Marcelo Bielsa among the critics, Uruguay 2025 edition
Uruguay's poor form has been, one reporter wrote, 'not a surprise, but the chronicle of a disaster foretold'. Marcelo Bielsa, of course, has heard the arguments. He doesn't agree with them.
The high of finishing third in the Copa América in 2024 has been hitting Uruguay harder than it should have, perhaps because the national team's coach, Marcelo Bielsa, was beset in victory by villains.
Facing him that night, as coach of Canada, was Jesse Marsch. He's the coach Victor Orta thought would be the perfect complement to Bielsa's work at Leeds United, who turned out to be its antithesis. Recently, Marsch has been getting himself sent off on purpose to demonstrate something to his players about his weird fetishisation of Latin American teams as 'fighters'. "It's not like I went into the game thinking, 'okay, I'm going to get thrown out'," he said. "But I was definitely looking for opportunities to make a point, right?" Right. Bayern Munich have been making some points to him since he apparently convinced an unfit Alphonso Davies to play in a game, and he ruptured his ACL inside fifteen minutes. And last week, Marsch claimed that Vancouver Whitecaps players went "down to Mexico for a big final and (got) poisoned" at their Concacaf Champions Cup final defeat to Cruz Azul, despite the Whitecaps themselves saying they took their own food and chef and only a few of their players fell ill on the journey home, and Marsch admitting, "Look, I don't have any proof here that this [happened], but it's not random."
Marsch is just irritating, though, whereas Luis Suarez seems to have been an actual problem. He was in the Uruguay squad at that tournament, but has recently been making some non-apology noises about the schism he caused afterwards by publicly criticising Bielsa. "There are people who can take it well and there are people who can take it badly, as happened," Suarez said a couple of weeks ago, not really sounding sorry. "The reality is that I wanted to help the national team, but it was not the best moment." His complaints had basically boiled down to Bielsa not being nice enough to him and the other players, while behaving exactly like Bielsa has always behaved. "A lot of players held a meeting to ask the coach to at least greet us with a good morning, because he wouldn’t even say hello," said Suarez. "I had a five-minute conversation with Bielsa as a team leader, and when we finished, he just replied, 'thank you very much.'" (I laugh every time I picture Suarez's face as Bielsa said that.)
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Bielsa, of course, shows his feelings his way, which leads us to the third significant moment of the Copa América, and the aftermath of their defeat to Colombia in the semi-final, when several Uruguay players fought in the stands with people they said were threatening their families. He might not have said 'good morning' to them nicely enough in training, but in his press conferences, Bielsa absolutely stood up for those players.
"The only thing I can tell you is that the players reacted the same way any human being would," he said. "If you see what happened happen, and there's no other process (for the families) to escape, and people are attacking their girlfriends, their mothers, a baby, their wives, their mothers — what would you do? ... when you see a violent action, of course no one is going to be in favour of a violent reaction. But the first thing you have to see is, what are they reacting to?" He went on to criticise the general organisation of the tournament in the USA, "the country of security", and to call the organisers "a plague of liars"; far from being due punishments for fighting, he said, the Uruguay players were owed apologies.
What they got, in the end, were suspensions: Darwin Núñez for five games, Rodrigo Bentancur for four, Mathías Olivera, Ronald Araújo and captain José María Giménez for three. They and six other players were fined. And what Uruguay managed, since the Copa until this week, was one solitary win in Conmebol World Cup qualifying.
The difference was stark. Before the Copa, Bielsa's Uruguay won four, drew one and lost one, scoring thirteen and conceding five, defeating Brazil and Argentina. In the games since they'd won once, a 3-2 win over Colombia, lost three and drawn five. Significantly, they'd failed to score seven times.
Last week's qualifier in Paraguay did nothing to lift the mood. Bielsa was working hard in the build-up, getting available players to camp earlier than usual, spreading his net of call-ups to bring more options into the fold. But in the thirteenth minute of the game the goalkeeper, Santiago Mele, charged uselessly at a deflected cross and Matías Galarza easily headed past him; with ten minutes left, Barcelona's Ronald Araújo pirouetted in his own box, gave the ball to Julio Enciso, then kicked him. Well, nobody's been looking at Barca's defenders this season, not with Raphinha to watch. Enciso scored the penalty and it ended 2-0. Outside these decisive moments, Uruguay had 71 per cent possession, but only one shot on target, but in some ways this was an improvement on recent form, when Uruguay hadn't had shots, but hadn't had possession either.