Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Tri's arrival

I wasn't at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday afternoon when the Mexican national team arrived on a charter flight from Ciudad Juarez. There's plenty of pictures here that show some of the scene of the team's arrival.

It did remind me a little bit of 2002. I did go out to LAX then, when Mexico arrived at LAX from San Francisco for a friendly against AC Milan right before the team went to Japan for the World Cup. It was so weird because here you had Mexico's World Cup, their best players at the time right before the most anticipated tournament in four years. There were several fans there and as you can imagine they were ultra excited. Then, you had the airport workers standing there completely unaware of this team and what they meant to millions of people. A couple of them were asking each other if they knew who those guys were.

I remember talking to Cuauhtemoc Blanco as he waited for his luggage next to the conveyor belt and how Paco Palencia and Rafa Marquez were leaning against a wall wearing shades, looking too cool to talk. They boarded a bus with a huge FMF logo on it and about 20 minutes into my drive home I heard on traffic reports that there was an unexpected delay on the 105, near LAX. Yeah, I bet that bus was a magnet that day.

Anyway, not sure if the scene afterward was as chaotic on Monday. But this is Hugo Sanchez's first trip to Los Angeles as coach and the anticipation for this match is immense. I'd really be looking forward to it if it wasn't at the #*&!^@ Coliseum.

2 comments:

blahblah said...

El Tri wins for cutest national team squad.

JT Soccer said...

How large a crowd are they expecting for Wednesday night?

Great for the young players to see all the excitement for the team.
Just hope that Hugo isn't distracted by excited hotel workers when he drives away.