Hormiga and the Empty Chair at CAR: A Missed Connection on Márquez's First Day

At two in the afternoon, Mexico central time, a car stopped at the gate of the Centro de Alto Rendimiento. Inside the dressing room, nineteen chairs already had their occupants. The twentieth chair stayed empty, and on its seat someone had laid out a training towel, its folds still crisp.

In Athens, a flight left late. In Washington, one passenger missed his connection. In Mexico City, a chair waited.

Armando "Hormiga" González, the forward who plays for Olympiacos, was the last man to walk into the first Mexico camp of Rafael Márquez's new cycle. His first flight was delayed. Customs took longer than expected. He missed the onward connection, spent a night in Washington, and had to redraw his route back to Mexico City. When he finally arrived, the clocks had just passed early afternoon on Tuesday.

That is all that has been recorded. A broken journey, a route drawn twice, and a player who reached the new house of El Tri later than anyone else.

This camp carries its own mark. It is the first gathering under Rafael Márquez, the man who once stood in the middle of Mexico's defence like a slab of stone. He wore the national shirt 147 times and is the only player in history to captain a nation at five World Cups, from 2026 to 2026. That armband no longer sits on his forearm. He now stands on the other side of the technical line, where every eye turns and every decision is dissected.

He needs to rebuild an order, test new pieces, and wire the lines of communication between himself and his players before the team meets Colombia on American soil.

The friendly will be played in Baltimore. Mexico face Colombia, a cross-confederation meeting between CONCACAF and CONMEBOL. Colombia carry the rhythm of South American football: slow in their own half, explosive when space opens, always ready to punish a back line that has not yet frozen its shape. For Mexico, this match is not counted in points. It is counted in order.

And order begins in training.

Under the plan, the squad will hold its final sessions before flying to the United States. González is expected to train fully with the group on Wednesday. On Thursday, the whole team departs. That means the forward walks into the dressing room of a new coaching staff, learns new movement patterns, memorises new pressing triggers, and absorbs new set-piece roles, all within a handful of hours.

In modern football, a player returning from Europe to a national camp carries more than a bag. He carries jet lag. He carries his club minutes. He carries a touch that is either still warm or already cold. The Athens to Mexico City route runs more than eleven thousand kilometres, and with connections a man can sit inside a metal tube for over twenty hours. The human body was not designed for that.

A lost session is not measured in minutes, but in rhythm. The rhythm of a front three when all three surge together. The rhythm of a defender who knows when to step up. The rhythm of a midfielder who understands where his teammate will appear before he turns his head. That rhythm is not written in a coaching manual. It only forms when people stand beside each other, day after day, on the same grass.

Drawing on my experience of watching matches, I have noticed that a new team usually wins or loses inside that invisible stretch of time, the stretch between first hearing each other's names and first understanding each other.

González arrived last. The question, then, is what the coaching staff will do with those scarce hours.

The staff could hand him individual work: extra running, ball familiarisation, video review. They could also throw him straight into the final tactical session and trust that professional instinct will compensate. Or they could save him for matches further ahead and give him only a few closing minutes in Baltimore.

Each choice tells a different story about how Márquez builds a team. A man who trusts the system pushes the player into the last session. A man who trusts people gives him individual work. A man who trusts time saves him for another day.

There is one small detail I always watch in camps like this: where the late arrival stands in the split-squad drill. If he is placed in the main group, the staff already intends to use him. If he stands with the reserves, the answer was written before kickoff.

Here I want to turn down another road.

When a player arrives late, reporters often ask whether he lacks professionalism. That is a dangerous question, because it turns a logistical event into a moral verdict. A delayed flight cannot be read as a behaviour. A customs procedure cannot be read as a choice. A night in Washington cannot be read as a sin.

The counterintuitive part is this: González's mishap exposes no weakness in a player; it exposes a blind spot in an entire scheduling system. International football has grown so dense that a Europe-based player returning for a friendly may trade away two days of travel, one skewed night of sleep, and a tactical session. Nobody designed this for human beings. It was designed for broadcast schedules.

And when the system produces a logistics failure, it usually lets the player pay for it with his image.

I once wrote about a comeback defeat on Russian soil, the day Japan led Belgium by two goals and lost by three. A young colleague shouted into the microphone that history was being written. I stayed silent. After the match, I took the blame for him in the editorial meeting, though the mistake was not his. I learned one thing: never turn a moment into a sentence. "That night on Russian soil, I understood the tide pulls back only to return a sorrow."

For González, the tide pulled back and returned an empty chair.

Some will look at the squad list and see only a name that arrived late. I look at it and see a broken flight, a night in Washington, a towel still folded. "In the stands, I set my heartbeat to the drums, so nobody sees that I am old." Football does not live on what is recorded, but on what is left behind.

On Wednesday, González will walk onto the training pitch. On Thursday, the team flies to Baltimore. Somewhere between those two days, a player will try to compress a whole week into a few hours.

When the referee blows for kickoff in Baltimore, people will look at the starting eleven. I will look at the twentieth chair. If it stands empty again, I will know Márquez chose time over the man. If it has an occupant, I will know a delayed flight can still lose to trust.

"Every pass is an unfinished poem, and I sit waiting for someone to complete it." Today, the one who completes it stepped out of a car at the CAR gate, exactly one day later than the other nineteen. The poem is still unfinished.