There’s No Love Lost in Rivalry

“We don’t like them, and they don’t like us,” DaMarcus Beasley was saying here the other day. “It’s no secret. That’s how it is.”

Landon Donovan readily agreed.

“They hate us,” he said. “I could have told you that before we got here.”

Beasley is only 21 and Donovan is 22, but they already are veterans of the United States-Mexico soccer wars. They were there two years ago when the U.S., en route to a place in the quarterfinals, knocked Mexico out of the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan.

They will be there again tonight, in the boiling caldron of Estadio Jalisco, when Mexico tries to return the favor by denying the U.S. a trip to the Athens Olympics.

The match has captured Mexico’s attention. The stadium is almost certain to be sold out. The game will be televised live throughout the country. The newspapers are filled with analyses and commentaries.

One television station is conducting a poll, asking which team will win. The public is split, 3-2 in favor of Mexico.

Mexico’s coach, Ricardo Lavolpe, already has been warned by commentators that if his team doesn’t win, he probably will be fired.

Lavolpe’s predecessor, Javier Aguirre, was ousted after goals by Brian McBride and Donovan had given the U.S. a 2-0 victory in Jeonju, South Korea. Mexican fans expect Lavolpe to avenge that defeat tonight, in the first meaningful encounter since 2002 between the North American neighbors and rivals.

“They don’t forget that kind of stuff,” Beasley said. “They know that we beat them in the World Cup and we’ve pretty much beat them the last couple of times, so they’ve got to come out and win for their country. It’s going to be a tough game.

“They’re a good team. They’ve played the best soccer in this tournament. They’ve defended pretty well. They’ve got a lot of guys attacking. We’re going to look at the tapes and look at their weaknesses, and hopefully we can exploit those.”

Mexico, naturally, will have the crowd of 60,000 on its side. During the U.S. team’s three victories so far in the CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament, fans have done all they can to upset the American players.

During at least two games, fans chanted “Osama! Osama!” in a derisive reference to the U.S. government’s hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

“What do we have to do with politics around the world?” Donovan asked. “It’s not our fault. If they really care about that, they should be outside the White House chanting, not yelling at some kids.”

Donovan, who speaks Spanish and has been surrounded by Mexican reporters after every game, has received abuse.

“It’s one thing when you cheer for your team or boo the other team or even whistle at them,” he said. “But they make blatant derogatory comments that are just crude. They make it personal, and that’s just ignorant. It says a lot about who they are.

“You just get used to it, and you deal with it. We’ve got bigger things to focus on. That’s part of their mentality, to try to get inside our heads....

“I think, psychologically, we have an edge right now. Mexico desperately wants to beat us. Sometimes when you want to win that hard, it’s difficult. There’s a lot of pressure on them. What do we have to lose? We want to go to Athens, believe me, but are we favored here? Of course not.”

American players and coaches have been trying to get the American public to understand the magnitude of the game. Their task has been made more difficult because it’s not being televised in the U.S.

“I don’t know how to describe it or compare it to something in America,” Donovan said. “Maybe Yankees-Red Sox, I don’t know.”

But he knows how seriously Mexico’s players take the game.

“They’re dirty, they’re nasty, they’ll spit on you, they’ll cough on you, they’ll grab you where they shouldn’t. They want to get any little advantage that they can that’s not soccer-related.”

In 2002, the U.S. tried countering those tactics with a little motivation from the White House. President Bush called U.S. Coach Bruce Arena on the morning of the game to wish the team well.

Whether he will call current Coach Glenn “Mooch” Myernick today remains to be seen.

Ralph Perez, one of Myernick’s assistants, compares tonight’s game to Duke-North Carolina in basketball or UCLA-USC in football.

Perez ran into a Mexican baseball player the other day, and they got to talking about tonight’s game.

“I said to him in Spanish, ‘I hope we can reciprocate,’ ” Perez said.

“He said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ ”

“I said, ‘Well, you knocked us out of the Olympics in baseball. Now maybe we can return the favor by knocking you out in soccer.”