Under-20 soccer team prepares

Just a month or so away from Panama’s first-ever world championship appearance in any level of association football --- what the Americans call soccer and the Panamanians futbol --- coach Gary Stempel has been fine-tuning the under-20 team in friendly games against teams that with any luck Panama will again meet in the United Arab Emirates. Though they have been coached largely as experimental and developmental matches, the team’s performances in four games that have netted two wins, a loss and a draw say a lot about its character and possibilities.

On October 9, the marea roja crashed upon Argentine shores and got roundly thrashed by the defending world champs. Of course, the guys who won the under-20 championship for Argentina back then have graduated to other things, but their young successors represent one of the world’s great soccer powers as one would expect.

The score was 4-1, with most of the scoring on their side and our only goal coming on flagrant defensive errors. Yes, it could be said that after all we were playing in Argentina, and after all we gave them some goals we shouldn’t have, but the score probably understated the extent of the rout. The Argentines maintained ball control and moved around with quick, precise passes that time and time again left the Panamanians straining to contain breakaways and stop excellent scoring opportunities. Stempel’s boys, a scrappy team with a few sharpshooting speedsters at the best of times, couldn’t put much together at all and found in Argentina a team that they couldn’t outrun.

On the one hand, Stempel has made good use of games in which the team has been expected to be stomped and in fact was. The message that this game delivered to the players was that if they harbor any dreams of glory at the world championships, this is how much they’ll have to improve. To bettors, the message was that, unless given points or good odds, it would be unwise to bet on Panama to beat Argentina, Brazil, Germany and the like.

But Panama isn’t playing any of those teams in the first round. They open against Burkina Faso in a group that also includes the host United Arab Emirates and Slovakia. The team’s next three games indicated that Panama has a reasonable chance to get through the first round in the UAE.

Those next games were played in a quadrangular tournament at Rommel Fernandez Stadium, featuring the under-20 teams of Canada, Paraguay and Mexico.

The first game, on October 15, was against the Canadians and as usual, Panama looked a bit shaky right at first, but then settled down and dominated the rest of the game. Stempel’s isn’t a powerful offensive team --- though it is occasionally explosive --- and the ball wasn’t put into the net until penalty time of the first half, when Gabriel Gómez scored on a penalty kick. In the second half the Canadian goalie muffed a ball and Elías Ortega was there to put it in the net. The Canadians also scored a goal in the second half. It wasn’t a pretty win, but it was a convincing one for Panama. More than anything else, it pointed to the team’s long-standing need to develop more offensive punch.

Two days later Stempel’s team tied Paraguay one-all. Paraguay scored first on a long and strange bending penalty kick, the threaded through screening players into the corner of the net. Seven minutes later, James Brown bounced the ball off the hand of Paraguay’s Oscar Díaz just inside the penalty area, and Gabriel Gómez converted the penalty kick into the tying goal. Paraguay maintained ball control for the better part of the game, but once in Panama’s end they kept running into a tenacious defense that is the great Panamanian strength.

In the final game of the tournament on October 19 Panama beat a team that it had beaten before, this time taking the Mexicans out by a 2-1 margin. It was a hard-fought game, with Panama taking control of midfield and occasionally getting long breakaways, then becoming rock-solid back in their own end. At 34 minutes Cristian Vega put Panama ahead, but then Mexico stiffened up, tied with a goal early in the second half and turned up the pressure in search of the win. But the Panamanians held them at bay, and in the game’s 88th minute Jean McLean fired a rocket that gave Panama the win.

The bottom line? Panama is a better team than Mexico. At any given point Stempel’s boys never seem dominant, but they’re tough on defense, they never quit, and after never quite muddling their way through on offense they from time to time break these spectacular long plays, or force errors in their opponents’ end, and come up with wins that may not be the prettiest of wins but are nevertheless no flukes.

The under-20 team has done something unprecedented for a Panamanian team, but I suspect that just getting to the world championships will not be the end of the story. It would take a succession of the most unlikely miracles for this team to become this year’s champions, but it won’t surprise me if Panama gets through the first round.

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Stempel's boys tune up for the UAE