AEL goalkeeper and football cult hero Guillermo Ochoa was given a hero’s farewell after playing the final quarter of an hour of Mexico’s 3-0 victory over the Czech Republic at the Azteca Stadium, which saw his team finish top of the World Cup’s Group A with a perfect record and advance to the competition’s last 32.

His appearance on Thursday morning ensured that he has featured at four separate World Cups, having played every minute of Mexico’s campaigns in Brazil in 2014, in Russia in 2018, and in Qatar in 2022. In doing so, he joins an elite club of goalkeepers, including Gianluigi Buffon, Fernando Muslera, and Hugo Lloris.

Having been named in the squads for the 2006 World Cup, in Germany, and the 2010 World Cup, in South Africa, he had already entered a club of just three footballers to be named in six World Cup squads. The only other two men to do so are Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, though Ochoa had to wait until 2014 to play a minute of World Cup football.

Thursday morning’s appearance at the Azteca – his 153rd and final for the Mexican national team – was one of the simpler affairs of his long and storied career, with a lacklustre Czech Republic side already well beaten by the time he entered the arena.

The Azteca crowd had been demanding that he be introduced to the action from the moment Julian Quinones put Mexico two goals to the good at the end of a slapstick goalmouth scramble, with chants of “Memo”, his nickname, and “Ochoa” ringing around all sides of the bowl.

Ochoa was on the pitch when Alvaro Fidalgo swept home Mexico’s third and final goal of the morning, and after the final whistle, was keen to thank the Mexican fans for their career-long adoration.

“It’s the most beautiful thing, that they recognise your effort. I always try to do it for them, to leave a mark. I think today was a perfect ending. I felt the affection in the stadium where I was born, the stadium where I grew up,” he said.

He added, “if they had asked me to make a script a couple of years ago, I do not think it would have turned out better than it did tonight”.

Barring a goalkeeping emergency, Ochoa will likely never play for Mexico’s national team again, with the 40-year-old now behind Chivas Guadalajara’s 26-year-old Paul Rangel in the pecking order, and he acknowledged this in an interview with Mexican television.

“My first game Azteca. My last game, Azteca. It has been a beautiful final chapter of my career,” he said.

Given this to be the case, he was thrown aloft by his teammates to mark the occasion, before disappearing down the Azteca tunnel for the final time.

He had signed for Limassol’s AEL last summer, and played 26 games across all competitions last season, keeping six clean sheets as they finished in eighth place in the first division.