Almada, 'Chiquito' Sánchez and the Art of Taking the Heat: When a Coach Builds a Shield for His Old Charge

In the second half of América's match against Necaxa in Apertura 2026, I focused on a passage of play that never appeared in the summary statistics. In the 78th minute, with the score at 2-2, Erick 'Chiquito' Sánchez drove at Danny Leyva on the edge of the opposition box, forcing the Necaxa midfielder to pass backwards off-balance. The ball reached Miguel Borja three seconds later. The goal that sealed the 3-2 result began with a defensive action sixty metres from América's own goal. That passage is why I reopened the tape fourteen times in a row. Not because it was beautiful. But because it is the kind of evidence public opinion typically ignores once a player has been labelled a disappointment. Guillermo Almada, América's Uruguayan head coach, knows this precisely. After the match, he said Sánchez was one of his most trusted men, that the player's value lay 'not only in the defensive zone but also in the offensive contribution'. He said it at the moment of maximum pressure on his former charge — when a section of América's fanbase is not fully convinced, and social media never forgets. At 59, after all these years writing in a country of redacted contracts, I recognise one thing: when a coach chooses to defend a player before the media, he is doing two jobs at once. One is a message to the pitch. The two is a message into the dressing room. And the second usually matters more than the first. To understand why, one must read Erick Sánchez's file not as a criticised midfielder, but as a deliberately chosen link. Sánchez arrived at América after years at Pachuca, and that is no coincidence. The same coach, the same system, the same view of what an energetic central midfielder should do. Almada brought to his new club a player whose reactions under pressure, in transition, across every phase of a match he already knew exactly. This is the hiring pattern agents call 'buying by the coach' — you are not spending on an unknown, you are spending on a relationship already tested. Integration risk is low. The price story, however, is another matter, and I will not guess when the financial file is not on the table. What stands out is how Almada uses the player. Sánchez started six of América's matches so far in the Apertura — meaning he is not a rotation option but a structural piece. In the history of Mexico's Apertura and Clausura tournaments, a newly arrived central midfielder starting six consecutive matches early in the campaign is almost always a fixed slot in the system, not an experiment. But that also makes the pressure heavier — people do not criticise rotation players. They criticise the man expected to change results. I spent an afternoon unpicking the statistical line from the Necaxa match. Eighty per cent pass completion. Five ball recoveries. Four defensive contributions. The first figure is an acceptable level for a central midfielder at this level. The other three are high. In other words, this was a performance built on volume of work, not on flashes of brilliance. And that is where the story starts having two sides. When I cross-referenced this with duel win rates, the picture was less flattering than Almada's claim. Sánchez won four of nine ground duels — around forty-four per cent. He won two of five aerial duels — forty per cent. Both sit below the fifty per cent break-even line any central midfielder needs to clear to hold the core of a match. This is where my investigative experience counsels caution in both directions. On one hand, these numbers are genuine red flags — they suggest that in physically contested phases against combative opponents, Sánchez's effectiveness may dip, and that direct, physical sides could use this to neutralise him. On the other, I must concede: this is one match's data. A single data point cannot establish a pattern. I have seen too many cases where one game was turned into evidence for an entire season — and I do not want to be one of those people. What is striking is that Almada himself, for all his praise, inadvertently revealed how he sees the player's role. He did not say Sánchez is the man who makes the difference on the ball. He said the player contributes on both ends. That is the language of a connector and a presser, not a match-winner through individual quality. And when a coach chooses that language, he is implicitly conceding that his player needs to be placed in the right system to thrive. In all my years digging through files in England and Europe, I learned that how a coach defends a player says more than the defence itself. At West Ham in 2026, I watched a sporting director publicly praise a signing days before that contract was terminated in silence. Silence, once again, spoke louder than the surviving words. Here it is the opposite — Almada speaks a great deal, and that itself is a signal. So what is the valuable truth behind this defence? First, the public pressure in this case is individual, not collective. América are winning. Nobody criticises the results. The dissatisfaction points at one man, which means this story cannot be resolved by the league table. A winning team can still cultivate a player whose reputation is torn apart for weeks. I have sat in stands and heard boos aimed at a player right after his team scored three goals. Crowd football runs on a different logic from scoreboard football. Second, Sánchez playing every match means he carries a significant physical load in a short tournament like the Apertura. In Mexico, the Apertura and Clausura are far shorter than a European season, but the fixture density is high. A player starting continuously in central midfield, inside a high-pressing system — as the passage that produced Borja's goal shows — will accumulate fatigue without much opportunity to rest. Injury risk is not on today's table, but it does not vanish because we do not mention it. Third, and this is the consequence I consider largest, Almada's defence creates a two-way dependency. When a coach publicly calls a player 'trusted' before the media, he places his own professional credibility in the same place as that player's form. If Sánchez keeps getting booed, part of the pressure automatically shifts to Almada. That is the fixed price of loyalty — and anyone who has worked long enough knows it is calculated in advance, not by accident. This is where I want to offer a hypothesis against myself, because I do not want to be boxed into the role of the investigator who always sees a conspiracy behind every coach's answer. The innocent hypothesis is simple: Almada is telling the truth. He genuinely believes Sánchez played well. The figures I call weaknesses — forty-four per cent ground duels, forty per cent aerial — may not say everything, because winning a duel is not the same as pressing effectively. A midfielder can lose most direct contests yet be the man who forces an opponent to pass half a second earlier, ruining an entire build-up. Duel statistics cannot measure that. And Borja's goal — born from exactly such a press — is evidence that does not live in a spreadsheet. Football always has a portion of data the cameras do not record, and those sitting in the dugout see it daily on the training pitch while those on social media do not. I do not have enough data to declare which hypothesis is true. And I will not pretend I do. What I can state is that this story is running exactly the way hundreds of similar stories run in every league I have followed. A player targeted by a section of the support. A coach choosing the moment of peak pressure to defend him. Local media splitting into two camps. Analysis pieces appearing densely within forty-eight hours, then quietening, then flaring again after the next defeat. Within that cycle, the real data usually gets left behind, because real data does not make headlines like a lost duel or a misplaced pass. One thing I noticed rereading comments from América fans: they describe their dissatisfaction as though Sánchez had caused dropped points before. But this article nowhere names a specific moment that triggered the anger. That is a noteworthy signal, because it suggests the debate over this player may have run longer than one match — possibly predating the Necaxa game, even predating his first competitive appearance in América colours. When criticism needs no specific event to exist, one should be careful with the assumption that a few better passes will make it disappear. I have seen something similar in an entirely different setting. In 2026, in Doha, when I asked about labour contracts during the construction of the Lusail stadium, my press credentials were withdrawn for forty-eight hours. Nobody in the press conference stood up with me. But when I went myself to the workers' housing and sat recording fourteen testimonies, I learned that majority silence does not mean the majority does not know. It only means they are waiting to see who will turn the light on first. In football, the one who turns the light on first is usually the coach — the only person with enough inside information and enough professional responsibility to make a public judgement. Almada turned the light on. The remaining question is where that light is pointing. If Sánchez plays well in the next three matches, the story will be retold as one about the steadfastness of a coach who understood his player better than the majority. If he plays poorly, it becomes a lesson about a manager who should not have staked his credibility on a doubted player. The same dataset, two entirely opposite tellings — and what decides is not the number but the next result. That is the precarious nature of this profession, and also why I keep the habit of saving every original quote with its verification date and time. I do not need to know how the story will be told next month. I only need to know who said what today, when, and in what situation. Others may choose the story by the result. I choose to preserve the facts in sequence. One final point on the wider context. América are a club at the top tier of Mexican football — one of Liga MX's most storied and powerful institutions. At such a club, the default expectation is near-perfection, and the tolerance window for a new signing is brutally shortened. At a mid-table side, the same Sánchez performance would barely be mentioned. But at América, every misplaced pass is worth a social-media post. That is not injustice; it is the price of wearing the shirt of a club whose every match is examined under a magnifying glass. Necaxa, the opponent in this match, sit lower in that order. A 3-2 result broadly fits the expected hierarchy, though the narrow margin hints at friction. Conceding twice to a side rated lower is a faint defensive signal, but I lack process data to know whether it reflects a systemic problem or just a slack moment in a high-intensity match. Without xG or defensive-structure data, I refuse to draw a conclusion from a single frame. What I know for certain is simply this: a coach chose a player, placed him at the core of his system, brought him to a bigger club, and is now standing up to absorb part of the pressure for him. This is the kind of decision football history remembers in two ways — as a shrewd act of loyalty, or as a mistake defended too long. In most cases it is both, depending on which match of the season you choose as your vantage point. If you force me to pick one direction to track, I will pick the quieter one: whether Sánchez keeps his starting slot in matches against physically direct opponents. That is where the duel data will temporarily stop arguing and start speaking. A coach's loyalty cannot help a midfielder win an aerial ball. Only fitness and positioning can do that. And if by then Sánchez is still there, still playing, still losing most duels yet still trusted, then we will have a clearer answer to the question Almada's statement has not yet answered: is América in possession of a good midfielder, or of a belief sustained by the credibility of the man in the dugout? That question is nothing new. But it always needs someone patient enough to recount every passage, rather than trust the last social-media post of the previous night. I once told myself I would do that work as long as I hold a pen. Today, after a pressing action in the 78th minute at América's stadium, I find I am still keeping that promise.