Team profile: Honduras

Carlo Costly and Jerry Bengtson, at 6 feet 3 and 6 feet 2, respectively, create a formidable duo up front for Honduras. The pair scored five of the team’s nine goals in the final round of World Cup qualifying matches, and they have plenty to prove. The 31-year-old Costly missed the 2010 World Cup because of injury and watched as his team failed to win a match. Bengston, 27, hadn’t yet been called up to the national team in 2010 and will make his World Cup debut in Brazil.

Honduras made a fine showing and inexplicably failed to advance out of the first round in its first World Cup appearance in 1982. Los Catrachos played two tough draws with host Spain and Northern Ireland — the two teams that would advance out of their group — but failed to score against Yugoslavia and lost 1–0 to an 88th-minute penalty kick.

Honduras is easily the most underrated team to come out of Latin America, despite having qualified fairly comfortably out of the CONCACAF region. They will have a tough time of it, with the Swiss, France and Ecuador in the same group.

Costly and Bengtson are quite a force up front, and the Hondurans have nothing to lose. They will play with a chip on their shoulders and came out of qualifying with big wins against World Cup qualifiers the United States, Mexico and Costa Rica, so others in their group would be wise not to take Los Catrachos lightly. 

Honduran players Víctor Bermúdez, Roger Espinoza and Andy Najar met last month in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Partners of the Americas and other organizations in hopes of finding ways to use youth soccer to combat gang violence in Honduras. The U.N. says the country has the highest murder rate in the world (91 in 100,000 annually), and a Mexican think tank recently said that number more than doubles in the city of San Pedro Sula, according to The Washington Post. "I feel it is a dream to give back, to show the values I learned to go on the right path. Because I identify with those children," Bermúdez told the Post. "Those are the children I once was.”