We argentinians repeated than nonsense for a long time, we struggled to qualify to the 1986 World Cup and ended up winning it, so everytime that we struggled we used to say we would have a great world cup just like in 1986, it never worked out that way though. We ended up winning our third cup after a great qualifier and arriving in our best form possible. If you don’t have a good world cup cycle, chances are you’ll also do bad at the world cup and viceversa. Obviously things like 1986 or 2002 can happen, but they’re not the norm nor desireable.

Tabarez lost all his matches against Brazil with embarrassing results. It turns out Uruguay had good players all along and should have been playing these kind of matches as a big team. Yes, this Brazil is weak, but results against Brazil and Argentina during Tabarez tenure were embarrassing, the guy was phobic when he had to face the other south american giants.

Sadly Copa America is still 9 months away, because if it were played today I have no doubt Argentina would be the number one candidate and most likely to win the cup by a reasonable margin.