El Clásico revives with Chivas leading and burns with America urged

Yes, you know: the numbers matter little when it is the conditions and human and football ambitions that decide a National Classic. Even anniversaries matter little. The environment may be filled with ghosts and worn-out chronicles. None of them step on the field, just, perhaps, they clump together like ephemeral chatter from the stands.

There are no guarantees. Yeah, Chivas Today he plays better football. In fact, he plays much better soccer than the Americanist babblings in this tournament. The Tricampeonato rests on anecdote. And yet, no one consciously risks betting their assets on someone else’s hopscotch. Because America always play with 12. They drink something, swallow something, something possesses them in Coapa, which imbues them with that pernicious and fascinating mysticism of #OdiameMás.

Yes, Guadalajara has found under the sponsorship of Gabriel Milito the ancestral resource of playing Chivas, as if paying homage to that watershed when Enrique Aceves Latiguillo, in his column in El Informador, wanted to stigmatize them by saying that they played like “crazy Chivas.” He never imagined that Guadalajara would end up being a disused patronymic, under the Chivas caste. Yes, the uncertain pedigree remains, although, with Milito, there is sanity and there is devotion.

André Jardine continues to patch up his team. His most important piece, after Alejandro Zendejas, is gone: Álvaro Fidalgo left an inheritance, but did not leave an heir for the position. And it’s not just about soccer but about emotionally anointing yourself with the commitment to being the American “8.”

Now, Jardine has Rodrigo Dourado and Raphael Veiga, both loaded with chromosomes from the cradle of football’s artistic patrons: Brazil and its Pentacampeonato. Will they be enough to rebuild America? If Guillermo del Toro was able to reinvent a seductive Frankenstein, Jardine could also create a better behemoth, although at the moment he has two left feet.

There is not much mystery. In the Classics other values ​​play, especially the intangible, the unpredictable, the immeasurable: devotion, personality, testosterone, inspiration, hunger, desperation, and, of course, petty characters such as fear, uncertainty. And yes, the imponderables: a card, an injury, a slip – or a misdeed – by the referee.

The heroes of the Classics can be powerful, legendary guys, like Salvador Reyes, Tigre Sepúlveda, Carlos Reinoso, Alfredo Tena, Fernando Quirarte or Zague, but it is also enough for faint-hearted guys who are mythologized by accidents, by a hormonal imbalance, as happened with El Chicote Calderón. There is room for everyone, for demigods and for mortals. For scholars and for idiots.

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Peláez explodes over Campillo’s statements prior to the National Classic

The Chivas player declared that the National Classic against América is just another game for them, which generated indignation in Ricardo Peláez.

With each edition, in modern times, hyperbole – almost a sophistry – is toyed with in debate tables: “The Classic is so old that it ages poorly and expires.” And yet, it moves… and moves legions, hordes, sometimes irrationally with outbreaks of violence, and sometimes in the pernicious sphere of stupidity on social networks, where the pellets of insult surpass the caution and moderation of the arguments, as if every noise extinguished the candles of understanding.

But, for that reason, the National Classic survives. Even the bad times of both teams. Or even the bad – or lousy – laborers who – eventually – do not deserve to wear one of those shirts.

Yes, it survives because it is under the powerful aegis of rivalry, history, tradition, and the cascade, but a current battle between the team that was born in the province and between the failures of the “already merito”, and the other, the powerful spawn of television plutocracy. The accidental amasiato worked: today one cannot live without the other. The misfortune of one is the misfortune of the other. The elevation of one urges the humiliation of the other.

If anything, time has calmed the verbal gales. Without Jorge Vergara recently, and without Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, since the last century, the heirs of both characters have chosen a discretion that makes them look timid. With Vergara there were displays and bets; With El Tigre, the television apparatus pissed off the soccer nation against its team. He genuinely created #HateMeMás, but without the need to decree or baptize it. It was more the pure essence than a barcode.

Chivas has an important absence: Luis Romo, one of those rare types in Mexican soccer. Slow in metabolism, but agile in mind. It is the catapult of Guadalajara. Surely, this week, Milito redesigned the team. He will not lose the seal of offensive and neat football, but he will resort to other forms. The five in the background gave absolute tenacity to the attack. He will surely return to a 4-3-3, with the variants that Diego Campillo or Oso González provide.

Milito knows it: the team’s dynamics will be enough to force players to pause more in the midfield, and will also force Alejandro Zendejas to get more involved in defense than in attack.

Romo’s absence will be instructive for Chivas. After America, a complicated calendar lies ahead, very different from the trail of invalids that he faced in the first five days. After America, the urgent Cruz Azul, the Two-time Champion Toluca and Atlas appear, always looking for a way to make life miserable for the Flock. And without Romo, Chivas will have a blunt – no edge – plan of attack for those games.

They already have an assigned referee: César Ramos Palazuelos, with bad memories for America, for that final against Monterrey in which he refused to consult the VAR, from where they demanded an action that could have resurrected El Nido.

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How do Chivas and América get to the Classic?

News of red and white and azlcremas facing the new edition of the duel between the most popular in Mexico.

Yes, Caesar is the whistler who feels more papist than the Pope, and America knows that he is not moved in his favor even by lighting candles in search of a long-awaited breath of the Rose of Guadalupe.

Thus, the Mexican tournament will benefit from this National Classic with the perfect framing under the imperfection of an America in reconstruction and of Chivas that lead the tournament, with sidelong glances of suspicion, due to their weak opponents, and with the doubts caused by Luis Romo’s injury.

In the end the two coaches agree. One tries to reinvent itself from the ruins of its Three-time Championship, and the other adapts a form of play under the strength of the soldadera that has been left without a marshal in the background. And then everything will be in the feet, head and spirit of those who step on the field.