Mexico shocks defending champion Germany at World Cup

MOSCOW - Deep inside a hurricane of celebratory mayhem, Juan Carlos Osorio sought a moment of calm.

Instead of bounding along in celebration after Hirving Lozano delivered the 34th-minute goal that would ultimately give Mexico an unlikely 1-0 win against Germany here Sunday, Osorio sat down on his team’s bench and adopted a Zen-like pose - a deep breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth, then again, and again - as he plotted his team’s next moves.

As Mexico’s coach, he had spent six months developing a game plan to shepherd his team to this exact point. Now, they had just about an hour left to navigate.

“The phrase was to play for the love of winning, not the fear of losing,” Osorio said after the game. “We were brave, and defended with our hearts.”

Osorio, who is 57 and from Santa Rosa de Cabal, Colombia, has long been known for his quiet, cerebral approach to the game, his professorial air. But he showed Sunday that he possessed a thrill-seeking side, too. What stood out in the huge upset against the defending World Cup champions was how aggressive, fearless and uninhibited his team looked.

It was, in some ways, a wildly irreverent game plan that Mexico employed. Its players defended in twos and sometimes threes, and when they won the ball they charged forward as a group, like sprinters at a track meet. They ran daringly in and out of passing lanes, wove multilayered combinations, and pinged the ball with confidence and intent. To the final whistle, they kept dashing recklessly down the wings.

Their fans responded to the team’s vigor with bursts of their own, forming a regenerating cycle of energy. They shouted “Ole!” from the game’s opening passes. They booed and hissed the German players whenever they gained possession of the ball.

It was Mexico’s dogged collaborative defending that produced the midfield turnover that would become the game’s only goal. After a quick blur of forward passes, Lozano, potentially one of the tournament’s breakout stars, sprinted into the box to latch onto the final diagonal pass, cut inside, hopscotched over a defender’s outstretched leg and buried the ball inside the left post.

“It was the best goal of my career,” Lozano said sheepishly afterward.

To a neutral supporter, Mexico would have had little reason to be embarrassed had it played conservatively, focused on securing a tie, before opening up against its next two, lesser opponents in the first round of play.

But Osorio announced his intentions openly at a news conference the night before the game. As journalists from Mexico prodded and probed him, trying to get a read on how much deference the coach’s game plan would show the defending champions, he insisted quietly, but firmly, that the team would not compromise its identity.

“Any team that tries to play with a back four at the halfway line is exposed with 35 meters in behind them, and they are not an exception,” Osorio said of Germany’s defense, foreshadowing the game’s counterattacking potential. “We will not change the way we play. We have our style in the Mexican national team, and we’re going to match up with their game.”

Mexico’s fans, he added, demanded it.

Germany’s coach, Joachim Löw, noted after the game that he and his players had little reason to be surprised by Mexico’s approach. They had watched tape of multiple Mexico games and saw that its players always looked for quick transitions. The German plan, he said, was to double-team players like Lozano whenever they picked up the ball in the attacking half. But Germany seemed too slow to execute it.

“Mexico really put in an excellent performance today,” said Löw, who described his players as unexpectedly nervous and their passing as “negligent.”

The mixture of booing and singing from the Mexican fans created a nightmarishly dissonant soundtrack to Germany’s string of failed attacking moves. And then, after the last effort by Germany faltered and the final whistle sounded, several Mexican players collapsed headfirst to the turf. Osorio beamed, receiving a string of ferocious bear hugs from his players and staff members.

Osorio has vocal critics throughout Mexico, from the fan base to the punditry, who dismiss him as a tinkerer, an over-thinker, a foreigner. He has, for his part, not hidden the fact that he will likely leave his current post after the tournament. But late Sunday night, his players, still buoyant from the victory, uniformly pledged their allegiance to him.

“We only need to obey his orders,” said striker Javier Hernandez, whose back-to-goal distribution was so vital to triggering the team’s offense Sunday. “If he wants to tell us, ‘Throw yourself headfirst to stop the ball,’ we’re going to do it, because we’re with him.”