“Darcy Norman, a former performance director for U.S. Soccer and the German Football Association, is talking about the mindset required when a team steps into the Azteca. ‘It is a bit like the Shackleton experiment,’ says Norman. Ernest Shackleton, an Irish explorer, is remembered mainly for the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It aimed to be the first to cross Antarctica, but his vessel, Endurance, was trapped and lost in sea ice. This turned a great explorer into a great survivor, as the voyage went down in legend for the extraordinary escape by those on board and a heroically safe return. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)