U. S.-Mexico Rivalry Headlines Gold Cup

June 6, 2007

Soccer

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

The Concacaf Gold Cup tournament, which began Wednesday, has never carried a great deal of prestige in the wider world of soccer. But among the teams competing for the championship of North and Central America and the Caribbean, the importance of the tournament has grown steadily since the first tournament was staged in 1991.

Now in its ninth edition, the Gold Cup tournament has attained a high enough level of historical moment for Hugo Sánchez, the coach of Mexico, to use the kind of overheated language reserved only for the sport's major competitions. "To win the Gold Cup is transcendental," he said last week, "because it is the first official tournament we'll have in this new era."

For Sánchez, who lobbied long and hard for the Mexico job and was hired last November, that new era is El Tri's push to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. He has declared the Gold Cup a top priority in his team's campaign, as has Mexico's top Concacaf rival, the United States. Both teams have called on their top international players for the tournament and are the favorites to reach the final on June 24. But Canada, Honduras and Panama, teams that played in the championship game previously, are among the sides looking to upset the regional giants - as Canada did when it defeated Colombia to win the tournament in 2000.

Most teams in this year's Gold Cup are sending their strongest rosters. But for the first time since 1996, the tournament will not include guest teams from outside the Concacaf region.

Here is a look at the 12 teams that will participate in the tournament that will take place in six cities across the United States over the next three weeks.

Group A (June 6, 9, 11, at the Orange Bowl, Miami):

Costa Rica is the perennial third power in Concacaf. Last summer at the World Cup the team fell bravely in the tournament opener to the host, Germany. Coached by their recently-retired longtime star, Hernán Medford, the Ticos will have 11 veterans of Germany '06 on the roster, led by the team's all-time top scorer, striker Ronaldo Fonseca. Most of the players are from the Costa Rican domestic league, with only four playing overseas for clubs in smaller European leagues.

Canada is in a position to surprise. The country has paid little attention to its domestic soccer in the past, but in recent years clubs like Impact de Montreal and the M.L.S. expansion team Toronto FC have drawn overflow crowds. And while few Canadians have made it with prominent overseas clubs (Julian De Guzman of Deportivo La Coruna and Paul Stalteri of Tottenham are exceptions), several are important in M.L.S., none more so than the creative attacker Dwayne De Rosario of Houston Dynamo. The presence of Haiti in the tournament is a source of great pride for Haitians at home and abroad, given the amount of political, economic and social disorder that has at times caused the country's domestic soccer league to shut down altogether. But last winter Haiti won the Caribbean championship for the first time since 1973 (when Haiti earned a World Cup berth by beating Trinidad and Tobago in a game in Haiti that saw several T&T goals suspiciously ruled offside). The team seems better organized than it has been in a long time. Haiti is truly a Concacaf squad, with all but one player based in Haiti or Miami, and the team is coached by Luis Armelio García, a Cuban who has also worked with his native country and Guadeloupe.

The group's fourth team is from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe, making its first appearance in a major international tournament. Although all the team's current players are based at local clubs or with lower-division and amateur sides in France, Guadeloupe has a proud legacy of supplying great players to France, including their talismanic midfielder/defender, 41-year-old Jocelyn Angloma.

Group B (June 7 and 9 at the Home Depot Center, Carson, Calif., and June 12 at Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Mass.):

The United States is still recovering from the disappointment of Germany '06 and the disarray surrounding the search for a successor to the cashiered Bruce Arena. But the interim coach, Bob Bradley, was finally given the job outright on May 15, and he has gathered the national team's strong overseas contingent to assemble a formidable roster for the Gold Cup. No fewer than nine players ply their trade in the English Premier League or the German Bundesliga, all in key roles, and then there's the coach's son, 19-year-old Michael Bradley, who is a part-timer with Heerenveen of the top Dutch league.

Still, the best player is Landon Donovan, who was a bust in the Bundesliga and at the last World Cup, but who has been brilliant in M.L.S. with the L.A. Galaxy and, before that, the San Jose Earthquakes. The U.S. will play in a relatively unchallenging group. Guatemala has only two players based overseas, including their star forward, Carlos (Little Fish) Ruiz of FC Dallas in M.L.S., who was recently benched after skipping two days of training with the club. El Salvador is an entirely domestically based team and faces the grim prospect of playing its final group-stage game against the Americans, a team they have never beaten.

Trinidad and Tobago delighted the world last summer in Germany with its exuberant performance in a draw against Sweden and a valiant loss to England. The miracle-working coach Leo Beenhakker is gone, though another Dutchman, Wim Rijsbergen, is in charge. But a salary dispute has led 16 of the World Cup veterans to sue the T&T football federation, and none of those players will be present at the Gold Cup, so the Soca Warriors will field what amounts to a reserve side.

Group C (June 8 and 10 at Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, N.J., and June 13 at Reliant Stadium, Houston):

Mexico will have the biggest following at the Gold Cup and may well draw near-capacity crowds. Most of El Tri's players are supplied by the traditional domestic giants Chivas de Guadalajara, Club América and the newly minted hemispheric powerhouse Pachuca, but a number of Europe-based stars give the team real luster: Pavel Pardo and Ricardo Osorio of Stuttgart, Carlos Salcido of PSV Eindhoven, and Barcelona's fine central defender Rafa Márquez. (Barcelona has two games left in the Spanish season, so Márquez will not be able to join Mexico until the Gold Cup's semifinal stage.) But Mexico's real star is the fiery attacker Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who was controversially left off the squad for last summer's World Cup by former coach Ricardo LaVolpe. On the field, everything good and bad that happens seems to involve Blanco.

Honduras has a fine striker in David Suazo of Cagliari in the Italian Serie A, rumored to be headed to Inter Milan. But he is injured and out of the Gold Cup, and another Italy-based player, Julio César León, is tied up with Genoa's promotion drive to ascend from Serie B. Panama was the revelation of the last Gold Cup, reaching the final before falling to the United States on penalties. The goalkeeper was the acrobatic young Jaime Penedo, who now holds a reserve spot on Osasuna in La Liga in Spain. He'll be back to anchor a team whose focus is striker Blas Pérez, who helped the Cinderella Colombian club Cúcuta Deportivo reach the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores. And to further cement Panama's status as a rising regional challenger, the team is now coached by Alexandre Guimaraes, who led Costa Rica to Korea/Japan '02 and Germany '06.

The field is rounded out by Cuba, which has a long soccer tradition. In 1938, Cuba got to the World Cup (where it beat Romania), and now it's making its fourth straight Gold Cup appearance. The roster is made up mostly of under-23 players, all domestically based. The captain, Yenier Marquez, is one of 11 returnees from the 2005 Gold Cup team.

After group play concludes, the top two teams in each group will advance to the knockout stage along with the two best third-place sides. The quarterfinals are scheduled for June 16 and 17 at Foxborough and Houston, followed by the semifinals on June 21 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The final will also take place at Soldier Field, on June 24.

All tournament matches will be televised on the Spanish-language networks Univision, Galavision and Telefutura. Matches involving the United States will also be shown on Fox Soccer Channel.