This Sunday Colombia will have a general rehearsal of what awaits it in the Qatar 2022 Qualifiers. With 20 players, most of the local media, it will resolve a friendly against Honduras, which will serve to test a strategy, albeit with different interpreters, facing to those duels against Peru and Argentina that can be the difference between being or not in the next World Cup.
The detail is, precisely, that what he will rehearse in Fort Lauderdale will not be with the same players who will be in Barranquilla on January 28, facing Ricardo Gareca’s team. There was no way to have the internationals in this commitment, except for the cases of Miguel Borja and Juan Fernando Quintero, perhaps the only ones who are not in the concentration fighting for a place in the main team. In short, it is what it is.
The goal is to solve the sentence that scoring a goal has become: there are already five games without scoring! That necessarily generates anxiety but it also tests the imagination: how the hell do you make defensive security pass to offensive ambition, to societies, to the gambling generation? Those are the tasks in Reinaldo Rueda’s notebook and it is what the 20 men who are already in the United States have to solve, knowing that this time it is not about giving the best of each one but about playing at being Ospina, Cuadrado, Luis Díaz, Barrios … and do it well. As much as to be an alternative in the next call, that of the ‘heavyweights’.
What will they have to do on the court? The players themselves in their press conferences what Rueda is testing with them. These are the fundamental tasks:
Find spaces!
“The teacher asks us all the same, he is very open and clear about what he wants, he is almost always talking with the group. He asks us to find the spaces. It is difficult, but he tells us that sometimes it is better to arrive than to be there, that You have to kick the goal every time you have the opportunity, you must do these things from behind. He asks all of us the same, “said Andrés Llinás. Clearer, impossible.
But what spaces is he talking about? “The teacher is very calm, we have not spoken personally but at a group level, he wants us to attack the spaces left by the teammate, he insists that precision in the pass is essential for the team to flow better,” said Homer Martínez. Be careful, that the spaces are not only those that the rival opens, that they are scarce when we talk about the hard-fought South American Qualifiers. It is also about coverage, relays, multiplying the effort so that, when a teammate drops an area, it is occupied and exploited by another with a yellow shirt and not a rival. Translation? INTENSITY.
Homer and Andrés, who are full-backs, are very clear that their task is to get the team out of their sector, to attack from their own defense, in Ospina’s own beard: “we have worked on the goals, when God wants the goal we will He is going to open and hopefully, God willing, many goals come, “said the Junior man.
It’s not Honduras, it’s ‘Bolillo’
Llinás reveals a question that many had when it was confirmed who was the rival in the friendly in the United States: which of the rivals that come in the Qualifiers does that team resemble? To nobody. But it is probably not about Honduras but about Hernán ‘Bolillo’ Gómez.
“Honduras has Bolillo, with its tactical teams that maintain zero and it will be very close, so we train a lot, looking for spaces, it is the emphasis,” Llinás told a press conference. It’s ‘Bolillo’, you see? A practical guy, who does not invent, who does not go out to put his face to anyone but waits for him and punishes him, very surely what Colombia will find in his visits to Argentina and Venezuela.
An essay in Barranquilla
Yes, the game is in Fort Lauderdale, a hot city, with conditions similar to those of Barranquilla, where it is increasingly difficult to make a difference and not drown at the same pace as the rivals. Colombia finished playing at 6:00 pm, because the weather conditions also intimidate him and that is a detail that Rueda does not want to imagine, he wants to train him.
For DT, the previous work at the headquarters of the national team is important but with the conditions that will be found on January 28: “He approaches that human part, he wanted to train in Barranquilla in January, know the weather, the whole environment of our headquarters here. From every point of view it is positive that he knows us, sees us work, that we can be close and that those called up can develop the idea of the game that he wants in the National Team “, revealed goalkeeper Diego Novoa, the most likely starter against Honduras.
Thus, in the words of those who have been with him since last Sunday, Rueda’s needs are understood: it is not that he likes a team that does not score goals, he is not happy to see that the minutes pass without conceding so many and he is so worried and anxious like his leaders to see that the paths to goal do not appear, which in the end ensures the place to the World Cup. It is in every detail, with and without the protagonists of the Eliminatory and that gives meaning to this friendly to the micro and morphocycles. Now you just need to reach conclusions, find solutions and bet bravely on what you are working on. There will be no more evidence. The risk is total.
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