South Africa v Mexico

The opening game of the World Cup final is always a special day, promising a great month of new soccer games, new teams and players that we don't get to see during the usual televised fare, and sometimes even some new styles of play. While saying that I don't usually enjoy the opening game because they tend to be match ups with the host nation and those teams enter the tourney by virtue of their ability to host not necessarily their ability to play the game at a world class level.

RSA soccer is not a sport I can remember ever seeing before. While RSA has performed well within their continent and gained entry into the finals before, I could not remember ever watching them play. As a die hard fan of Brazil though and knowing that FIFA has a paternalistic way of shoring up the host nation's coaching staff I was interested to see if Parreira could translate his success with Brazilian players into a team with players of presumably lesser skill.

RSA's opening draw against Mexico, a team we see much of here in the USA, would be a good baseline to evaluate both the RSA players and maybe would be a glimpse as to the tourney itself.

The game was more entertaining than I hoped. The RSA team was able to generate dangerous counter attacks. They opened up gaps in the Mexican back line then exploited them by making telling diagonal passes to attackers making blind side runs, the old "split pass" drill for those of you familiar with coaching. The essence of Brazilian soccer is to exploit a small, almost invisible weakness of their opponent and the Mexican defenders who were much too square at the back turned out to be the RSA target. The first goal was well earned and a signal of good things to come for RSA. I desperately looked through my notes on which teams I had selected for the pool and discovered to my dismay I had ignored the possibility that the RSA team could advance. This became even more likely with the Uruguay v France scoreless tie.