Man, was that not one of the biggest choke jobs in the history of all of sport? Seriously, given the global nature and audience of the World Cup, and the fact that it’s safe to say a billion people were watching at the same time, this really has to be considered an upset of the monumental variety.
Bigger than any U.S. sport for us in America, and frankly it could be bigger than an Olympic event, due to the variety of events, people can cherry pick what events they really want to vest their interest in.
But Mexico, with a 1-0 lead, with barely five minutes plus stoppage to go, not only gives up the equalizer, but then commits a haphazard foul in the penalty area, and then subsequently give up the go-ahead goal four minutes into stoppage time?
I understand the criticism over how liberally the term “epic” is used these days, and I agree to a point. But in this instances, yeah, it was a pretty epic collapse and failure by the Mexican soccer team.
I’ve seen some pretty monumental collapses; the U.S. failing to win gold in men’s basketball in 2004, the 2004 Yankees dropping four straight to the Red Sox in the ALCS to lose the pennant. A 116-win Seattle Mariners squad tumbling like a house of cards in the playoffs. The 18-0 New England Patriots losing the perfect season in the Super Bowl to the Giants. An Arizona Cardinals team with a 21-0 lead on an offensively inept Chicago Bears team losing in a nationally-televised tragedy.
And that’s just the last decade. Given the seeming impossibility and scarcity of goal scoring in soccer, much less in the World Cup, that just makes things exponentially worse for the Mexicans. There have been several games in which the final score was 0-0, and many more where a single goal was the entire scoring; and Mexico gives up two goals in the final ten minutes of the match? Yeah that’s failure on a monumental scale.
To think I had the game on as background noise while I ironed shirts. Turns out that I witnessed something pretty incredible after all.
lol Mexico.
