What about Mexico?

March 13th, 2010 | by: jeff | Comments (20)

A quick reminder of France’s scheduled matches for this summer’s World Cup:

June 11th – Uruguay
June 17th (my birthday) – Mexico
June 22nd – The hosts, South Africa

Miguel from Mexico poses the following question: “Hello my dear French friends. I’m from Mexico your rival in next WC. I was wondering what do you think about Mexico? do you see us as a strong team or easy to beat?”

A fine question, that, and politely put.

My gut feeling is that France will advance out of the group. Like a lot of readers of this site, I live in North America with Mexico as a neighbor. I always hope they’ll do well. They don’t necessarily have a history of making it very far in recent World Cups, so with that in mind, and given my feeling that France will make it out of the group, I’d rate Mexico’s chances of advancing as 50-50. That’s just me, and the whole point of this post is to get some differing opinions.

The one player that a lot of us are familiar with is Carlos Vela who plays for Arsenal, who is a great player on his day, but hasn’t done enough to establish himself as a regular starter in the team. I have the impression on the one hand that he needs to be a big player for Mexico for them to do well (maybe I’m wrong about this), and on the other hand, he’s been struggling to even make the bench for his club for most of this season.

In a head-to-head matchup, there’s no question that France can lose to anybody, so I wouldn’t venture to predict anything for a specific match.