OMNISPORT

Mexico head coach Juan Carlos Osorio found a novel way of explaining the potential gulf between his players and Germany's in Thursday's Confederations Cup semi-final.

CONCACAF champions Mexico take on Joachim Low's 2014 World Cup winners at Sochi's Fisht Stadium, with the make-up of their opponents' squad having proved one of the talking points of the tournament.

Low left a host of star names including Mesut Ozil, Toni Kroos and Thomas Muller out of his squad, giving them a close-season off before next year's World Cup and bringing younger and fringe members of his playing group to the fore.

This re-imagined Germany have excelled in Russia, topping their group as the likes of stand-in captain Julian Draxler and Bayern Munich utility man Joshua Kimmich have earned rave reviews.

But Osorio told a pre-match news conference any labels of youthful naivety would be ill-attached to a Germany squad he analogously compared to prodigious medical students.

"You have mentioned that Germany is a very young squad; they have only one player who is 20, [Benjamin] Henrichs, who plays with Javier [Hernandez] at Bayer Leverkusen," said Osorio, who arrived at his briefing with a wedge of printed notes to assist him in making his point.

"There are two who are 21, [Niklas] Sule and [Julian] Brandt, who are the same age as [Mexico winger] Hirving Lozano.

"Being young and having experience are two different things. For example, you can go to university when you are 30 years old and become a heart surgeon and have no experience at all.

"But you can study when you are 21 and then work in an emergency room in a huge city and have surgeries 10 times a weekend. When you are 22 or 23, you will have much more experience in practice than the heart surgeon who is 30 years old.

"The same happens in football. Maybe their advantage is in the group between 22 and 25 years old – [Leon] Goretzka, Kimmich, [Matthias] Ginter, [Emre] Can and Draxler.

"The fact is they are 23 years old, they have played in national cups, they have won the Bundesliga, played in UEFA tournaments and played in the Champions League."

The 56-year-old former Atletico Nacional boss added: "That's the difference. It doesn't matter if they are young or not. What really matters is how much experience they have, although they're young.

"We have the possibility to play against them and we can properly represent Mexican football, CONCACAF football and a country who really wants to learn from the big countries like Germany."

Bayer Leverkusen striker Hernandez is well-versed in his German opponents, if not in the intricately studied manner of his boss.

"It doesn't matter if you know them or not," he said. "We know some of their qualities, some of the ways we can make them suffer but we have to focus on our ways and our system.

"It doesn't just matter 100 per cent what they are going to do. We want to do our best to try to stop them, make a lot of danger and win the match."