Jiménez and the set-piece giants: what to watch as the World Cup's second round opens

Raúl Jiménez trotted onto the field at the Estadio Azteca on 14 June 2026 carrying a résumé few strikers his age would envy: a Premier League stint cut short by a fractured skull, a Mexican league homecoming that doubled as a question mark, and a national-team place reclaimed only because his form refused to stay quiet. Two matches into Mexico's World Cup campaign, the question is whether the 35-year-old is making the most of what he has called a second chance, or whether El Tri's tournament will be remembered for the striker who timed his run, not the federation that kept the door open. As the second round of group play begins on 18 June 2026, the broader story is a tactical one — set-piece supremacy — and Jiménez sits squarely inside it.

The bracket has thinned quickly. Group A and Group B, two of the tournament's most scrutinised pools, tip into matchday three with qualification math reduced to a handful of permutations. Mexico need only a draw to advance; the chasing pack does not have that luxury. The schedule, the stakes, and the dead-ball economy that has come to define this World Cup all converge on the next 96 hours of football.

Jiménez's late bloom and the federation's bet

Jiménez's path back to the starting XI is a case study in patience. The skull fracture sustained at Arsenal in 2020 effectively ended his Premier League prime, and his return to Club América in 2024 was widely framed as a graceful wind-down. Instead he scored at a clip that left manager Javier Aguirre with a public selection headache. Through two group-stage matches at the 2026 tournament, Jiménez has been the focal point of Mexico's attack — a target for crosses, a reference point for cutbacks, and, crucially, a set-piece target whose aerial duel winning rate has tracked above his career average. CBS Sports' Day 8 preview explicitly identifies him as a player "making the most of his second chance," a framing the Mexican federation has been careful not to overclaim given the years of scrutiny around its striker pipeline.

The nuance is that Jiménez is not a charity case. He leads El Tri's expected-goals per 90 at the tournament, and his hold-up play has been the platform on which Mexico's wingers have generated their best chances. Critics who argued that his return to Liga MX had dulled his edge have, two games in, been answered by the tape rather than by federation rhetoric. The remaining test is whether the 35-year-old body holds through a knockout bracket that will compress every recovery window.

A tournament of dead balls

The second-round story that genuinely belongs to the coaches, not the federations, is the dominance of set pieces. Roughly a third of all goals at the 2026 World Cup entering matchday three have come from dead-ball situations — corners, free kicks, and the long throw-ins that have become their own subgenre. The CBS Sports preview characterises the matchups in Groups A and B as a "battle of set-piece giants," and the label is not promotional fluff. Three of the four teams still in realistic contention to top their groups have scored at least 40% of their goals from set plays, a figure that would have looked freakish four years ago.

The tactical explanation is straightforward. Tournament football rewards rest-defence and territorial control; open-play chance quality compresses as opponents sit deeper; and set pieces offer the one moment in a match when a defence's structure is, by rule, broken. Teams with a designated aerial winner, a rehearsed routine, and a runner willing to block at the near post have begun to look like they are playing a different sport. The structural shift has implications for the bracket: a side that concedes few set pieces and scores them at the average rate has effectively banked a goal and a half per match before a single open-play sequence resolves.

What to watch in Groups A and B

Three fixtures will settle the pool. Mexico's closing group match offers the most direct read on El Tri's ceiling: a win secures first place and a theoretically softer round-of-32 draw; a draw still advances but at the cost of meeting a group winner in the next round. The chasing side in Group A — pressed by a physical, set-piece-oriented opponent — has to win and to do so without conceding first, because the tournament's first-choice goalkeeper is suspended for yellow-card accumulation per FIFA's standing rules.

Group B's picture is messier and more interesting. Two of the three teams still alive are separated by goal difference alone, and both have shown the same tendency: a flat first half followed by an aggressive second-half press that wins the set-piece count and, more often than not, the match. The CBS preview flags the head-to-head set-piece duel as the single most predictive indicator for the group. Coaches on both benches know it; both have rehearsed routines designed to win the second ball rather than the first contact, an approach that travels well in tournament football where territory is conceded by design.

Stakes beyond the bracket

The wider stakes are familiar but worth restating. For Mexico, a second-round exit would be a fourth consecutive elimination at this stage and would harden a domestic narrative that the federation's youth investment has not produced a successor to the Chicharito-Jiménez generation. For the chasing teams in Group A and Group B, the difference between advancing as a group winner and a runner-up is a knockout tie against a side that, on paper, has no business beating them. For Jiménez personally, the tournament is a referendum on whether a player written off in 2021 still belongs in a World Cup starting XI in 2026 — and on whether the Mexican federation was right to keep the door open for him rather than accelerate the rebuild.

Two things remain genuinely uncertain at the close of matchday two. The first is the durability of the set-piece trend: dead-ball goals tend to regress toward open-play baselines as knockout rounds stretch preparation windows, and the next round of fixtures is the first sample large enough to test whether the pattern holds. The second is Jiménez's workload management. Aguirre has rotated sparingly so far, and the bracket does him no favours; a player whose value is physical will be asked to give more of those physical minutes, and the tournament's injury ledger is unforgiving. The answer to both questions begins on 18 June 2026 and runs, for the relevant teams, until the final whistle in early July.

Desk note: Wire previews of tournament matchdays tend to flatten the tactical story into individual stars. The more durable frame this World Cup is offering — set pieces as the structural advantage — sits underneath the personality coverage, and is the line Monexus is following into the knockout rounds.