Jorge Célico considers that Gustavo Alfaro is a brave coach because he excluded the ‘sacred cows’ from the National Team

Argentina’s Jorge Célico, Ecuador’s U-20 coach, affirmed this Wednesday that his compatriot Gustavo Alfaro, technical director of the senior national team, is brave to summon new players, many of them young people who previously had no opportunities, over renowned players who they used to be seen as untouchable in the Tricolor.

With his statements to the Quito radio Sports area, Célico gave a boost to his senior team colleague after the historic away win against Chile (0-2) in Santiago on Tuesday night.

“There are sacred cows that many do not dare to touch and that is why I say that it requires great courage that of Professor Alfaro. He also met a great generation of 19, 20, 21, 22 year old players of a really very good level ”, explained the coach who led the youth Tricolor to the title of the South American U-20 Championship Chile 2019 and to third place in the World Cup Poland 2019 of the same category.

Célico affirmed that with the process that Alfaro has been carrying out since October 2020, several young under-23s are being given the opportunity over already established elements.

He also defended that Alfaro be a balanced technical director despite the fact that a good part of the national sports press has called him defensive and even speculative.

“It is rational to raise the parties like this. And it has thrown all that to the ground, the team attacks much more than other teams, it has the ball more than other teams, “he said.

“I do not know why we have become very intolerant of an adverse result or a bad performance, we must all together understand that it is not easy. We are competing with the best in America ”, stressed the director of the training sessions in Ecuador.

“Do not forget that we are a country looked down on our shoulders many times at the international level. It seems to me that it has to do with the publicity of Ecuadorian soccer that we are going to gain as the achievements that we are reaping. Of that sub-20 the majority (of young people) went abroad ”, he stressed.

The hardest moment that Alfaro endured at the command of the Tricolor in the second half of 2021 was last October after he planted a formation with a line of three in the background in the games against Paraguay in Quito (2-0 win), Uruguay in Montevideo (defeat 1-0) and Venezuela in Caracas (defeat 2-1). This last commitment, even improvising the central defender Robert Arboleda in the left-back position.

For this reason, Alfaro, after obtaining the victory in Chile, let off steam by reminding his opponents that his coaching staff and players endured “all kinds of criticism, questioning, cloth of judgments” as they have been “in all this time.” (D)