Costa Rica FIFA World Cup 2022 Team Preview
QATAR and the FIFA World Cup 2022 will be the final swansong on a glorious national career for long-serving campaigners Keylor Navas, Celso Borges, and Bryan Ruiz, all of whom have been central figures of La Sele over the last decade and will go all down as legends of Costa Rican football.
They are joined by an array of World Cup first-timers in Jewison Bennette, Brandon Aguilera, Anthony Contreras, Daniel Chacón, Roan Wilson, Álvaro Zamora, Anthony Hernández, Juan Pablo Vargas, and Rónald Matarrita amongst others. Who will all be desperate to write their own World Cup stories.
The man behind the team, coach Luis Fernando Suárez, has plenty of World Cup experience, having previously coached Ecuador and Honduras at the 2006 and 2014 editions.
Fernando Suárez’s defensive-minded tactics divide opinion among fans, his style can be difficult to watch, even boring at times, but he does bring results.
His team does not score many goals (13 in 14 games), but they concede even fewer (8 in 14 games). And six of Costa Rica’s seven wins in qualifying were by one-goal margins (we will settle for that at the World Cup!)
Having given debuts to 22 players in 15 months (11 of them in qualifiers). And in total, played a remarkable 77 players during his tenure, Fernando Suárez has finally seemed to settle on a favoured line-up.
Expect a defensive and compact set-up with two sturdy banks of four. Talismanic goalkeeper Keylor Navas is vital to any success, and key defenders Óscar Duarte and Francisco Calvo provide a strong central defence pairing, with the hardworking Yeltsin Tejeda offering a protective shield in front of them. The team will rely on set-pieces and speedy counterattacks. Utilizing the distribution skills of midfielder Celso Borges and striker Joel Campbell to unleash the pace of youngsters Jewison Bennette and Anthony Contreras.
Against superior footballing nations, Fernando Suárez’s organized approach is Los Tico’s greatest chance of progressing in the tournament, but for that to transpire, the players will have to perform at their optimum, [coupled to] a bit of luck along the way. We can dream, right?
A true underdog story that evokes memories of the historic 2014 tournament. When La Sele, against the odds, topped a group with Uruguay, Italy, and England and reached the quarter-finals before heartbreakingly losing to the Netherlands on penalties.
Edited from: [Source: https://ticotimes.net/2022/11/19/costa-rica-fifa-world-cup-2022-team-preview]
