"We are going to remember and repeat the gringos' defeat at the Alamo."
- Mexican columnist Alfredo Domínguez Muro
Here is the article in todays paper-
Gloves come off when USA, Mexico meet
By Kelly Whiteside, USA TODAY
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — The last time the U.S. and Mexican under-23 men's soccer teams met here, U.S. players were showered with beer bottles, batteries and racial epithets after a 3-1 victory. And that match, last spring, was a friendly, the soccer term for an exhibition.
The U.S. Under-23 team has scored 10 goals in the Olympic qualifying tournament with three by Alecko Eskandarian.
By Omar Torres, AFP
So imagine the scene tonight when the USA will play Mexico before an expected sellout of 60,000 in an Olympic qualifying tournament semifinal. The winner gets one of the North/Central American and Caribbean region's two bids to the Athens Games; the loser is out.
After the U.S. team's first two games of the tournament, it left the field to taunting chants of "Osama! Osama!" in reference to al Qaeda leader bin Laden.
Defender Jose Burciaga, a Mexican-American from Dallas, heard the chants and seethed. "For all of us Americans, we went through something so dramatic as 9/11, that's not something you joke around with. I don't know how people can stoop so low," he says.
Crowds in Mexico long have been hostile to U.S. players. Stories from the 1990s, when the U.S. team became increasingly competitive worldwide, have become part of soccer lore: U.S. flags burning in the stands at Mexico City's Azteca Stadium, bags of urine and feces tossed on the field and the likenesses of U.S. players hanging in effigy from the stadium rafters.
At times the foul play has carried on to the field. In January 1997 in Pasadena, Calif., during a U.S. Cup game, a fracas erupted and a Mexican player landed a well-placed kick to defender Alexi Lalas' groin. An unsuspecting Lalas crumpled and called the incident "a full assault on my manhood."
In the USA's 2-0 victory against Mexico in a 2002 World Cup round-of-16 match in South Korea, a Mexican player was ejected after head-butting midfielder Cobi Jones.
"They're dirty and they're nasty and they spit on you and grab you where they shouldn't. It's bad. They want to get any advantage they can," forward Landon Donovan says. Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley are the two members of the U.S. under-23 team who also were on the World Cup squad.
Donovan speaks Spanish fluently and thus has been the team's spokesman in Mexico. When talking about the hatred between the two teams, he does not shy away from controversy or his dislike of the Mexican team and the "ignorance" of the fans who make their attacks personal.
"As fun as it is to win a game at home in front of a lot of people," he says, "there's nothing better than beating a team on its home turf, especially Mexico, to go to the Olympics."
