Boca's best efforts fall well short of expectations

BY DAN EDWARDS

@DANEDWARDSGOAL

A

 whole country watched in wonder for the past few weeks as it was taken over by an overwhelming blue tide. Tens of thousands of Boca Juniors fans descended on the United States for the Club World Cup, filling Miami’s beaches and outlet stores – helped, no doubt, by the weak dollar and suspiciously strong peso – and Nashville’s iconic music bars, accompanying the usual twangs of country and bluegrass with an interminable chorus of ‘Dale Bó, dale Bó.’ The Xeneize invasion was a marvel, and one of the highlights of a tournament which has proved far more engaging viewing than many suspected at the outset.

There was just one problem. The Boca Juniors team is still not particularly good at playing football and it proved as much with an early exit from the party on Tuesday in embarrassing circumstances, the first of two Superclásico disappointments as Argentine interest in the Club World Cup was extinguished this week.

Elimination itself would have come as no big surprise. Fresh off a decidedly mediocre first half of 2025 and a last-minute coaching change, Boca were always a long-shot in a group that also contained Bundesliga titans Bayern Munich and Benfica, who boasted two World Cup heroes in their ranks in the shape of Ángel Di María and Nicolás Otamendi.

Even so, a thrilling draw against the Portuguese team and last Friday’s heart-breaking loss to Bayern showed that Boca were not just there to make up the numbers, and they came into the last game against hapless Auckland City with at least a theoretical chance of still making the last-16. Then, as has so often been the case with Boca, hope turned to despair and ridicule in the blink of an eye.

When full-time finally arrived in Nashville, pushed back by a lengthy delay owing to an electrical storm in the region, Boca had hit another low point to rival their elimination from the Libertadores at the hands of Alianza Lima. This time it was not a pair of 40-something strikers like Alianza’s Paolo Guerrero and Hernán Barcos that sunk the giants, but a group of part-timers who had to beg for time off from their day jobs to make the trip at all.

Goalkeeper Nathan Garrow suffered the misfortune of handing the Xeneize the lead with an own goal, but came up with save after save to keep the likes of Edinson Cavani and Miguel Merential at bay. Not bad for a 20-year-old university student playing only his ninth game of the season and fresh off picking the ball out of his own net six times against Benfica. And with Boca desperately looking to engorge their goal tally Christian Gray struck for the equaliser. Gray has quite the story to tell his students back in New Zealand: he is a P.E teacher and admitted that once safely at home he will have plenty of classwork to catch up on from his unforgettable time away.

It will be small consolation to Boca that Benfica’s win over Bayern would have rendered even their best efforts academic. Nor that arch-rivals River Plate, and with what seemed a far more accessible group to boot, are also back in Buenos Aires much earlier than they desired after putting up 180 goalless, frustrating minutes against Monterrey and Inter. Once again, Boca’s best efforts fell well short of expectations and of what the incredible support from the stands merited.

When it most counts, whether under Fenando Gago or under Miguel Ángel Russo, against Auckland, Alianza or River, the team looks lost, distracted, unable to focus on the goal at hand, fundamentally unsure of what needs to be done to deliver. This goes down then as another missed chance for this befuddled football club and a signal of just how far the glory days of the early 2000s remain for president Juan Román Riquelme, whose administration continues to fail to put out a coherent sporting product and give these world-acclaimed fans a team to match their passion.