How Interliga finals are bound up with Copa Libertadores
Memo Ochoa has been to a World Cup, played in a Gold Cup and the Copa America and made nearly 200 starts in goal for Club America, one of Mexico’s most storied soccer franchises.
Yet he says he still holds a soft spot in his heart for the 11-nation Copa Libertadores, Latin America’s version of the UEFA Champions League that begins with preliminary-round games later this month. “My second game as a professional was in the Copa Libertadores,” Ochoa said Tuesday. “It’s a tournament that means a lot to me. And I play it with enthusiasm.”
Whether Club America and Ochoa return to the Libertadores for the fourth time in seven years will be determined tonight in the finals of Mexico’s Interliga tournament at the Home Depot Center in Carson.
Tonight’s championship doubleheader begins at 6 p.m. with Group B winner Puebla meeting Guadalajara’s Estudiantes Tecos. America, the Group A champion, faces Monterrey in the second match at 8:30.
What happens after that gets a bit complicated. Morelia is already in the Copa Libertadores by virtue of its finish in last fall’s Apertura. And Chivas of Guadalajara and San Luis have already been seeded into the round of 16 based on their performances in the 2009 Libertadores, where their stays were abbreviated by the H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak in Mexico.
That leaves just one guaranteed spot in the second stage of the tournament -- and a number of scenarios to determine who gets it.
For America, the only team to survive group play unbeaten, the situation is simple: Win and advance or lose and go home. For the rest of the field, there are various possibilities.
Puebla and Monterrey, for example, not only need to win tonight, but they’ll also need help to avoid a preliminary-round playoff to reach the Libertadores’ second stage. Puebla needs America to lose while Monterrey needs Puebla to lose.
And the best Estudiantes can hope for is a win over Puebla and a Libertadores play-in against the Peruvian club Juan Aurich.
Boil all that down, though, and it means everyone has to take care of their own business first.
“We have to be careful,” Monterrey midfielder Osvaldo Martinez said. “But obviously we have to worry about what our team can do and not what they can do.”
And in the case of Monterrey’s opponent, Club America, “they” is likely to include a raucous pro-America crowd at the Home Depot Center.
“America always draws a lot of people,” Monterrey’s Jesus Aldo de Nigris said of the Aguilas, who saw several hundred fans attend their practice Friday.
“We’re playing very well,” he continued. “We just have to maintain the mystique that we’ve shown.”
