Huiqui explains Cruz Azul's loss to Monterrey: only three hours of training all week

A week with barely three hours of training rarely ends well, and Cruz Azul paid the price this Saturday at Estadio BBVA, falling 1-0 to Monterrey. The blow comes on the heels of another defeat, the one suffered days earlier against Inter Miami in the Campeones Cup, leaving Joel Huiqui with the task of explaining how so many setbacks have piled up in such a short span.

The coach himself did not hide the scale of the problem in his postgame press conference. He described a "complex" week and laid out the numbers to illustrate it.

We had, I'd estimate today, three hours of training all week, and that seems like a lot to me. So I think today is a tough blow for us too. It's hard to process, but I insist that our goal remains much higher stillJoel Huiqui

How do you prepare for a match against Rayados with so little time to work on the field? Huiqui explained that the club is used to a different rhythm, with full weeks of planning, and that the trip to Miami threw that entire dynamic off.

We're used to designing complete work weeks, and honestly, we didn't have a very comfortable week to prepare for the previous match in Miami and this one. At the end of the day, as I mentioned in the last press conference, it's never been an excuse for us, but within that context we do try to solve complex situations. Unfortunately, a lot of things are out of our hands: the flight schedule, the timing, the travel, the match itselfJoel Huiqui

The risk of playing out of the back

Beyond the physical toll, the result against Monterrey had a specific origin: a bad combination between Jeremy Marquez and Kevin Mier while playing out from the back that ended in the winning goal for the home side. For Huiqui, it wasn't an isolated mistake but a direct consequence of how his team approaches the game.

The coach made clear that this kind of error, when it happens between center backs and the goalkeeper, almost always ends up in the opponent's net, because those plays unfold in such compromising areas of the field. Even so, he defended the playing model Cruz Azul practices, built on constructing from the back and always looking for a clean way out through short passing.

Mistakes always go straight to the scoreboard when they come from a bad combination between our center backs, defenders and goalkeepers. It's normal that when there's an error, it shows up much more. It's part of the risk, and part of our model is always trying to find passing lanes, to keep playing, to try to always have that ball progression. There are times when it doesn't work, and today, well, the risk of building play so far back, and what happened, well, it was an accidentJoel Huiqui

The word "accident" sums up Huiqui's stance well: he has no plans to change the team's identity because of one specific play, even though that very play cost them the three points against Rayados. The challenge now is to get back to a normal training rhythm and absorb the blow without losing sight of the goal that, as the coach himself insisted, remains far above the current rough patch.