25/09
2009

Game Six v Godoy Cruz

Godoy Cruz 2 Argentinos Juniors 4

Crates of Malbec all round please waiter. This victory against Godoy Cruz – the team from the western region of Mendoza in the heart of Argentina’s wine growing country – was vintage. I’d even go so far as to say that it was a performance of vigorous texture and taste, with a touch of rusticity in the palate. Although it could be that, after six glasses, I’m confusing my football with this fine bottle of 2008 Benjamin Nieto Malbec.

Malbec grapes were originally grown in south-eastern France but  in Argentina found more propitious features for their development. They produce wines of pleasant taste, medium body with certain earthy notes and an intense purple colour. You what?! I’ve nicked all this, obviously, from a pretentious wine page but I think it translates as ‘Malbec grapes grow much better on the slopes of the eastern Andes and if you guzzle a bottle or two with a fat, juicy lump of prime Argentine beef it’ll slide down your throat smoother than a ball through David James’ goalkeeping gloves.’

Squeeze these

Squeeze these

Argentine wine now sells huge amounts in the United States and Europe. It’s still cheap, it’s pretty good and the labels are posh enough that if you take a bottle to someone’s house, they might not realise that you’re a tight bugger pleased to get some change out of a fiver.

Argentines have been producing and guzzling wine for some time. But until recently they didn’t sell a great deal abroad, leaving that to the Chileans, their neighbours on the other side of the Andes. However a drastic, even by Argentine standards, economic collapse in 2001-2 and growing expertise, plus plenty of foreign partnerships, led to a boom in overseas sales.

Argentines in general don’t drink that much and most of what they do consume is at mealtimes. The only quality beer that I’ve come across was in the country’s nether regions and is produced by the Argentine equivalent of those round bellied, bushy bearded real-ale men and women you find in big tents at country fairs across the UK.

Occasionally, in Buenos Aires I’ve stumbled across the odd dusty bottle of decent ale on rarely visited supermarket shelves, alongside rusty tins of marinated yak hearts and jars of llama eyeballs in brine. Otherwise there’s Quilmes — the national flag-carrying pale, some would say insipid, Argentine beer now owned, although don’t say it too loudly, by the Brazilians.

I’ve never seen beer drunk at Argentine football matches. It’s certainly not sold inside the grounds. And police were breathalysing the fans outside the last Argentinos Juniors home game I went to.

My wife, Claudia, spent her rebellious teenage years drinking in Buenos Aires milk bars. “Chocolate milkshakes all round, barman. And don’t hold back on the sprinkly stuff!” So when she first visited England and was subjected to the custom of buying drinks in rounds, she stumbled.

“No, I’m fine,” she said when the second round was offered, since she’d barely reached down to the first dimple of her half pint glass. There were walkouts, there were hurrumphs of disgust and the landlord had a quiet word with me. I had a quiet word with her and one small but serious cultural divide was bridged.

One of the joys of living in Argentina is that, if left to look after the children as I was for this game, it’s perfectly within the realms of the law to be an irresponsible parent and watch the game with them in a nearby bar. While my son sipped on his Coke, I ordered a glass of Malbec. I remember at one stage an aroma of mature plum, intense with an elegant yet well-balanced taste. But looking back, I’m not sure whether that applied to the wine or the peanuts.

I suspect the restrained imbibing of alcohol in Argentina is due to the influence of the large number of immigrants from Italy – a nation of moderate drinkers. Despite the best efforts of local television advertisers, the phrases ‘binge drinking’ and ‘this round’s on me’ simply don’t figure in any of the Argentine phrase books that I’ve come across.

But while they may not overdo it on the booze, no-one shovels meat down their throats quite like the Argentines. The average consumption is about 80kg per person per year, which is a quarter of a cow more than your average Texan and pretty much a whole herd more than the average Brit.

I don’t know a home in Argentina that doesn’t have a parrilla or barbeque, even in tenth floor apartment blocks which one way or another will manage to squeeze the grill and chimney into the corner of their balcony.

On Sunday afternoons the waft of grilled meat floats over Buenos Aires from a million fires, in back gardens, patios, balconies, by the roadside and restaurants. And I don’t just mean a few decent cuts of beef. I’m talking intestines, tongue and heart – and that’s just for starters. Then there’s a dazzling array of different cuts of meat. Some talk of the Inuit and their many different words for snow.  The Argentine equivalent is meat cuts – lomo, bife de chorizo, cuadril, vacio, matambre, asado and on and on until you look in the mirror one day and find you’re fatter than Diego Maradona. So much meat doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else. A few chips perhaps? Salads are strictly for show – a touch of green to break up the monotony of all that filthy flesh.

One of the main reasons Argentines eat so much meat is firstly because they’ve got the space to rear the cattle– the vast, fertile grasslands in the centre of the country known as the Pampas. Although, what once looked like endless plains are fast being covered by the easier to grow and far more lucrative genetically modified soya. I find that they’re very difficult to barbeque – they tend to slip through the grill and get lost in the burning charcoal.

Sorry to go all psychiatry, but that’s one of the hazards in a country which has more analysts, therapists and psychiatrists per head of self-absorbed citizen than a New York premier of the latest Woody Allen film. My view is that standing over the open fire with a long fork in their hand helps the men stay in touch with their wild, rural roots.

The gaucho, the Argentine cowboy, tamed the pampas, sleeping under the stars, fighting off the Indians and controlling the livestock. They were armed with just a sharp knife and a set of boleadoras, which look like a couple of sun-dried bull’s testicles tied to a piece of string. They’re flung, often from a great distance, around the legs of stray cows to bring them into line – a kind of an Argentine lasso.

These men were so hard, so duro, that they made John Wayne and Clint Eastwood look like a couple of King’s Road hair stylists. Most modern-day Argentine men now use deodorant, work in an office and listen to their i-pods. But on a Sunday, it’s they, not the women who generally cook the rest of the week, who stand in front of the parrilla with a big cooking implement and a glass of Malbec. They’ll talk about blokey things — the weekend footy fixtures or their cars — as a sub-conscious way of trying to re-establish some kind of link with the last vestiges of that raw, original Argentinianness — their gaucho roots.

Hat-trick Hauche

Hat-trick Hauche

With this amount of wine and a performance like the one Argentinos Juniors put in tonight, I’m in danger of getting carried away. They played the same brand of attacking, passing football they played last week, spraying the ball around the pitch and always providing passing options for one another.

The home team went ahead, against the run of play, just before half-time. But the visitors stuck to their game plan and were rewarded with a hat-trick from Gabriel Hauche and a fourth from last week’s hero, Ismael Sosa. I know I’m slurring my words and repeating myself but this really was a performance of vigorous texture and taste, leaving a touch of rusticity in the palate.

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19/09
2009

Game Five v Atletico Tucuman

Argentinos Juniors 2 Atletico Tucuman 1

It’s difficult to explain to anyone who is not a rabid, obsessive football fan what makes a person travel for endless hours across the country in a rickety bus to stand on the terraces at a ramshackle ground to watch your team lose – and then spend all of the next night and much of the following day heading home again.

If you’re a Newcastle fan travelling to Plymouth, I don’t want to hear your pathetic whining and moaning. My Argentinos Juniors baseball cap comes off to the fans of Atletico Tucuman. There were hundreds of them in Buenos Aires for this game. Tucuman is 1,340km (that’s 832 miles for you who haven’t been metrificated) to the north-west of Buenos Aires. That’s compared to just four-hundred and forty-four kilometres (or 276 miles) from Newcastle to Plymouth which, in comparison, is pretty much just nipping down the road.

They came from afar

They came from afar

It won’t be much consolation to the Tucumanos, but this was an absolute belter of a game. This was ninety non-stop minutes of quality passing, heart-stopping goalmouth action, a sending off and three pretty good goals. It was just the kind of game I needed to re-establish my faith in football after a 0-0 draw in the rain.

I passed through Tucuman once, many years ago, on my way to somewhere else. I had about four hours to kill between getting off the train from Buenos Aires and taking the bus to somewhere even more remote, hot and dusty.

I didn’t know anyone. It was a Sunday, the streets were empty and the only place open was a porno cinema just off the main plaza. A couple of rancid old men sat on the steps outside. This place epitomised seediness. I must admit that I was tempted to go in. Firstly, it was open and secondly it promised air-conditioning on what was a hot, humid, suffocating day. I fought that temptation. You may not believe me but my wife does.

When, many long, long hours later, my bus finally pulled out of the main terminal, I vowed never to return to Tucuman. That’s the kind of attitude towards the interior of Argentina shared by many who live in and around Buenos Aires. They talk of it, not often, with a disparaging flick of the hand. For the capital city and its surroundings dominate and overshadow the rest of the country in a way that few other capitals dominate theirs.

Forget England’s north-south divide or the disdain many French people feel for the arrogant Parisians. This is much, much worse. Buenos Aires has fought wars with the provinces. There were countless uprisings and mutinies throughout the nineteenth century. And it’s not over yet. Just last year the country’s farmers revolted over government plans, Buenos Aires plans, to impose huge export taxes on their produce. They blocked roads and destroyed cargoes, rather than let them reach the city’s supermarket shelves.

There’s also a race issue here. Most of those who come from Argentina’s interior are of mixed indigenous and Spanish blood. They’ve got dark-skin, black hair and brown eyes. The majority of the residents of Buenos Aires are of Spanish, Italian, German, Croat and British stock – Europeans. Many still have ties with the ‘old country.’ That’s where they do their business and take their holidays, although recent years have seen a strong shift towards the United States.

More than one-third of Argentina’s forty million population lives in and around Buenos Aires. It’s a seemingly endless urban sprawl where it’s often difficult to find any open space, except in the River Plate defence of course! When some does appear it’s usually soon filled by migrant families from the countryside drawn to the big city’s bright lights and overflowing rubbish bins.

The Buenos Aires-based media rarely ventures out of the capital, unless it’s to cover the places where they take their holidays – the southern ski resort of Bariloche or the coastal resort of Mar del Plata, for instance.

And of course it works both ways. Those who live in the countryside generally view those from Buenos Aires, the portenos, as loud, arrogant and ignorant.

Loud, arrogant and ignorant

Loud, arrogant and ignorant

All of this, you won’t be surprised to learn, is reflected in the structure of Argentine football. There are twenty teams in the national first division – thirteen are based in and around Buenos Aires. Fifteen if you count Estudiantes and Gimnasia, from the city of La Plata a mere one hour’s drive south of the capital.

The only two regular residents of the Primera found more than spitting distance from the capital are Newell’s Old Boys and Rosario Central from the country’s second city, Rosario. They’re the kind of Birmingham City and Aston Villa of Argentina. Away matches for Atletico Tucuman, tucked away in the far north, are really long, long way away matches.

It also means that most football fans in Argentina simply don’t have a local top team they can support. I once went to the house of a Wichi indigenous man near the Argentine border with Paraguay. On his mud-brick walls he had a picture of the then president and the Boca Juniors line-up. “You ever get to see them?” I asked rather insensitively. “I’ve never been to Buenos Aires,” he replied. “But I love Boca.”

The national football authorities – would you believe it, based in Buenos Aires? – have even devised a system which makes it very difficult for the established big city clubs to be relegated. They would have to play very, very badly over several seasons to be eligible for the drop. This means that the newly promoted teams, usually from the far-flung corners of Argentina, often only get to enjoy a season or two in the top-flight before they’re forced back down to where they came from.

This means that teams like Atletico Tucuman and their fans really enjoy the short spurts they get to spend hobnobbing with the big boys. And beating the Buenos Aires clubs has a strong political resonance. Like their two-nil victory last week over the biggest of the big boys, Boca Juniors who paid the price, like many from Buenos Aires so often do, for not showing their country cousins sufficient respect.

Thankfully, Argentinos Juniors didn’t make that mistake. There was a goal in each half from Ismael Sosa as reward for as fine a display of quality football as I’ve seen in some time. Luis Rodriguez pulled one back for the visitors. If it carries on like this, I’m going to have to invest in an Argentinos Juniors shirt. Five games, still unbeaten and making a steady climb up the table.

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12/09
2009

Game Four v Newell’s Old Boys

Newell’s Old Boys 0 Argentinos Juniors 1

The first victory of the season and a surge up the table. Not much to complain about there, surely? Well, yes there was actually. Firstly, this was a poor game of poor passing, little cohesion and sparse goalmouth action. There was a barely noticeable burst of promise from Newell’s at the end of the first half when they should have, but didn’t, score. And the visitor’s goal came in the second half when Nestor Ortigoza rammed home what had been an indisputable penalty.

Ortigoza is not, has not and never will be part of the exodus of South American players who have been plucked in their prime by foreign clubs. It’s not that he’s a bad player. He was probably the man of the match in this one with, admittedly, not much competition. His problem is that, to be blunt and a little cruel, he looks like me on the pitch. Me or any other forty-something, slightly out of condition, beer swilling, Sunday morning park slogger. That’s why I like him.

Nestor Ortigoza - like me, but much, much better

Nestor Ortigoza - like me, but much, much better

The difference between Ortigoza and me is that, despite being more wildebeest than graceful gazelle, he is a deceptively skilful and sometimes very effective player. And he plays with a passion that the fans love and they love it because, to echo a whinge heard around the world, it’s a passion not often found in the game these days.

We’ve all heard about the mercenary nature of modern football. But in the case of Argentina that moan takes on more resonance with the knowledge that more than one-thousand home-grown players ply their trade abroad. That’s more than one-thousand compared to England’s, let me think for a moment, one. At least Mr D Beckham is the only one I could find on a brief scan of the web.

But replace the word ‘English’ for ‘Argentine’ on your search engine and you’ll travel the world. We all know about Carlos Tevez, worth every penny at Manchester City, Lionel Messi advertising razors at Barcelona and Sergio Aguero providing for Diego Maradona’s grandson at Atletico Madrid. And who would begrudge former Argentinos Juniors player, Julio Arca, whatever wealth and happiness he found at Sunderland and Middlesborough?

But what motivates Julian Eberhardt as he pulls on his Lightning Fayetteville shirt in the US fifth division? Or Carlos Martino who plays for Scorpion in the Nicaraguan league? There are more than sixty Argentines playing in Mexican football. One-hundred and seventy four in Spain and nearly as many in Italy. And then of course there’s Mariano Caporale, Hector Parodi and Mariano Sanchez dazzling the home fans at Ahrahami Chittagong in Bangladesh!

Wherever you roam in the world of football – from the Greek second division to the Panamanian league, from Indonesia to Malta, the Maldives to Andorra – there are Argentine footballers earning a crust.

Good for them and good for world football, I say. But the situation does raise a number of points on the bleak terraces back home. Firstly, what has become of the more than thirteen billion dollars paid over the past ten years to Argentine clubs for this lucrative export? I’m not sure how much Bong da Binh Dong of Vietnam forked out for Diego Morales, perhaps nothing at all.

But little of the money generated by Tevez, Mascherano and Aguero has been ploughed back into the Argentine game. Many of those playing abroad have never even been seen by the home fans. Messi was shipped off to Barcelona aged just thirteen and never pulled on a Newell’s Old Boys first team shirt. The national team goalkeeper, Sergio Romero, played just four games for Racing Club before moving to AZ Alkmaar of Holland.

And what does the constant flow of Argentine players do to the quality of the home league? The truth is that there is no shortage of aspiring, talented youngsters and there’s a fine teaching structure in place to bring them on. But the motivation to continue investing time and money in nurturing this young talent is fast deflating. What’s the point if your promising fourteen year olds all end up in the Greek second division?

It’s a problem that has long been reflected in the rest of Argentina. A good education system churns out keen young citizens. What often awaits them at home is a sometimes corrupt, always bureaucratic country in which you’re rewarded by who you know rather than what you know. The temptation of a more lucrative and comfortable life abroad is often too difficult to resist.

This was one of the few games that my adopted team have to play outside of Buenos Aires. Newell’s Old Boys are one of the two teams in Argentina’s second city, Rosario. The other, you’ve guessed it, is Rosario Central.

It’s a fair old trek for a kick-off at ten past nine on a Friday night so being a fair-weather fan I watched this one in a local bar with my taxi driving mate and fellow Argentinos fan, Pablo.

There was just about enough to celebrate on the night. But we agreed, over our ham and cheese sandwiches, a bleak looking future. That’s been exacerbated by two dismal performances in the past week from the Argentine national team, which leaves their qualification for the 2010 World Cup in some doubt. Perhaps, we pondered over coffee as the barmen mopped the floors around our table, a symptom of the malaise in the domestic game.

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03/09
2009

Game Three v Lanus

Argentinos Juniors 0 Lanus 0

They don’t play a lot of mid-week evening matches in the Argentine first division – and perhaps this game was a good reason why. It was cold, wet and goalless. But perhaps cold, dark and miserable with nothing much to celebrate was a fitting way to mark the International Day of the Disappeared – a day which resonates throughout the week in Argentina where an estimated thirty thousand people were detained and made to disappear under military rule between 1976 and 1983.

Most of the perpetrators of those crimes were never jailed and still walk the streets of Argentina. I often wonder when I encounter a particularly obnoxious taxi driver or a security guard of a certain age whether I should ask him what he did during the dictatorship. It’s quite possible that there were former torturers and killers in the crowd, cowering with the rest of us under the rain.

In the absence of much judicial activity, there’s a strong movement trying to keep the memory of those victims alive. There’s a group of Argentinos Juniors fans who display banners at games and ensure that former fans among those thirty-thousand are not forgotten – the names Gregorio Nachman, Ernesto Szerszewicz and Guillermo Moralli are displayed on web-sites and at games on the anniversary of the days on which they were last seen alive.

Brutal Street Art

Brutal Street Art

A book has just been published called Memories in the City which lists the 240 sites in Buenos Aires which one way or another remember the victims of state terrorism. One of the most colourful is on the wall of the Argentinos Juniors stadium, a mural which looks like a cross between Picasso’s Guernica and Munch’s The Scream.

Football played a big part in the dictatorship, mostly notably with Argentina hosting and winning the 1978 World Cup.
That victory was a huge boost to the military, with hundreds of thousands of Argentines celebrating on the streets. Many here feel that the country has never really fulfilled its political and economic promise on the international stage. But here they were, the focus of the world was on them, Argentina were the champions, at least in footballing terms.

Former prisoners told how their guards took them from their cells and drove them out to witness the celebrations. For many who survived the dictatorship, it’s a World Cup tainted by blood.

If Argentines had to name the top five cruellest, most hated men from what was a particularly long list of very cruel and hateful figures, I can pretty much guarantee that Carlos Guillermo Suarez Mason would be among them.

He was an army commander and military intelligence chief responsible for the running of several clandestine detention centres. He was charged with more than six-hundred human rights abuses, including stealing babies from prisoners. He was also a former goalkeeper in the youth ranks of Argentinos Juniors and an honorary club member.

Like so much from that period, his association with the club is murky, blurred by denial and cover-up. A former official said that Suarez Mason ‘opened doors and got things.’ It’s reported that he was involved in the club’s sale of Diego Maradona to Boca Juniors in 1980.

Suarez Mason

Suarez Mason

When the dictatorship fell, he fled to the United States. He was extradited but then benefitted from a controversial mass pardon given by the nervous civilian governments that followed the military. He was arrested again for crimes not covered by the pardon and, while under house arrest, it was reported that he celebrated his eightieth birthday with a big steak meal at the Argentinos Juniors ground.

In 1999, the club voted in a late night meeting to revoke his honorary membership. With angry human rights protesters outside, Suarez Mason escaped out the back door. He died four years ago, aged 81 never having gone to prison.
Questions are still asked of the current club president, Luis Segura, about his association with the man nicknamed ‘The Butcher.’ He retreats behind that old adage ‘that football and politics shouldn’t mix.’

Football, as it so often does, provided essential escapism for many during the dictatorship and in the years of recovery afterwards. It’s woven into the fabric of Argentine life so it’s inevitable that those who run the country will use, and often abuse it.

So a dark and miserable night, with no goals to cheer us up, provided an ideal setting to ponder probably the darkest period in Argentine history. But that’s just me. The spirit among the fans was good. The team played well and were perhaps unlucky not to snatch a win. Three games into the season and still unbeaten, but still three games without a victory.

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