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newssplashy · 6 years

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PASADENA, Calif. — A few weeks ago, Juan Carlos Osorio, the coach of the Mexican national soccer team, sat in the sunny courtyard of a Beverly Hills hotel.

Osorio, 57, had just presided over the most humiliating defeat in Mexico’s history, a 7-0 demolition by Chile in the quarterfinals of the Copa América, the world’s oldest international tournament.

It was the sort of loss that gets a coach fired, especially in Mexico — provided Osorio didn’t quit first.

“I went into the locker room, splashed cold water on my face, loosened my tie and told my team, ‘If there is no trust in our work then I will go out there right now and tell everyone I resign,'” he recalled.

Osorio’s players stood behind him, and to the surprise and dismay of the Mexican fans and news media, so did the country’s soccer federation. Twelve full-time and interim coaches in 12 years were apparently enough, at least for the moment.

The decision may be vindicated in the coming weeks, as El Tri, which opens play Sunday against Germany at the 2018 World Cup, tries to advance beyond the round of 16 for the first time since 1986. Or it may not be. In which case, there’s no mystery about whom the nation will blame for another underachieving performance: their Colombian-born, U.S.-educated coach.

Osorio has been under more or less sustained attack from the moment he was awarded the Mexico job in fall 2015. El Tri legends came forward like a Greek chorus to denounce the choice, mocking him as a physical trainer (which he was early in his career), putting air quotes around his “titles” and insisting that there were dozens of better options in Mexico alone.

In the 2 1/2 years since then, Osorio has won more than two-thirds of the games he has coached, and yet the chants for his ouster — “Fuera Osorio!” — have only grown louder.

“If Osorio is such a good coach, why isn’t he managing the Colombian team?” said Hugo Sánchez, a former national team coach and Mexican soccer star.

Fans complain that he is too analytical. “Professor” they call him, not entirely out of respect. They wave off the many teams Osorio has beaten as second rate and fixate on the handful of games he has lost. Most of all, they complain that he is not Mexican.

“It’s a matter of identity,” Sánchez said. The relentlessly negative Mexican news media, which is given very little access to Osorio and the national team, only amplifies these complaints.

“El Tri Leaves Doubts on Its Way to Russia,” was a typical headline assessing the team after it tied Wales here, 0-0, in a warmup match recently before the Cup.

Osorio has clearly reached his limit. During an interview in May and one last year in New York, he was remarkably candid about the untenability of his position.

“They’re not happy with us winning,” he said. “We have to win and humiliate the opposition. There is no country in the world that keeps so much pressure on a national team coach. There is none.”

As much as anything, this is a function of Mexico’s modern World Cup history.

Since 1994, the team has never failed to advance out of its group. It has also never managed to win a knockout game, losing six consecutive times in the round of 16 in a highlight reel of soccer heartbreak: Mexico has gone down on penalty kicks (Bulgaria, 1994), on a botched offside call (Argentina, 2010) and on a penalty that wasn’t (the Netherlands, 2014).

It is a record of failure that in most other nations would produce a certain kind of fatalism, if only as a form of self-protection. But to Mexico’s fans, each World Cup disappointment has increased the size of the debt they feel is owed to them and ratcheted up the heat on the team’s coach to finally collect it — to right this cosmic wrong and validate a nation’s unwavering faith.

In Mexico, the blending of fantasy and reality is not just a literary tradition. “To coach Mexico you have to be sort of a magician, you have to sell illusions,” the Mexican novelist and soccer columnist Juan Villoro said.

Going into this World Cup, Mexico’s fantasies may be more vivid than ever. With more than a dozen of its members playing in top leagues around Europe, the Mexico team is considered one of its best.

At the same time, the quadrennial curse looms. Mexico had a punishing draw: It shares a group with the defending champion, Germany, and strong teams from Sweden and South Korea. If Mexico finishes second, a likely outcome, it will probably play Brazil, one of the most heavily favored teams to win the tournament, in the round of 16.

The glare will also be unusually intense. El Tri has long been America’s Other Team: It plays most of its friendlies on American soil, selling out stadiums, such as the Rose Bowl, that the U.S. national team could never hope to fill.

The Mexican top level league, Liga MX, routinely draws larger American TV audiences than Major League Soccer or England’s Premier League. With the U.S. team failing to qualify for the World Cup, Fox and ESPN are pouring resources into exhaustive coverage of Mexico in both English and Spanish.

On top of all this, Osorio knows he is auditioning for his next job. He will almost certainly leave Mexico after the World Cup, whether by his own choice or the federation’s.

“It’s not that I’m not happy with the players — I’m very happy with the players — but the environment is just unbelievable,” he said.

Osorio makes no secret about his desire to coach the U.S. team — “that’s a job that any manager would like to have,” he said — and he is, in some respects, the perfect candidate for it.

He has the international pedigree, having coached in Colombia, Mexico and even England, as an assistant at Manchester City. As a native Spanish speaker steeped in Latin America’s soccer culture, he might give the United States an edge it badly needs in the competition for young stars of Mexican descent who live in the United States and can choose to play for either national team.

But Osorio also has a deep personal connection to the United States. That’s where he met his wife and where both of his teenage sons were born.

He first came to the United States at age 26, after an injury cut short his playing career in Colombia and Brazil. He attended a small college in Dubuque, Iowa, but dropped out after a semester and moved to New York City. An unauthorized immigrant, he cobbled together a living in construction and food service.

Osorio went back to school and regained his legal status, finishing his degree in exercise science and playing soccer at Southern Connecticut State University, before returning to New York to work as a personal trainer in Queens.

In 1998, at age 37, he landed his first soccer job, as a conditioning coach for the now-defunct Staten Island Vipers in the United Soccer League. Over the next two decades, he bounced from country to country and from club to club, always seeking the next opportunity to coach at a higher level.

As a coach, Osorio is as much a product of the United States as he is of Latin America. His high-intensity, situation-centric training sessions are modeled after a Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls practice that he managed to talk his way into during his time in Iowa. And he has tried to import some of the physicality and competitiveness of American sports culture to Mexico.

He is always changing his lineup, often benching stars, both to better exploit his competition and so that his players won’t become complacent. This is another source of his unpopularity among a Mexican public that sees his refusal to commit to a single group of players as a lack of confidence in the team. Osorio has little patience for the criticism, which he considers emblematic of Mexico’s problematic attitude toward soccer.

“We think we can win by just being talented, we don’t like really the competition,” Osorio says. “We are more into diving, faking and talking bad about other people, creating animosities and creating problems.”

Stylistically, Osorio is everything his beloved predecessor, Miguel Herrera — last seen rolling around on the grass of the 2014 World Cup in fits of operatic fury and elation, before being fired for punching a broadcaster — was not. He takes extensive notes on the sideline in color-coded pens, quotes Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and is prone to lengthy digressions about the chemistry of the human brain.

Without the pedigree of a successful playing career, the calling card for most professional soccer coaches, Osorio’s rise has been fueled by an obsessive quest to master the tactical aspects of the game.

He persuaded Manchester United to allow him to observe its practices when Sir Alex Ferguson was still in charge there; and he not only befriended a Liverpool family whose home overlooked the team’s training ground, he moved in with them.

Osorio’s players, at least, appreciate his hard-won expertise. “I call him, in a way, like a genius because they live in a completely different world than ourselves,” said Javier Hernández, the Mexican star known as Chicharito, or Little Pea. “Even if you can speak five minutes with him about one game or one player, he gives you the way he sees football and the way he sees that player, and it’s knowledge that you can learn if you want.”

(Osorio stood by the players after photos and videos leaked of a party several of them attended with escorts hours after the team beat Scotland, 1-0, in its final appearance in Mexico before heading to the Cup.)

After the Chile defeat, with a traumatized nation baying for his firing, Osorio went on something of an intellectual and emotional journey, consuming books about failure and humility, while seeking out other coaches who had endured devastating losses. He had his players study a video of Chile’s goals and hired a mental coach from Spain to help them recover and prepare for this World Cup.

Now, Osorio will finally have the chance to erase the loss from his and Mexico’s collective memory and maybe even break the nation’s World Cup curse.

“If he can get through to the fifth game, all will be forgiven,” said Hérculez Gómez, a Mexican-American broadcaster for ESPN who played professionally in the United States and Mexico. “That’s what they’ve long yearned for.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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itsjaybullme · 7 years

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21 Actors John Wick Should Fight in ‘John Wick 3'

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Peter/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media, Mike Pont/FilmMagic, VCG/VCG

Keanu Reeves is gearing up to start production on John Wick: Chapter 3, which will be released in 2019. That's right: John Wick is officially back for a third go-around.

But after battling against actors like Adrianne Palicki, Alfie Allen, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ruby Rose, and countless unnamed bad guys in the first two films, Reeves needs some new blood (literally) for the cast of the sequel.

So: Who will he fight this time?

Reeves does most of his own stunts, dating back to his days on The Matrix, and the John Wick series is no different.

“There’s an incredible stuntman who doubles John Wick,” Reeves told Men's Fitness in March. “They hit him with a car. He’s standing there, and they hit him—that’s a stunt. Me? I’ll shoot some guns, flip some people—and that’s action. So, yeah, I do as much action as I possibly can, because I love it—and I love the opportunity to bring the audience along. I want to be able to do everything. Since The Matrix, I’ve used this term, ‘superperfect.’ As in, ‘Can we get it superperfect?’ That’s part of what makes [a great action film] a pressure cooker. It’s the intensity of just trying to do the best you can in the circumstances that you have.”

Here’s a look at who you think John Wick should battle against in Chapter 3, ranked according to their action-movie experience, skill at portraying villains, and cinematic track record.

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Tom Hardy

TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images

After transforming his body for films like The Dark Knight Rises, Warrior, Venom, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy could easily get the look of an uber-assassin taking on John Wick. Between playing a villain in Bane and doing some intense MMA and kickboxing training for Venom, the British badass already has a head start on the “gun-fu” moves of John Wick. Plus, we already know he loves dogs. He’d fit right in.

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Jason Statham

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The Fate of the Furious and Expendables star would have no trouble sliding into the world of John Wick. Statham has played badass villains in the past, fought against stars like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and he has the action movie fight skills to go with it. Adding his mix of roguish British charm to the franchise would make for pure entertainment. Need proof? Here’s Statham's most shredded Instagram posts.

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Dave Bautista

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Letting the former WWE superstar and current Guardians of the Galaxy actor let loose in the world of John Wick could make for one of the most entertaining fight scenes in Hollywood history. Dave Bautista would be a challenging physical presence for John Wick, considering how massively jacked he is, and his comedic timing could make him just the right kind of over-the-top-villain for Chapter 3. Bautista has experience playing the bad guy, having starred as the James Bond villain Mr. Hinx in Spectre, as well as in The Man with the Iron Fists and the Kickboxer reboot.

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Idris Elba

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Between kickboxing in real life and taking down Norse gods in the Thor series (and likely the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War), Idris Elba would have no problem handling himself against John Wick. For as many good guys he’s played over the years, Elba has played some fantastic villains during his career, including Stringer Bell on The Wire, Tango in American Gangster, and Krall in Star Trek Beyond, so being a bad guy would come naturally for this potential future James Bond.

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Liam Neeson

Mike Pont/FilmMagic

With his late-career turn into a badass action star, Liam Neeson could bring some major gravitas to the John Wick series, thanks to a “particular set of skills” he picked up from the Taken franchise. Neeson has kicked ass in movies like The Grey, Run All Night, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop, The A-Team, and in the upcoming 2018 film The Commuter. He has some experience being a villain, including his iconic turn as Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins.

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Scott Adkins

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

The martial arts expert would be perfect for John Wick: Chapter 3. The British-born actor has multiple black belts in various disciplines, is as shredded as anyone in Hollywood, and he has experience playing a villain, starring as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s sidekick in The Expendables 2. Adkins has made his career starring in B-type action movies like Accident Man, Hard Target 2, Triple Threat, and Boyka: Undisputed, and that’s kind of the genre/DNA that runs through the John Wick movies.

We know Adkins would have no trouble training for the role, based on these 17 Instagram moments.

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Jon Bernthal

ason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Playing The Punisher wouldn’t be the worst way to prepare to enter the John Wick universe. Between the action and the gunplay, Jon Bernthal would feel right at home after working as Frank Castle for the Marvel series on Netflix. Bernthal has the experience (and jawline) to play a villain, too: The actor has played a bad guy in projects like Shot Caller, The Walking Dead, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

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Denzel Washington

Susana Gonzalez/Getty Images

Okay, fine: Though the Academy Award winner might not be the first name that crops up when it comes to “action movie villains,” Denzel Washington actually would fit in pretty well. He won an Oscar as the heavy in Training Day, and over the years he’s starred in his fair share of morally cloudy movies, including Man on Fire, The Equalizer, The Taking of Pelham 123, 2 Guns, The Magnificent Seven, and Safe House. Bringing Washington’s gravitas to the John Wick series would make for a fun hero-villain dynamic. (Look, you guys suggested his name. We're just taking the idea seriously.)

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Jet Li

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Adding a martial arts legend to the world of John Wick would likely make Keanu Reeves very happy. Reeves is a self-professed martial arts nerd, he could have a fight for the ages against someone like Li. While Li doesn’t do much acting in the U.S. anymore, he starred in all three Expendables films. He's also made a few heel turns of his own, portraying ass-kicking villains in Lethal Weapon 4 and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

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Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving

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We'll say it: We love this idea. Reeves already reunited with Matrix co-star Laurence Fishburne in John Wick: Chapter 2—so why not go all-in and make Chapter 3 another Matrix reunion? Both Hugo Weaving and Carrie-Anne Moss have Matrix fight training under their belts. Weaving has played plenty of stony villains besides Agent Smith— remember Red Skull in the first Captain America movie? Moss is no slouch herself, and these days you can see her on the Netflix/Marvel series The Defenders as high-powered attorney Jeri Hogarth. This tag team could give Reeves the challenge he needs to take John Wick: Chapter 3 to the next level.

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Tom Cruise

Pierre Suu/GC Images

The superstar actor has as much action experience under his belt as anyone in Hollywood, and joining John Wick would give Tom Cruise a chance to go against type by playing a bad guy. On top of that, Cruise would absolutely be game for fight scenes—he’s proven with the Mission: Impossible series that he has no problem doing his own stunts. (Cruise climbed one of the biggest buildings in the world and was strapped to the outside of a plane while it was taking off while filming the Impossible series.) Yes: Some badass fight scenes with Keanu Reeves would probably be a joy for Cruise.

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Joe Manganiello

Doug Inglish

He’s got the size and he’s got the look: Joe Manganiello knows how to wear a suit, and with muscles like he has, Keanu Reeves would have his hands full with a Manganiello villain. The former Men’s Fitness cover star just took the mantle of one of the most badass villains in comic book history after appearing as Deathstroke in Justice League, and he has action film experience after appearing in movies like Sabotage and the upcoming Rampage, alongside superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

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Michael Jai White

Noel Daganta

The John Wick producers could save a bunch of money if they brought in Michael Jai White as one of the villains. The Spawn and Dark Knight actor has been training in martial arts since he was a teen, and he has no fewer than eight—count ‘em, eight!— black belts in a range of disciplines, including Taekwondo, Kobudo, and Goju Ryu. Jai White is buddies with Scott Adkins, having co-starred with the actor in Accident Man and Triple Threat, so he could try and bring over his friend for a villainous duo to go up against John Wick.

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The Best of the Rest

John Parra/WireImage, Isa Foltin/Getty Images for Sony Pictures, Gisela Schober/Getty Images

Here’s a look at the rest of the suggestions:

Jack Gleeson - Game of Thrones star Alfie Allen a.k.a. Theon Greyjoy already starred in the first John Wick, so why not bring in another GoT star—this time, the actor who plays King Joffrey. Still salty about the whole Ned Stark thing? We see where you're going with this, guys.

The Expendables crew - Jason Statham could join Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and company as opponents of John Wick. That might be too much action even for this movie.

Iko Uwais - The martial arts star would be quite the opponent for John Wick.

Tilda Swinton - Keanu Reeves already mentioned Swinton as a potential option for the John Wick universe, saying he’d love to reunite with his former Constantine co-star. “You know, I had the chance to work with her – I was in two films with her [Constantine and Thumbsucker, both released in 2005] but had the chance to work with her once — I’m onboard with that,” Reeves said to People. “We run into each other once in awhile socially out there in the world. She’s a remarkable person and actress, so I’m all aboard with that!” Plus, she nailed the part of a martial arts master in Doctor Strange—why not do it again?

Floyd Mayweather - Maybe this should be his next fight after Conor McGregor.

Vin Diesel - Between his Furious work and time doing the voice of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Diesel could try and squeeze in one more franchise under his belt. His heel turn in the latest Fast & Furious flick was entertaining, if not entirely convincing, so

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson - Speaking of actors with lots of franchises under his belt, “The Rock” is always a welcome addition to an action movie. While Johnson likely has no time at all to make an appearance in John Wick, we heard this suggestion a lot.

Danny Trejo - Between his roles in Con Air, Machete, Grindhouse, From Dusk till Dawn, and The Replacement Killers, Trejo knows his way around an action scene. A battle against John Wick would be extreme and fun. Extremely fun, basically.

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newssplashy · 6 years

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World: In Mexico, the coach's seat is always hot