Monday, December 31, 2007

Golazo del ano for Mexico

Mexico scored plenty of goals in Hugo Sanchez's first year in charge, 38 of them in fact. Several games featured more than a handful of goals, including the 6-0 crushing of Paraguay in Copa America and 4-2 and 4-0 wins over Ecuador and Iran, respectively.

The one goal that stands out from the rest wasn't necessarily the most important goal Mexico scored in 2007, though it certainly is one of them.

Nery Castillo played his first national team game for Mexico in 2007 and he might play for a decade more and not score a goal like this one. The goal was set up by a nice cross from Juan Carlos Cacho but Castillo took care of the rest. A deft flick and a timely finish and Mexico was well on its way to beating Brazil by 2-0 in the Copa America opener.


5 comments:

A.C. said...

Hugo, Hugo, you are a soccer legend and doing well as El Tri coach, but horizontal stripes are not your friend.

Anonymous said...

that was a great goal from Castillo.

Anonymous said...

dude, it's alt164 to make the "ñ"... you must know what that headline says to those of us who read spanish. happy new year

L.B. said...

Yeah, but the alt+164 didn't work on my laptop while I was writing this post.

Feliz año!

(used the cut-and-paste method for that one!)

The Hammer said...

try alt+0241... in any case... did you notice that the same formula up front that failed for Hugo at Copa Oro failed for Hugo at Copa America.

When Borgetti went down, Hugo was forced to bring on Omar "1 Goal in Playoffs All-Time" Bravo. So the attacking end was made up of Castillo, Guardado, Bravo, and Medina.

In Copa America, when Mexico goes down, Hugo tried to use this combo by taking out Cacho and Arce and the scoreline went from 0-1 to 0-3. I attribute much of it to Omar Bravo's inability to pin up an opposing defense.

Gooch just took one look at him and decided it was safe to play a little further up in the pitch.