IF I TOLD YOU THAT ONE COUNTRY’S fans had drunk the train dry by 9.30 on Thursday morning, you would probably guess it was thirsty England supporters en route to Nuremberg. It wasn’t. Ecuador’s excitable fans travelling to Hamburg from Berlin for their match against Costa Rica caused the nice people at Deutsche Bahn to put up the “sold out” signs while most people were still digesting their breakfast.
Ecuador’s achievement here has surprised everyone, except those from South America. Tradition, backed up by statistics, said that they won only at altitude. In the qualifiers, Ecuador won seven matches at home, including beating Brazil and Argentina — all played above 2,800 metres (9,184ft) and their sole away win was against Bolivia in La Paz, the one capital higher than Quito.
But it was the win over Brazil in November 2004 that in part explains their success at this World Cup. “Once they realised they could beat the big two South American superpowers, even if it was at altitude, they knew they could play,” Ricardo Setyon, the Fifa press officer for Brazil four years ago, said. “That gave them the thrust to keep going forward.”
Psychologically, then, Ecuador arrived in Germany in a positive frame of mind and they have been improving as a footballing nation since they started importing coaches from their more successful neighbours, Colombia.
In 1990, Colombia, the country of Carlos Valderrama and Faustino Asprilla, were the third force on the continent, but since some of their high-profile coaches moved to Quito, it is Ecuadorean football that has been on the up. Luis Fernando Suárez, “El Profesor”, is the third such man to make the short journey. An intelligent person, his motto is “seize the day”, or “Es hora de matar a su vaca” — literally “it’s time to kill the cow”.
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Ecuadorean domestic football is also enjoying a renaissance such that LDU Quito have a chance of reaching the semi-finals of the Copa Libertadores.
Pelé predicted that they would be the surprise team of the tournament and Agustin Delgado and Carlos Tenório are proving a handful up front, supplemented by Iván Kaviedes, the mask-wearing prodigy who has never quite lived up to his early promise.
There are tens of thousands of Ecuadorean immigrants in Europe — Madrid has the third-largest Ecuadorean population in the world and Rome is also home to thousands of exiles — and they all seemed to be in Hamburg to “smell Ecuador” on Thursday.
“We only fear one team and that’s Brazil,” Suárez said yesterday. “The rest, including England, are the same for us. Being in the round of 16 is nothing for us.”
His adopted country is the world’s leading producer of bananas and the home of the panama hat and if they do play Sven-Göran Eriksson’s team in the second round, England could be in for another tense evening.