04/13
2013

Game Nine: v Atletico de Rafaela

Argentinos Juniors  0  Atletico de Rafaela  0

Game Nine and the first one I’ve attended this season. OK, I  was present last month at that scintillating 3-0 victory by Leo Messi and his gang over Venezuela in the World Cup qualifiers and I did have my butt frozen to the seat at a bitterly cold Craven Cottage in February to see Dimitar Berbatov break sweat, almost, as he blasted a volley into the Stoke City net.

Then there was our regular visit to the West Ham shop in the Boleyn Ground to stock up on Hammers pencil cases, slippers and the like. We also paid a non-matchday visit to Anfield and trekked around the very impressive National Football Museum in Manchester.

The Kop...He who dares!

So I’ve not exactly been lacking football. It’s just that this is where it’s truly at. The bread and butter, the nitty-gritty, the bare bones of live, league football action on the terraces on a chilly Friday evening whinging and moaning about the quality of the play, the referee, the price of soft drinks and swimming in a cacophony of foul language.

The game was truly awful. It started badly and steadily deteriorated. The first-half ended with barely a shot on goal and the fans reduced to celebrating the one corner. The atmosphere was lively among the home fans. The huge away stand opposite hosted a mere straggle of Rafaela supporters, like Wigan followers at a Wembley final or Thatcher diehards at a miners’ meeting.

We consoled ourselves at the break that the second half couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first. Could it??!

It could and it was. Passes went astray, goalkeepers blasted their kicks into touch, defenders collided with one another. “What is this? Anti-football?” shouted one wit from the stands.

Then the home side brought on their little number 17. Diego Maradona was short, Kevin Keegan wore stacked heels and a puffed up mullet to hide his lack of stature and plenty of other quality players feel themselves fortunate if their eyeballs are on a level with Peter Crouch’s nipples when marking him for corners. But Daniel Villalva was tiny, a pocket-sized 152cm. I don’t know if he’s finished growing. I hope for his sake he hasn’t. His headers were met with ironic cheers, he scurried and hurried around the ankles of the Rafaela defenders, on one occasion nipping in below their field of vision to steal the ball and hit a rare strike on goal.

But the high point for me, on an occasion when the bar had been forced dangerously low, was when one disgruntled fan threw his false teeth over the railings at a Rafaela player about to take a throw-in.

Dangerous or disgusting weapon?

It landed in a pink plop at his feet, the saliva glistening in the creamy glow of the floodlights.

To what depths of frustration must a fan have sunk to feel moved to rip his plate from his mouth and fling it angrily out of reach? Did he have no coins or lighter or  half-eaten sandwich? Did he not consider the consequences? Would he now have to sit out the Sunday afternoon asado, trying to suck molten beef fat through a straw while the rest of the family munched their mandibles on prime cuts of bife de chorizo?

One of the Argentinos trainers picked it up, realised what he was handling and flung it disgustedly back into the crowd. It was thrown back on to the pitch.

What if the toothless one were arrested? For I’m sure there’s a sub-clause of a paragraph somewhere in the Argentine constitution that forbids the flinging of dental accessories onto the field of play. Who knows where it could all end? Would disgruntled fans next start tossing artificial limbs, colostomy bags and wigs onto the pitch?

“Mr Lopez, how to you plead to the charge of throwing your dental plate onto the pitch?”

“Strnngh grt.”

“Sorry Mr Lopez. I didn’t get that.”

“Strnngh grt.”

Goalmouth action at the Cottage.

“I’m afraid, your honour, that my client is totally unintelligible without his dental plate in place. But in his defence, he felt moved to protest in the strongest possible terms at the failure of his side to string more than two passes together. He was frustrated that having spent 70pesos of his hard-earned cash, he didn’t see his team mount a single coherent, threatening attack on the opponents’ goal and was particularly angry at the cynical delaying tactics employed by the Rafaela players who were quite blatantly playing for the goalless draw.”

I would willingly stand as a witness for his defence.

In the absence of goalmouth action, we took to analysing the performances of individual players and focussed on the Rafaela number nine, a lithe, athletic figure with a shaven head who, in full flow chasing after loose balls, was as graceful as a gazelle. In short, he looked the part.

However, on the few occasions that Diego Vera Mendez came close to the ball, an expression spread across his face like that of the average Argentine when answering the door to the tax inspectors.

He didn’t like it one bit and the ball didn’t much like him either, bouncing off his knees, ankles and shins in every direction but the one his team mates were anticipating.

You remember matches like this one as the low-water mark against which future games will be judged. It’s performances like this one that bond and bind the fans together in common disgruntlement.

“I was there for that awful Rafaela game.”

“Yes, me too. Wasn’t it dreadful. Still, could have been worse. At least it didn’t rain.”

“That’s true. And d’you see that geezer who threw his false teeth on the pitch? Never seen anything like it.”

“Remarkable. See you in two weeks for the Lanus game?”

“Si señor. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

 

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01/04
2013

LIONEL MESSI

 

The request was to search for the source, the light, the inspiration for the Holy Grail. Many had before me accepted the challenge, none had emerged holding aloft the burning light, the answer to just why Lionel Messi is so fucking good.

I suspect that the answer is that there is no answer. No one definitive answer anyway.

But I suppose we have to keep searching. Our natural curiosity as human beings and as journalists with pages, screens and airwaves to fill, demands that we persevere.

Messi Now.

I didn’t want to go to Rosario, a three-hour drive up Route Nine from Buenos Aires. I was aware that many journalists had gone before me to talk to Leo Messi’s mum, dad, siblings, coaches, teachers, neighbours, schoolfriends, aunties, uncles and the bloke from the corner kiosk who once sold him a lollipop.

But as Leo in Barcelona knocked in that ninety-first goal of 2012 and blasted Gerd Muller from the record books my bosses wanted answers in both Barcelona and Rosario.

The Messi family, not surprisingly, has had enough of answering bland, often ridiculous questions from the world’s media. So, on my list of people to talk to were two of his former coaches and the doctor who treated him for the hormone deficiency that was preventing him from growing. We also filmed the house and the humble neighbourhood where he grew up.

Revelations, there were none. But when you’re investigating a footballer for whom we have run out of superlatives, then perhaps we have to look at the details.

Ernesto Vecchio was a coach at the local club, Newell’s Old Boys, when he saw six-year-old Leo Messi for the first time.

“He’d just arrived at Newell’s, to the school,” he told me as we stood among the cars in his workshop. “He was among the kids born in 1987, playing for what became known as the Machine of 87. We saw a different player, with his young age, his tiny body – that’s why he was called The Flea. Well! Seeing him play was totally different to the other players.”

Another of the young player’s coaches in those early days of his development was Enrique Domínguez. We spoke in a park near the monument to the Argentine flag with the River Parana just a short hop away. “The most difficult thing for a kid of eleven or twelve years old to achieve is coordination,” he said. “He can think and then needs to do what he’s thinking with his feet, his body and with the ball. We noticed right from the beginning that Leo had that coordination, from the age of six or seven. The ball was an extension of his foot, his leg, his chest. He had no problems in passing it, in stopping it. His coordination was excellent.”

Leo Messi’s family spends most of its time in Barcelona but still maintains its ties with Rosario. I went to the modest family house in a humble neighbourhood to the south of the city. All the lampposts and many of the walls were painted in the blue and yellow of Rosario Central or the black and red of Newell’s Old Boys – the city’s two main teams. The shutters were down but the neighbours all confirmed that this was the Messi house which they often use on their return. I asked some local kids to kick a ball about in the street in front of the house since that’s the kind of corny thing you’ve got to do for TV.

Messii Then.

The pitches in the area were all overgrown and riddled with muddy puddles. The centre of Rosario is beautiful with its grand houses, tree-lined avenues and views of the River Parana. But you don’t need to look far to see the poverty…the run-down houses on the outskirts of the city, the cartoneros looking in the rubbish for anything they can sell or re-cycle.

It was apparent to all who saw him that Leo Messi was a prodigious talent, attracting interest from big clubs in Argentina and beyond. But he was too small for his age, suffering from growth hormone deficiency. So Newell’s called on specialist Diego Schwarzstein for help.

He found time between patients to talk to me: “He had a medical problem. Not all the kids that are small have a problem,” he explained. “The majority of the kids that are short are just short. They are normal kids that genetics have decided that they are not going to be so tall. But in some cases, and this was one of these cases, there is some kind of problem and this was the case here – he was lacking the hormone that is necessary to grow.”

The treatment was expensive…paid for initially by the family’s health care then Barcelona football club, aware of young Messi’s talent, stepped in to help:

“I feel happy and proud when I see a kid that has solved his problem,” said Dr Schwarzstien. “Of course, I feel a little bit more happy and more proud when I see where he is now.”

Lionel Messi went to Barcelona, aged twelve, where he grew both in stature and as a footballer. The rest is history. Those who stayed behind in Rosario watch his progress with pride in the small parts they all played in helping The Flea to develop into perhaps the best footballer the world has ever seen.

“I always say that Leo never surprised me,” said Enrique Dominguez. “We knew him when he was six, seven, ten, eleven years old and he’s the same now as when he was playing in the kids’ team. It’s very rare that a player becomes a top professional like him and doesn’t change. But he hasn’t changed the way he plays or the way he treats other people. He hasn’t changed his image or the way he talks. He’s totally natural, everything Leo does is natural.”

Ernesto Vecchio feels much the same: “When I see him play I do get very emotional. I had him here in a team with the other kids and watching him play was always marvellous.”

Argentina's Finest.

Later, before heading back to Buenos Aires,  we drank coffee at the Restaurante VIP run by one of the Messi brothers. The family runs a football school in the city. He’s a popular local lad. How could he not be?

But there’s none of the passion for little Leo that still exists for Diego Maradona. Enrique and Ernesto were privileged to see The Flea play as a small boy, on Argentine soil. But he was gone by aged twelve.

The terraces of Argentinos Juniors are still populated by elderly fans with knitted scarves who harbour fond memories of the short, stocky sixteen year old Diego who dazzled them at their modest ground with his precocious skills.

The same is no doubt true up the road at the far grander Bombonera Stadium where Diego still enjoys God-like status among the Boca Juniors fans.

Of course Lionel Messi is Argentine. However, until he lifts the World Cup while wearing the national shirt, he’ll not enter the footballing hearts of his countrymen and women in the same way that the previous Number 10, with all his arrogance and silliness, has done.

The three-hour drive back to Buenos Aires gave me plenty of time to ponder. Messi simply has a wonderful talent but I think it’s relevant that he was born in Argentina. It was Rosario but it could have been Buenos Aires or Cordoba or Mendoza since Argentina doesn’t let much of its potential footballing talent slip through the net.

It has a system of boys clubs and good coaches that feed the bigger clubs and increasingly the world’s top teams, such as Barcelona. They know their football and they know talent when they see it.

The same boy born in Peru or Guatemala or Nepal or even Britain might not have been spotted and his talent nurtured in the way Messi’s was in Rosario. He had a supportive family behind him which is always important.

They play tennis, volleyball and basketball in Argentina. Football, though, is always the dominant sport. Messi’s talent was spotted aged six and, despite his medical problems, no-one was going to let him get away. Little Leo, growing up in a football-crazy culture, also had the will and determination to succeed.

The truth, as you can see, is that there is no secret. Lionel Messi is  simply very, very good. We should just sit back and enjoy and stop asking so many questions.

 

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12/09
2012

The End of the World

Argentinos Juniors  1  Newell’s Old Boys  3

What is the point at which we should get angry? I’ve just returned from Doha, the capital of Qatar, where those tasked with saving the planet from the ravages of man-made climate change have failed to reach any kind of meaningful agreement on reducing the CO2 carbon emissions which cause the problem. Perhaps this is what the Mayans had in mind when they predicted that the world would end in December 2012.

There’s a positive side to every situation, however dismal, even the end of the world as we know it. Mine is that I missed the catastrophic finale to Argentinos Juniors’ none-too-impressive season – just one point from their last four games and a 3-1 home defeat against Newell’s Old Boys to finish off and leave them in 15thposition.

Doha skyline...built on oil wealth

Back in Doha it wasn’t as though they were discussing something meaningless like who should host the 2022 World Cup, since Qatar already has that. That decision made me and plenty of other football fans angry. Angry but not despondent since we recognize that we live in a cynical world where over-weight, over-ego-ed FIFA officials can be bought for little more than the price of an ageing midfielder at one of the less fashionable Premiership outfits.

Neither were they discussing who should put on the Olympic Games after Rio, which Qatar would like despite being a desert afterthought of a country with a population of less than two million of which about eighty percent are immigrant workers.

Qatar is one big sandy building site with high risers vying with one another to be the most iconic. It has no soul. The only reason it’s there is to make money. The only alcohol to be had, legally anyway, is in the 5-star hotels.

Qatar hosted the 18th United Nations climate change summit despite boasting an economy built on oil and having a population that per capita burns more energy than any other country. Because of their abundant air-conditioning and seemingly bottomless oil wells there is simply no incentive to switch anything off. A litre of water costs double the price of a litre of petrol. Irony is piled on irony like bundles of straw on a camel’s back.

Although my view of the desert was blocked by endless highrisers, I did get to see a flock of camels as I ran along the Corniche or waterfront. No point stereotyping a place if it can’t confirm our prejudices every now and then with a: “Hey look! There’s a German wearing lederhosen.” Or “My word! That Arabic gentleman is putting an awful lot of straw on that camel’s back. I’m not sure it can stand even one more straw.”

Qatari gentlemen

Our planet is reaching that critical stage when it simply won’t be able to stand much more. The evidence is with us every day. Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Bopha, flooding, droughts and mudslides. The scientists lined up in Doha to confirm what we’ve suspected for a long time – that by pumping more and more carbon fuels – oil, gas and coal – into the air we’re increasing the greenhouse effect which sends our weather loopy. Sea levels rise, rains come tipping down and glaciers melt. We’re chopping down too many trees and dumping too much crap into our rivers and lakes.

The doubters are in a tiny minority who still believe that a flat earth was built in seven days by a bloke with a long white beard and flowing robes.

This was the 18th UN climate change summit held since we started saving the world in earnest in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Each year the conference grows bigger and more complicated.

As well as the 194 countries, there are NGOs, scientists, women’s and youth groups, green industry and development banks,  along with their secretaries and advisors and the attendant protesters and journalists, the UN police force, translators, monks and girl guides.

This is two solid weeks of acronyms and jargon, endless speeches, side events, protests and huddles. This is a climate change orgy in which most of those attending eat, sleep and shit climate change. This is, after all, the end of the world we’re talking about here.

Plenty claim to have the solutions. We found the trillions needed to save the banks, they say. Surely we can find a few trillion more to save the world we live in? The technology needed to move us away from polluting cars and coal and oil fired power plants is available and pretty cheap and efficient. Wind and solar power is getting better and, in theory, could supply most of our clean energy needs. The politicians um and ah and procrastinate and prevaricate while the oil companies keep prospecting for more filthy petrol, telling us there is no alternative.

Conference centre spider. I don't know why

Yet despite this urgency, much of the rest of the world doesn’t seem to care. The story is not ‘sexy’ enough for most of the international media. Kate and William’s future offspring and Fernando Torres finding his form steal the headlines. Yet none of that matters if we’re pushing futile sandbags up against our front door to stop the waters coming in or our grandchildren are starving because the corn harvest has failed, again.

I’m angry at our politicians’ failure to act and simply can’t understand why more people are not as angry as I am.

In Doha, the wealthy nations, the ones that cause the pollution, made vague promises to fork out an undetermined sum of money to pay for the damage. A few developed countries signed up to the second stage of the Kyoto Protocol – the only binding agreement to reduce the emission of carbon gases. But it had more absentees than a Qatar beer festival. Among the self-interested, self-serving slugs were the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Canada and New Zealand..

These are the ones we should be ranting and raving against, shaking our fists at, these politicians and the big businessmen in whose pockets they sit. Because they have lied, dawdled and dithered and blatantly mislead us for twenty years in the interests of short-term profits and winning the next elections.

What is the world coming to?

Barack Obama knew long ago that climate change was not a hoax but only now makes a vague reference to it in the acceptance speech for his second term. The US climate change delegates, Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, rush from meeting to meeting, heads down, treating the journalists and concerned bystanders in their wake like camel turds on the end of a kebab stick.

Angry? We should be livid.

Luckily for the future of humankind there is plenty of activity going on on the ground. While the politicians fly home in business class to see how they can slither and slide their way out of the already weak commitments they’ve made, youth groups and NGOs and generally concerned citizens are working on projects to improve the lot of rural farmers, indigenous people, oppressed women, child labourers and more. These victims of the effects of climate change are themselves finding their voices and marching, organizing and demanding action.

I interviewed a cashew nut farmer from Ghana and an Ecuadoran from the Ashuar community who had walked seven days from the depths of the Amazon to reach the nearest road from where he could get to Quito from where a flight brought him to Doha.

“Why do we suffer,” they asked, “from pollution we didn’t cause and can’t afford to repair?”

I spoke to youngsters from India, Germany, China, Australia, Sri Lanka and Canada. They were all working on projects to raise the awareness of young people to the threat of climate change. They are talking to one another. They are generally better informed and articulate than many of the long-time negotiators I’ve interviewed.

“It’s our world,” they screamed. The problem with youth is innocence. I know in my bitter, gnarled and cynical mind that the politicians will talk the talk, will promise the world and will then, using the most direct language I can conjure up, fuck us over.

It’ll all happen again next year in Warsaw, another fest of mitigation, adaptation, protocols, platforms and general piffling about while the world heats up.

There is still room for hope. There are a lot of fine people out there committed to saving our skins.

There’s less hope than last year but a little more than there will be a year from now. Unless of course we start getting angry now, really angry.

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11/23
2012

Buenos Aires in focus

There are many different ways of getting to know Buenos Aires. From the vantage point of the terraces at Argentinos Juniors, for instance, catching glimpses of football through the barbed-wire topped fencing while shielding your ears from the foul-mouthed rantings and ravings of the local fans.

Or you could be crouched between two parked cars in a pose similar to that of a Greco-Roman wrestler gripped in a headlock by an Azerbaijani fighter – only without the Azerbaijani since he’s in Baku and you’re in San Telmo – taking a photograph of the long disused tram tracks that decorate the cobbled streets of this quaint Buenos Aires neighbourhood.

From the twisted, crouching position

That’s what I found myself doing the other Saturday – see left – while on a photography course run by Foto Ruta. Or as they put it in their bumpf  ‘A city tour with a twist.’ In my case, literally.

“Whaddya think you’re doing?” asked a curious local fellow, towering over me. I shall explain.

Foto Ruta is run by two proper photographers – Joss from Canada and Becky from the UK. Photographers who know how to use all your camera’s fiddly bits which they’ll explain in easily digestible morsels. They also know Buenos Aires. What’s more, they like Buenos Aires and encourage visitors, as well as bitter and cynical long-time residents like myself, to explore its streets and bars and people through the camera lens.

You could just walk around a bit, map in hand, camera at the ready, and take in the president’s pink house, the obelisk, Evita’s tombstone and the pretty coloured houses in La Boca. Grab a pizza, pay over the odds to see Boca Juniors under-perform and marvel at stiletto heels on the tango floor slicing dangerously close to functioning male body parts and you could say you’ve ‘done’ Buenos Aires.

Foto Ruta forces you to see the city differently. It’s just one of several ways you can see Buenos Aires differently. There’re the guided tours of graffiti walls…taking in some of the best street art you’ll see anywhere in the world (graffitimundo.com or facebook.com/graffitimundo).

Crap!

Or you could attend a football match, traveling on public transport, visiting the locals’ favourite bar for a pre-match drink and digest some inside knowledge from English-speaking fans who know their Newell’s Old Boys from their All Boys (sam@hastaelgolsiempre.com). And I’ve just heard about the Buenos Aires ManTour where you can have yourself a shave with a straight edge razor, visit a cigar lounge and generally experience a finer class of tourism (http://landingpadba.com/the-man-tour-buenos-aires/) .

Typical San Telmo

But back to Foto Ruta. Firstly, you’ll join a motley collection of fellow foreigners meeting at one of Buenos Aires’s wonderful cafes where Joss or Becky will talk you through the afternoon.

There’ll be some basic photography tips, the lowdown on the particular Buenos Aires barrio you’ll be exploring and tasks will be set before launching forth for a couple of hours of happy snapping.

No-one is impressed by state-of-the-art cameras with fifteen different lenses and a zoom that highlights the nose hairs of the bloke on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building three blocks away. Any camera will do. What we’re looking for here is imagination and an eye for the unusual. Personally, I’m partial to a decent bit of framing and not too much fuzziness.

We were in search of pictures that fell into a number of loose categories: Brilliantly Bohemian, Lost in Time and Pretty, Pretty Patterns are three examples.

Then it was back to our café where Joss downloaded our bravest and our best photos onto her computer while we sipped wine. She took us through them, one at a time, pointing out their merits and explaining how they could have been better.

I knew San Telmo. I’d been there many times. But I know it better now. I saw it differently and, in my less than humble opinion, with Foto Ruta’s help, took some bloody good pictures. (www.foto-ruta.com or hola@foto-ruta.com)

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