He Uruguayan soccer team, with the debut of Argentine Marcelo Bielsa as coach, will receive Nicaragua this Wednesday from 8:30 p.m. in a friendly match to be played at the Montevideo Centennial Stadium. And on Tuesday the 20th, La Celeste will receive the Cuban national team on the same stage and at the same time.
He Bielsa’s debut in charge of the Uruguayan national team aroused enormous expectations in Uruguay, which is strengthened with the title achieved last Sunday when the selected Under 20 world champion was consecrated in the contest held in Argentina, after beating Italy 1-0.
Bielsa, whose last job was in charge of Leeds United of the English Premier Leaguenow excites the Uruguayan soccer world thanks to the tactical capacity of the Rosario DT teams and their offensive mentality.
To add to the expectation of the Uruguayan fans, the coach who emerged from Newell’s Old Boys adds the plus of the bet to the youth training, since he cited seven members who are Sub 20 champions in this first call.
Uruguay, at the national team level, excelled in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where they qualified fourth. Then he won the 2011 Copa América in Argentina and In the last World Cup in Qatar 2022, with Diego Alonso as DT, he did not pass the group stage.
With a new and renowned DT, Uruguay bets heavily on the 2024 Copa América in the United States and the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canadaas well as to Colombia 2023 pre-Olympicqualifiers for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games (with an Under 23) and to which Bielsa will go as coach.
Marcelo Bielsa led the Argentine national team in the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup, where they were eliminated in the group stageand, later, he was Olympic champion in Athens 2004.
In the debut of “Celeste”, the rival will be Nicaragua, which will visit Paraguay on Sunday and has just received a severe blow by being excluded from the 2023 Gold Cup for improperly fielding a player in eight gamesas determined by Concacaf. The wrongly included player is the Uruguayan Richard Rodríguez Álvez, a midfielder who became a Nicaraguan national in 2019the year in which he made his debut with the Central American team, but does not meet the FIFA legislation requirement of having previously lived at least five consecutive years in his new sporting country.