THERE IS METHOD APLENTY IN THE business of dropping half your star cast, but yesterday at the Berlin Olympiastadion it seemed like insanity. A handy wind had been gathering in Ecuador’s sails going into their final group match, but by the time Germany were finished with them yesterday, it had gone flat.
England will be happy to find them that way. Ecuador yesterday were underdogs who had lost their bark, perfect opposition for an England team who are still struggling to bare their teeth. “I think England is going to be a very difficult match,” Luis Suárez, the Ecuador coach, said. As if Germany were not difficult enough.
“We know England. I believe they are one of the best teams in the World Cup,” he said. “If we repeat the mistakes we made today, we will have the same problems and could face the same scoreline.” But Suárez can ensure that his team avoid their most heinous error of yesterday, that should be a doddle. He simply needs to pick his best side. In the knowledge that second-round qualification had been secured, he dropped five first-teamers from yesterday’s match, including Carlos Tenório and Agustín Delgado, who had scored two goals each in the first two matches. In resting Iván Hurtado, they lost their defensive hub, too.
So Ecuador can hardly fail to be better than they were yesterday. However, the wisdom of saving fresh legs for Sunday now looks questionable, given the battering they will have taken mentally. It is one thing to lose 3-0 to Germany, but quite another to allow Lukas “Barn Door” Podolski on the scoresheet.
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The joke, in Germany at least, has been on the profligate Podolski, but now you fear that it is on Ecuador. For the less experienced football nations, the significance of momentum is huge. Ride that wave and who knows where it will take you? But Ecuador came crashing down yesterday and the question, now, is how they can pick themselves up again before facing England.
They have their big five to come back into the team, but they now know how it feels to be mauled by one of the traditional giants of the game. An alternative argument is that they have kept pretty much every trick up their sleeves from this game and that England will be able to learn nothing from it. That, at least, is how Ulises De La Cruz, the Ecuador and Aston Villa defender, sees it.
“We will be no pushovers,” he said. “It will be very, very difficult against them because I know better than anyone the strength of their players. We would have preferred to play the Swedes, because maybe they are not quite as good as the English. But we proved in the group that we are capable of winning in the World Cup and I don’t see any reason why we can’t carry on with another shock against England. I don’t see any reason why we cannot beat them. No one thought we had a chance of getting through, so why should it not continue?” Maybe, although on yesterday’s showing, Ecuador look about as useful as a giant turtle on the Galápagos: other-worldly, a real treasure, not very good in the air and a miracle they have survived the rigours of natural selection, especially now that just about everyone else is playing with a defensive midfield player.
But if you rest your five best giant turtles, what can you expect? Especially when you tell the replacement turtles that they have already qualified. When Miroslav Klose pulled back off Edwin Tenório in the fourth minute of the game, Tenório showed no interest in tracking him and Klose scored.
This may have been but a minor misjudgment, yet it turned out to be a forerunner of the way the entire game would go. It is, of course, sound theoretically to rest some of your star cast, but not if it means that the rest sent out to do a job of work decide that they are entitled to a little down time, too.
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If Ecuador were not buried by that first goal, they looked five feet under with little inclination to crawl out of the hole into which they had got themselves. As we got deeper and deeper into the second half, so did this hole of theirs. “We must remember the good things from our first two matches,” Suárez said afterwards. But how fresh are those memories? They retreat today to their camp in the spa town of Bad Kissingen, licking their wounds and in need all the natural recovery methods they can find.