Close the game or throw away the game? (Meluk tells him, opinion)

Uruguay won easily 2-0, but in a true miracle, out of nowhere, Colombia tied in two minutes, with nine minutes remaining.

Then, Rueda surprised with a change: he brought in the scorer Martín Arzuaga to replace Luis Gabriel Rey, another ‘9’, and one minute from the end, Uruguay scored 3-2. “Rueda and Colombia found the lottery jackpot ticket thrown away… and they threw it away!” I wrote that time.

Then, as usually happens, the entire press – myself included, obviously – ended up with the coach because instead of closing the game, he threw it out for bringing in a striker and not a brand-name midfielder or a defender to close the game. Rueda, with a guilty voice, admitted that he did not close the game because he thought that if a brand midfielder or a defender scored and they scored another goal, as happened, the press would have destroyed him for being a coward and not securing the game with one more goal because could pass over Uruguay.

Alexis, then, wanted to close the game by bringing out attacking midfielders, putting in brand midfielders and a fifth defender, even more so when Tolima scored 15 minutes into the second half. For more than half an hour he stood close to his goal and allowed Tolima to rally around him until they tied in the 88th minute… and beat them in the 96th minute!

“I was wrong with the changes and I accept that,” admitted García, who was evidently furious with his players, whom he later criticized: “My players became too important, everyone loves them, they buy one and the other, and that blur. He has had to work more on my head than on my feet.”

(Also read: Millonarios collapses: they lost to Bucaramanga in El Campín and are last in group A)

Last week the one who threw the Millonarios match in the Libertadores was Alberto Gamero. The coach brought in a third center back, Jorge Arias, when he beat Pelestino far from his goal without any problems, but without anything left over.

And Arias lost the mark in the 92nd minute for the painful 1-1. The same thing had already happened to the two of them in the final of the last Colombia Cup: Millos was beating Nacional well, in Medellín, and Arias came on supposedly to close the match and lost the 1-1 mark, at 93. They lost in penalties.

The coaches make the changes to win, nothing more is missing, but perhaps if the game itself does not ask for it and the teams are achieving their results in a good way, changing for the sake of changing is more like doing for the sake of doing, for the sake of appearing to do.

Close the game or throw away the game? Alexis and Gamero did the second…