Tonight's Mexico vs. Guatemala match could be first of many intraregional friendly matches
Will we have an accidental ConcaCHAN?
The names change, but the tournaments are the same. We call our continental championship the Gold Cup, South America calls it the Copa America. We call our top club tournament the Concacaf Champions League and Europe calls theirs the UEFA Champions League. OK, we didn’t get too creative on that one. Nor did we for Concacaf League, this region’s version of the Europa League which gets confused tweets every time I tweet about it because it’s not different enough from the Champions Lea- … I’m getting off topic.
The point is that you generally see the same tournament formats played in all regions. Hell, Qatar is in all of them next summer, and there will be little confusion other than why Qatar is in all these tournaments.
One notable, fun exception is the CHAN, the CHampionnat d'Afrique des Nations de football or, in English, the African Nations Championship. Every two years, the African confederation hosts a tournament in which nations compete using squads made up only of players from that country who also are based in the domestic league. So, a player would only be eligible for Mexico if he fit the typical criteria and also were playing in Liga MX (or, I suppose, a lower league).
Mexico is preparing tonight to play its first match of 2020, nearly a full year after its 2-1 win over Bermuda in a November 2019 Nations League match. It will do so with a domestic-based squad and meet a Guatemala team made up almost entirely of domestic-based players.
Neither team will come in cold. Both have been preparing when able to train away from the clubs, who essentially are loaning players to the national team for a few days in a certain week.
These mini-camps, or microciclos as they’re called throughout Latin America, are currently very common. It’s why Guatemala was quickly able to slot in as an opponent after Costa Rica had to drop out of tonight’s friendly against Mexico because of quarantine regulations.
In addition to those three countries, teams like Nicaragua (who will play Guatemala on Tuesday) and Chile also are bringing in local players to train together. Panama, anticipating now-delayed World Cup qualification matches, put its domestic-based national team players in a bubble environment with new manager Thomas Christiansen.
Curacao even tried to have one in the Netherlands last month before a staff member testing positive for COVID-19 derailed those plans.
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It’s easy to understand why managers want to have these camps, beyond simply that they’ve had lots to think about and little to do for the last seven months. If the pandemic ends when we all hope it does (yesterday, but, you know, some time early next year, I guess?), there will be a jam-packed list of fixtures for national teams. The summer of 2021 would feature the Gold Cup, the Concacaf Nations League Final Four and some element of World Cup qualification matches, plus, oh yeah, the Olympics.
The squad can not be simply a list of 23 players but must be built to account for absences because of injury or club commitments but also wear and tear. There are players who would not typically be getting a national team opportunity who will be on tournament squads this summer.
“Players’ levels change a lot. There are variations. That’s why I say we need at least 35-40 players to be able to face a very difficult year in the midst of this pandemic that none of us were ready for our training to face,” Costa Rica manager Ronald Gonzalez said after the Gold Cup draw Monday. “We’ve got to have some parameters in mind, the amount of games players have played, the rest they’ve had and also their clubs’ preseasons.”
Ronald Gonzalez is using a couple volumes of the history of art to get a nice Zoom angle. I didn’t know he was so cultured…
Again, hopefully we get to see that and COVID-19 is just a horrendous memory. Before that, though, teams want to play meaningful games - and not everyone will be able to fly to the Netherlands for top-level friendlies like Mexico is doing next month. That means we could see more games between teams in the region who are not able to count on their stars based in stronger leagues because of travel restrictions.
It could become an accidental Concacaf mini-version of Africa’s CHAN.
Who would win a true ConcaCHAN? Obviously with the Concacaf Champions League we see Mexico’s dominance and MLS coming right behind. Costa Rica’s league also is historically strong, and a domestic-based team like the one that would’ve played tonight would’ve had a mix of experience and up-and-coming talent.
That Guatemala is as excited as it is about the debut tonight of Mexico City-born Antonio de Jesus Lopez, a fringe player for Club América who correctly read the tea leaves that he’s not in the picture for Tata Martino, shows it would struggle - even with the Colombia-based players who will take part in this tour.
The Caribbean teams would struggle mightily, with up-and-comers like Curacao and Haiti able to field few if any regulars. Canada is another interesting case, with only three MLS teams to choose from but a young league specifically looking to develop Canadian talent.
One thing we do not need right now is more tournaments, but perhaps when the backlog is cleared, it would be worth Concacaf considering a CHAN. At the moment, the matchups in the region made up almost entirely of domestic-based teams are the best-case scenario to a very bad situation.
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