The Fifth Game: Mexico's Forty Year Wait Runs Through England

Viva Mexico. A statement millions of passionate Mexicans will be making on Sunday ahead of their Round of 16 tie against England. You will hear it from the rooftops of Coyoacán and in every cantina from Tijuana to Cancún, and by six o’clock local time it will be rattling around the steep concrete bowl of the Estadio Azteca, where a full house will believe, genuinely believe, that this is the year.

They have earned the right. Mexico have played eighty nine competitive matches at the Azteca and lost just two. You can go through the Mexican opposition and comment on the lack of elite teams, but the record stands. El Tri have never lost a World Cup match at one of the world’s most iconic stadiums, ten games across three home tournaments without a single defeat. Pelé lifted a World Cup on this pitch. Maradona lifted one too. The Azteca does not host fairy tales for visitors. It buries them.

Javier Aguirre is in his third spell in charge, and the road that brought him here reads like a man being saved for this exact moment. He steered Mexico to the World Cups of 2002 and 2010, twice parachuted in to rescue qualification campaigns in trouble, and twice watched his side fall at the last sixteen. Called back once more after the embarrassment of Qatar, he has rebuilt El Tri into something harder and meaner. Four games at this tournament, four wins, not a single goal conceded. No other side left in the competition can say that.

Aguirre could become a national hero if he can find a way to expose England’s back four in the same way DR Congo did in Atlanta. Brian Cipenga needed just seven minutes to do it, ghosting in at the far post to punish a defence that had gone missing, and England spent the next hour and a bit passing the ball out of play and waiting for Harry Kane to save them. He did, twice, the winner arriving four minutes from time. England have struggled for years against teams who defend deep, and Aguirre has built precisely that kind of side, compact and disciplined, with the crowd and the conditions doing half the pressing for him.

But this is not a postmortem on seventy five minutes of England looking rather average. This is a story about Mexico, a nation of passionate football fans who have waited forty years for a team worth dreaming about. The 2-0 win over Ecuador was their first World Cup knockout victory since 1986. Julián Quiñones tore through to open the scoring and Raúl Jiménez doubled it nine minutes later, while seventeen year old Gilberto Mora became the youngest player to start a World Cup knockout game since Pelé in 1958. The noise that greeted the final whistle carried all the way to the volcanoes. This is a country that shakes the ground when it celebrates. Literally. Seismic monitors in Mexico City have registered goal celebrations before.

The English media will spend the week talking about the altitude, and to be fair to them, it is a genuine thing. The Azteca sits more than two thousand metres above sea level, over seven thousand feet in old money, higher than one and a half Ben Nevises. Thomas Tuchel has already admitted his players cannot adapt in the three days available and called it a huge advantage for the hosts. Paul Merson called it mind blowing. The excuse, you will notice, is being drafted before a ball has been kicked. Mexico, meanwhile, have played three of their four matches in that thin air and looked entirely at home, because it is home.

And if England want a reminder of what can happen to them at this ground, they only need to check the VHS tape. The last time they played a World Cup match at the Azteca was the 1986 quarter final against Argentina, when a certain Diego Maradona scored twice in four minutes. One goal with his hand. The other, a slaloming run from his own half through five white shirts, remains arguably the greatest goal in the history of the game. England have not played at this altitude since. Some scars keep you away from places.

Here is the question the whole country is asking, whispered rather than shouted, because Mexican fans have been hurt before. What is Mexico’s best World Cup? The answer is the quarter finals, reached twice, in 1970 and 1986, both times as hosts. Never further. Seven consecutive tournaments between 1994 and 2018 ended at the last sixteen, a run of heartbreak so reliable it earned its own name, el quinto partido, the fifth game Mexico could never reach. Beat England on Sunday and they reach reach the quarter-finals at the Azteca of all places.

England will arrive with the tournament’s form striker. Kane’s brace against DR Congo took him to thirteen World Cup goals, past Pelé, and five for this tournament alone. He is the obvious threat and Aguirre knows it. But Kane needed sixty eight minutes of nothing before England found him in Atlanta, and a defence that has not been breached all summer will fancy their chances of keeping the supply line shut while eighty thousand people howl at every England touch.

The fitness picture tilts Mexican too. Aguirre has a clean bill of health, with Quiñones coming through his calf tightness against Ecuador, while England are patching themselves together. Reece James and Jarell Quansah are both racing to be ready after missing the DR Congo game, Djed Spence has been filling in at right back and Declan Rice has been carrying hamstring and calf niggles through the tournament. Bukayo Saka and Anthony Gordon changed the game off the bench in Atlanta and both could start on Sunday, but a makeshift defence in that thin air is nobody’s idea of a good evening.

English fans will be setting alarms for one in the morning to watch this. Mexican fans will not need alarms because nobody in Mexico City is planning on sleeping. The hosts have the fortress, the form, the manager, the momentum and forty years of longing behind them. England have the better squad on paper, and paper has never won a football match at the Azteca.

So if England’s best players don’t turn up, Mexico’s will.