The team will be without its all-time top scorer Lionel Messi for the game, who announced his retirement from the national team straight after the Copa America loss.
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The Copa final heartbreak was simply too much for the Barcelona ace to take, and just as he said, he really had given everything to win his motherland a major trophy.
Argentina’s place in the CONMEBOL (South American Football Confederation) standings is far from secure, and should the country miss out on the World Cup for the first time since 1970, there’s a good chance the AFA will be looking for another coach.
Bauza is not Marcelo Bielsa, who perhaps was never a realistic candidate, and he is not Jorge Sampaoli, who might have taken the job had he not been appointed so recently at Sevilla, but he is an experienced coach with a recent history of success.
Do you think Bauza will be able to convince Messi to return to the fold? It is not about convincing him of anything, just to chat about football.
“Those of us who were players know how frustrating it is to lose a final”.
“I’m thinking of Tevez as I am about other players…”
Bauza can only do so much to remedy the AFA’s issues behind the scenes, and that dysfunction has bled on to the pitch, as evidenced by Messi’s abrupt retirement. “I hope the chat with him will help for him to carry on in the national team”. That’s perfectly illustrated by a look at their recent record against Chile: in the last 13 months the two sides have met four times.
That suggests a team in need of a mental reset in order to get over that final hurdle.
Bauza has less than a month to work on his strategy for the national side, as on 1 September Argentina will play Uruguay in a World Cup 2018 qualifier and visit Venezuela a few days later.
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“The feeling I had after the Copa America was that Messi was left by the locker room with an unbearable weight and downloaded it on the first microphone he saw”.
