t have thought that. But I pressed on. Surely the ‘squads’ section would help determine who exactly these recently defeated Mexican players were?
The first name I Googled on the Mexican squad returned two separate murder victims in New Jersey and Guatemala. The second returned a soccer player, except it was an Equatoguinean one born in 1985. I eventually figured out that the Mexico’s U20 Milk Cup squad contains four players from the Mexico squad that finished runners-up at the 2013 U17 World Cup. I simply don't know Mexican soccer well enough to say whether this is a full strength side. All players are affiliated with Mexican pro clubs, for what it's worth. Even if we describe the squad as "experimental," beating Mexico is a feather in anyone’s cap.
Canada has since drawn against China and will next play Northern Ireland on Aug. 1 to determine the winner of the tournament’s ‘elite’ division. The above jokes aside, entering a team in a competition like this is great. It gets the boys bonding and gives the coaches a chance to see them in action. And hey, the Mexican youth set-up saw fit to attend. (As an aside, the Mexican and Northern Ireland teams got into a vicious kick-fight during their match. That's some hard back kicking.)
But I can’t help but wonder how much our rivals benefit from competing in regional tournaments with just possibly more rigorous competitive demands? Canada, along with Mexico and the U.S., receive an automatic berth to next year’s Concacaf U20 championship in Jamaica, which in turn determines who goes to the U20 World Cup.
Meanwhile, the Central American nations in the form of UNCAF arrange their own qualifying tournament to the qualifying tournament. This wrapped up recently, and Panama absolutely crushed it. Los Canaleros won five straight games to make themselves untouchable in the seven team round-robin tournament. That showing also earns them a spot in next summer’s PanAm Games in Toronto. And in terms of a pathway to the senior team, five of Panama’s victorious U20 players have already earned senior team caps for its next round of friendlies.
It’s not just at the youth levels, as the biennial-ish Copa Centroamericana qualifies UNCAF nations to the Gold Cup while offering what I assume is valuable playing-together time in a seriously competitive environment. It makes economic and competitive sense to hand the U.S. and Mexico automatic tickets to Concacaf tournaments, but given Canada’s showing in recent years (okay, decades) you have to wonder whether this country can or should be afforded the same luxury.
Grant Surridge focuses much of his writing for CSN on the Spanish-speaking Concacaf world. You can follow him on twitter @SCGGrant