Chile's Sharp Improvement Gives Them Huge Chance of Winning Copa America Again
Last year Chile won the Copa America for the first time in their history. Now La Roja are starting to believe they can do it again.
However, roll back to the evening of June 10—when they were drawing 1-1 with Bolivia in the 99th minute of a gritty clash—and the wave of confidence they are currently riding wasn't even a speck on the horizon.
Having been beaten by Argentina in the tournament's first game, going down 2-1 in Santa Clara, California, Chile had travelled from the south-west to the north-east, and touched down in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
TOP NEWS
Madrid Fines Players $590K 😲
'Mbappé Out' Petition Gaining Steam 😳
Star-Studded World Cup Ad 🤩
They had fought and scrapped against a Bolivia side determined to drag them down to earth and gain some revenge for the 5-0 beating they were handed by Chile in last year's Copa America.
This was a drab clash, only lit up by a brilliant free-kick by Jhasmani Campos to equalise Arturo Vidal's opener for Chile.
Eight minutes were added on and in the additional minute after those, Luis Gutierrez was adjudged to have handled in his own box, which seemed an extremely harsh decision. La Roja didn't care.
Vidal stepped up, now in the 100th minute, and stroked home the penalty to earn his side three vital points.
Lucky as it was, that was the moment which turned Chile's tournament around. It was salvation, when they had seemed doomed to draw and be on the verge of elimination; a weak attempt to defend the title they had waited 99 years to win.
They came into the next game against Panama—a direct shootout for qualification to the quarter-finals—more confident, alert and closer to their usual level.
Coach Jorge Sampaoli carried on the excellent work done by Marcelo Bielsa, and that is new manager Juan Antonio Pizzi's job too.
When he took over in January, it seemed a difficult job because the team seemed to have peaked, it wasn't as hungry having won the Copa, and Pizzi was following up a coach the fans adored.
He looked to have replicated the attacking form of Sampaoli's Chile, but the defence was unorganised and lacked intensity against Panama, leading to two goals conceded and showing up the team’s faults.
Admittedly Claudio Bravo was culpable for both goals, and the Barcelona goalkeeper also made some mistakes in the other group games. However, he kept a clean sheet against Mexico as Chile played the perfect match to defeat their quarter-final opponents 7-0, back in Santa Clara.
This was a perfect storm—Mexico couldn’t have been worse, nor Chile better. Pizzi said he couldn’t really explain why his team scored so many in this game but not in some of the other matches, sticking to a conservative line of implying his team has been playing fairly well all along.
Per ESPN, he said:
"I don't have a magic wand to say that today, we will score seven goals and we're going to play great like we did today. No, these are things that come up, that we believe that we created.
My explanation as to why we played this way? It's because we had actually been playing this way and we adjusted minor details, like the definition of those plays at goal [the finishing], and we focus a lot more and we were more concentrated on the game.
...
This group of players has been playing and has been writing many more pages of the most brilliant story of Chilean football. We hope that we can continue adding more pages to this great book. We hope that we can continue incorporating our contribution and achieving objectives, which is what we want.
"
To some extent, he has a point. the team’s finishing has improved greatly. Vidal struck twice in the Bolivia game and defender Jose Fuenzalida scored a consolation goal against Argentina, but Chile’s strikers were anonymous.
No goals for Alexis Sanchez, no goals for Eduardo Vargas. Now they have three and six respectively. The performance levels of both these players, along with Vidal’s, have risen sharply with each match that comes.
Against Mexico, Sanchez was a magnet that defenders couldn’t help but be sucked close to, as they fretted over what he was going to do with the ball. Often that was looking for Vargas, who gleefully bundled home four goals on one of the best days of his football career.
Edson Puch scored the other two, while Sanchez was also on target, with one goal not real reward for his strong performance.
Vidal missed a handful of reasonable chances, but he was the all-action midfielder who drove the team on, covering every blade of grass and showing why they used to call him Cometierra (eats ground) when he played for amateur side Rodelindo FC Roman.
He started at six years old and grew a reputation for being a player who gave his all. The nickname came because he left each match covered in dirt and dust from the field which was just yards from his house.
Vidal started the Copa America well last year, but after an incident in which he was arrested for drink-driving, his tournament went downhill even as his team-mates thrived.
Chile won the cup but it was not because of the man dubbed "El Rey"—the king. This year it is Vidal helping to pull the team up by its boot straps, along with Alexis and Vargas.
The latter has never shone for long at club level but has a hugely impressive 30 goals from 57 matches with his national side. His finishing was merciless against Mexico, with each strike sending more El Tri fans packing from a 70,000-seater stadium they had virtually filled by themselves.
Chile delivered the performance of the tournament against one of the best sides in it, and they now have to seriously be considered as potential winners themselves. They will be favourites against Colombia and logic dictates they would then face Argentina in the final.
They beat the Albiceleste last year in Santiago in the final and to do so again would be quite remarkable.
One gigantic thrashing of Mexico doesn’t necessarily mean that anything that was not working under Pizzi, such as the frail defence, has suddenly been fixed.
Playing against the world’s best, Lionel Messi, is enough to undo even the most consistently tight back line on the planet, but Chile stopped him at their own Estadio Nacional in 2015 and a good performance against Colombia would give them the confidence to believe they could repeat that at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on June 26.
"Everybody knows what Messi is. He is the best player in the world," Vidal told Goal.
Vidal is suspended for the semi-final in Chicago on June 22, having been booked twice in the tournament thus far. He will be a huge miss for his team, but then again, if they do the job without him, then he will have had extra rest before the final.
"It would be great to meet the Argentines again because they are the best national team in the world, and we are up there fighting," the Bayern Munich star added.
"I am sad, but confident in what my team-mates can do. These games come with a risk, I hope I can play the final."
.jpg?w=600 "Colts Release Kenny Moore")
