Mexico’s future in the World Cup?

MOSCOW – Despite two victories in two games, Mexico’s future in the World Cup is nearly as unsettled as it was when the team landed in Russia three weeks ago.

Heading into its final group-stage game with Sweden on Wednesday, Mexico is facing several scenarios that could send it to the knockout rounds as Group F champion or send it home. Here are the possibilities:

With a win or draw vs. Sweden, Mexico wins the group and advances to the second round.

Even with a loss to Sweden, Mexico still goes through if Germany fails to beat South Korea. Under that scenario Sweden would be the group champion and Mexico the group runner-up.

If Sweden and Germany both win – meaning Mexico loses – all three teams will finish group play with six points and goal differential will determine who advances. If Germany and Sweden’s margin of victory is two or more goals each that would send Mexico home.

If Germany and Sweden both win 1-0, head-to-head results would break the tie atop the table, again sending the two European teams on and Mexico home, based on goals scored in head-to-head games between the three. In fact, if both Sweden and Germany win by one goal, the only way Mexico advances over Germany is if its game with Sweden has more total goals than Germany-south Korea.

Mexico can make all the scribbling irrelevant, by simply failing to lose.

“Against Sweden, it will be very intense,” defender Miguel Layun said. “If they score first, they know how to defend. Hopefully we can be the ones who score first.”

Through the first 32 matches of this World Cup, there have been 85 goals scored, an average of 2.7 per game, matching the 2014 tournament in Brazil.

But it’s not so much the number of goals that have been scored as it is how and when some of them happened that’s surprising, with 12 coming in stoppage time, either at the end of the first half or at the end of the game, and 13 coming on penalty kicks, one more than were scored from the spot in all 64 games of the 2014 World Cup.

The move was the talk of the race. Did Martin Truex Jr. and his crew chief Cole Pearn use a secret code to bluff the rest of the field at the Toyota/save Mart 350 into thinking they would make a second pit stop in the third and decisive stage Sunday? Did “pit” really mean “don’t pit”? Did “don’t pit” mean something entirely different?

Truex, who was initially called over race radio into to pit row by Pearn, instead kept driving and rode the move to his second victory at Sonoma Raceway in a win that was as much guts and strategy as it was driving. And it was a move that inspired all kinds of chatter about gamesmanship and radio ploys.

But turns out there was no secret code, no attempt to throw other teams off their track. They simply decided – on the fly – to keep driving.

“I called him off at the last minute,” Pearn said. “I’d like to say we are smart enough to use codes but we’re not.”

And with that, Truex, the reigning NASCAR Cup Series champ, drove away with the win at the Toyota/save Mart 350 Sunday. And with the decision not to make that key second stop, he made it look easy.

“No codes,” he said. “It’s a recipe for disaster because we’ve all seen it before, guys have codes and then they call it out and the guy is like, ‘What the hell? I thought it was the other way’ and they screw up.”

So secret code or no, it was a move that baffled and snookered just about every other team on the track. And the brains behind the call? He is the guy who got brained by a 4x4 on Thursday building a kids’ tree house at his home in Denver.

The man behind what might from this moment on be called “The Call” celebrated on victory row sporting a massive gash on his forehead courtesy of an accident the required multiple stitches and “KO’D” him.

“He wouldn’t have made that call if he wouldn’t have been hit in the head,” Joe Garone, team president of Furniture Row Racing quipped.

The remark got hearty laughs but there was some truth there. The call to keep his driver out looked like a stroke of genius when the team was bathing in beer after the race, but had a

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