Brian Phillips at Grantland.com puts next week's matchup between the United States and Mexico in perspective. He does a great job of breaking down a rivalry that some die hard sports fans might otherwise be unaware. Please take a few minutes and read this well written article and let me know what you think.
The U.S.-Mexico rivalry has gotten intense only in the past few years — the friendly in Philadelphia on Wednesday will be their 60th match overall, with more than half of those games coming since 1990 — but the roles the two sides play were established as early as their first meeting. In the spring of 1934, both teams traveled to Italy to play a game that would determine which of them qualified for the second-ever World Cup. The ocean voyage took two weeks. The Mexican team, so the story goes, treated the time as a vacation, confident that it'd zip right past its American counterparts.2 The Americans ran conditioning drills on the deck. In Rome, the Mexicans were technically superior players but couldn't match the Americans' fitness. Mussolini frowned, and the U.S. won 4-2 behind frantic running and four goals from an unheralded amateur named Aldo Donelli.
And thus a contrast was born. Mexico would be the flair side — slick on the ball but prone to lose its focus. The United States would be the laborious striver — Just Doing its way to a contender status that could never quite be justified by its raw skills. Neither team would ever win the World Cup, but they'd not win it for opposite reasons.Continue reading...
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