11/03
2012

Game Five: v San Martin de San Juan

Argentinos Juniors  1  San Martin de San Juan  1

It wasn’t so much the fierce mid-afternoon sun baking Buenos Aires to a crisp that was hard to bear. It was the intense, wet-blankety humidity that brought rivulets of sweat pouring from every crevice and orifice of anyone brave or foolish enough to take their head out of the freezer or venture far from the always struggling effects of fans and air-conditioners.

But the Diego Maradona stadium beckoned for my first game of the season, the Bichos Colorados fresh from their victory last week against Independiente and a new manager, Leonardo Astrada, to boot.

All we had to do was to stand on the terraces and sing. The players had to run around and kick a football. The fire-brigade, always on hand at Argentine football games in case there’s, er? a fire, performed an act of humanity by spraying the crowd at half-time with their hoses. 

And there are other little innovations in the Argentine game that the rest of the world might do well to heed. They’re innovations that do nothing to alter the fabric of the game but, in their own small ways, help its ebb and flow.

One is the referees’ use of the spray can. It’s very light and attaches to his shorts. He’ll spray a circle of foam on the grass where a free-kick should be taken and then a line behind which defenders should stand. There are no grey areas, no petty arguments about the distance, no pushing and hustling. And about a minute after the free-kick is taken, the foam has faded away as though it were never there.

The other is the mid-half half time. With the weather being so hot it’s a life-saver. It’s simply a five minute break in the middle of the first half during which the players can take in some much needed liquid.

The first time I saw it I thought my watch must be broken. Or the game had been so exciting that forty-five minutes had seemed like twenty-two and a half.

I’d watched the Bolton v QPR game on the tele beforehand and like the QPR players, the fans, the TV public and everyone else except the linesman, saw that ball cross the line for a goal. Only it wasn’t because the easily available and simple to use technology that could solve these issues in a matter of minutes has not been applied.

I understand the traditionalists but the longer the authorities hold out, the more the integrity of the game is compromised. If I were a QPR fan, I’d just be pissed off.

Tired and sweaty heroes.

Back in Buenos Aires, there were flashes of football amidst a general soggy mush of poor passing and aimless dribbling.

The hardest working man in the stadium was the driver of the electric golf-cart that tends to the injured. No sooner had he parked his vehicle than he was called out again as the players, probably feigning injury in order to grab a rest, fell to the ground like extras re-enacting the Battle of Waterloo.

I thought our hard-working but totally ineffective frontman, JJ Morales had finally got his name on the scoresheet with a headed goal mid-way through the first half – the first home goal of the season – only to discover later that it was recorded as an own-goal by Cristian Grabinski.

But a goal is a goal, especially when your team finds them as difficult to score as this one obviously does.

Argentinos Juniors have made the one-one draw their own. So one-nil up usually only means one thing. And sure enough the equaliser came in the second half shortly after another incursion onto the pitch by the man with the golf-cart.

The home players were obviously taking advantage of the break to dream of ice-cold beer, heads in freezers and diving into swimming pools since none of them seemed aware that San Martin were launching pretty much their first attack of the game. They waltzed through the middle of the home defence like pensioners on a weekend trip to Southend for Gaston Caprari to slot home the inevitable.

Then, as if things were not hot enough, the temperature rose a degree or two. Our goalkeeper, Nereo Fernandez, lurched out of his box to bring down a visiting forward and the referee, who had been abysmal all afternoon, showed him the red.

Argentinos Juniors had already used their three substitutes so the departing keeper had no option but to pass his sweat-soaked jersey to the tallest, most nimble defender, Juan Sabia. But hold on!

The new manager, Leo Astrada , had other ideas. This was a draw that, with only ten men, had to be defended. So he overruled commonsense and told JJ Morales, the shortest man on the pitch, to stand between the sticks.

He looked like a little boy who couldn’t reach the light switch. His discomfort was only heightened when one of the trainers brought him out a smaller pair of gloves since the original goalkeeper’s kept slipping off his dainty little hands.

He got a huge cheer when he picked up a stray ball and his defence guarded him valiantly. The crowd appreciated a battling performance in the face of adversity and in the end we were all grateful for a draw that really should have been a victory.

But all of that paled into nothingness after the game between Boca Juniors, who were top, and Independiente, who were bottom without a point this season. At Boca’s Bombonera, the visitors took a 3-1 lead. Boca pulled it back to 3-3 then took the lead. With just two minutes to go, Independiente equalised then scored the winner in added time. It was a partidazo, as they call them here, and is front page news and beyond.

Other strugglers also won key games. Racing beat All Boys 3-0, San Lorenzo got a vital 2-1 away win at Belgrano and Tigre took all three points with a 2-0 at Banfield. Union also clinched the points away at Atletico de Rafaela by the same score. Arsenal beat Godoy Cruz 1-0, Colon lost 3-0 at home to Newell’s and Estudiantes won at home to Lanus by the single goal.  

 

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08/03
2012

Games Three and Four: v San Lorenzo and Independiente

Argentinos Juniors  0  San Lorenzo  1          Independiente  1  Argentinos Juniors  3

Fourth game, first victory. I missed this one and the previous match, a 1-0 defeat at home to San Lorenzo, because I was out of Buenos Aires– a long way out of Buenos Aires in the Falkvinas or Malkland Islands.

As a Brit who was studying in Portsmouth in 1982 when Argentina invaded the islands who then married an Argentine and came to live in Buenos Aires six years ago, with two children of dual nationality, you might expect my opinion on the subject of who owns those damned islands to be confused.

Britain?

Generally, I don’t talk about them. The family motto, taken from the John Cleese character, Basil Fawlty, is: “Don’t mention the war.”

But now I’ve been there, I do know this.  I wouldn’t want to live there and they’re certainly not worth dying for. Perhaps the empty rhetoric, the talk of flags and sovereignty and Queen and country and honour, is to mask the fragility of the arguments on both sides.

Argentines are taught from an early age to shout: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas”  without asking why. When a group of seventeen Argentine intellectuals, journalists and historians recently put out an open letter asking for a more grown-up debate on the subject they were shouted down, death threats were issued and little has been heard from them since.

The willingness on the islands to find any kind of solution to the 179 year old problem is not much better. “We’re British and we want to stay British and that’s it…” is about as deep as the debate goes.

Any noise coming out of Buenos Aires is treated immediately with scorn and suspicion, even the more positive sounds. For the islanders, all 4,000 or so of them, are unified by their siege mentality, their distrust of the Argentines.

I found a similar reaction to all things Spanish when I visited Gibraltar a few years ago. Franco had been long dead. Yet the locals somehow managed to find his influence in everything said about them that emanated from Madrid.

Port Stanley

It was racism, pure and simple. Yet many of them shopped, had holiday homes and parked their cars in Spain.

The same is true of many of the Falkland islanders. No, they don’t park their cars in Spain. But several spend the long, harsh windy South Atlantic winters in Europe or at the very least have made enough money out of the post-war economy to have bought an alternative home far, far away should the British government decide the islands are not worth defending and pull their 1,300 troops home.

That, though, is not about to happen any time soon. Since there is oil in the South Atlantic, possibly lots of it. If Britain would go to all the trouble and expense of aiding and abetting the invasion of Iraq to ensure access to its oil, maintaining a few hundred troops on a distant island with seven pubs and many thousands of penguins is a comparatively small price to pay.

The islanders don’t need the oil. They’ve got wind turbines and these are very windy islands.

Their exaggerated British culture is a bit like something out of a cheap Hollywood film set in England with red post boxes, telephone kiosks and a Number 38 double decker bus. It’s all Marmite and teabags and pints of beer with salt and vinegar crisps down the local pub. That’s my kind of culture. I love it – in Britain.

King Penguins...absolute monarchs

Argentines, if they had their way, would no doubt replace it with some feverish yerba mate drinking and intense meat barbeques, although keeping the coals lit in such extreme weather conditions would be difficult.

Which raises the question of who should control the islands? The French were the first to inhabit them but they soon lost interest. Britain, Argentina and the islanders, like radical readers of the Bible and the Koran, are often choosy about the historical facts they select to support their arguments.

There are no easy solutions. Is it a dark little stain left over from the British empire, maintained by a permanent military force and the promise of oil? Or are we talking of a proud people who have earned the right to choose their nationality by nine generations of sweat and graft in a remote and inhospitable land?

Or should Argentina have inherited them when it emerged as a nation from Spanish colonial rule? And they are much closer to Buenos Aires than they are to London.

Or perhaps leave the oil where it is and declare the islands a nature reserve and let the penguins decide.

Meanwhile, Argentinos Juniors face San Martin de San Juan this Saturday when hopefully my season can kick off.

Champions Boca share the top spot with one of last season’s strugglers, Tigre. But it’s the bottom of the table that, early on, looks interesting. It’s propped up by two of the big boys. Independiente have no points, zilch, nada, after four defeats. Above them, with just the two draws, are their rivals Racing.

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13/02
2012

Game One: v Union de Santa Fe

Argentinos Juniors  0  Union de Santa Fe  0

The 2012 Clausura season, whichever way you look at it, has begun with a soggy fart, rather than a bang. There was not much in the way of keen expectation during the long, very hot close season. Then – Wey-hey!! – a routine 2-0 victory by the champions, Boca, over those far-southerners, Olimpo, and a drab 0-0 by our own Argentinos Juniors.

I didn’t go since the kick-off was at 10.10pm, way past my bedtime. It was scheduled for 5pm but the television masters decided that the second division clash involving those depleted giants, River Plate, who kicked off against Chacarita at the same time, would be a greater crowd draw. First division should take precedence over second division but that’s not the way it works here.

Just as well then that I’ve just come back from Cuba, a land where there’s no football to speak of but they’re passionate about other sports, especially rounders. Only this is played with bigger bats and funny gloves and is known in some parts of the world as baseball.

I always like to catch a game wherever I travel so I hopped in a taxi — a 1951 Chevy with a 1990s Lada engine and a Toyota dashboard, supplemented by bits and discarded bobs from Hondas, Renaults and VWs –  to the Latinoamericano Stadium, the home of Havana giants, Los Industriales, the Industrials.

Jonron!!

In true Cuban fashion, the pizzeria next to the ground only sold beer. I thought the crowd pressed against the railings was waiting for a glimpse of the players coming out of the changing rooms but no! This was the ticket office.

There are two currencies operating in Cuba: the Cuban peso which is used by the locals and buys very little and the Convertible Peso or CUC which is used by tourists and buys you much more at a much higher cost.

A CUC is worth 85 US cents. There are 25 Cuban pesos in one CUC. The entrance fee is one Cuban peso. Unless you’re a foreigner in which case you pay one CUC. Only I didn’t know that until I’d fought my way through the throng and attracted the attention of the ticket lady with the long, curling green fingernails.

She would only accept the exact the money so I had to return to the pizzeria that didn’t sell pizzas and buy a beer that I didn’t really want to obtain the exact four CUCs that would get me and my family into the stadium.

By the time we got to our seats, the game was in its second innings and the visitors, Pinar del Rio from the west of the island, were one run up.

Then the home team pulled one back and the crowd erupted like, well, like a goal had been scored.  

It’s wrong to compare baseball with football. It has a different rhythm and the moments of excitement come in varied ways. With all the bases stacked (you see here how I almost seamlessly adopt the jargon) and Pinar’s last batter in at the top of the third, the crowd held its collective breath. Crack! A homerun…or a jonron as the locals pronounce it…and the visitors leapt into a 4-1 lead.

Because the pizzeria didn’t have any pizzas we sampled the fare offered by men who prowled the stadium with baskets selling small brown parcels of some kind of pastry rather frugally filled with something indistinguishable that was neither sweet nor savoury. We ordered more.

Champions...The Boca Juniors of Havana.

This was a big night out for the mostly young Cuban crowd. Boyfriends adorned with bling sat proudly next to giggly girlfriends. Dads explained the complexities of the game to small kids with far greater passion than they’d ever apply to a description of how the Cuban economy has somehow survived despite the fifty-year long US trade embargo and the withdrawal of Russian support after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties.

I find it difficult to take a sport seriously in which the athletes don’t look like athletes. Golfers, darts and snooker players spring to mind. I was surprised to find that several Cuban baseball players seem to have succumbed to the temptations of the good life.

I expect taut limbs, steroid induced muscles and the ability to keep going for several hours that only illegal substances and a dedicated team of medics with criminal records can give you. This is a category often filled by professional cyclists, some tennis players and, if the French are to be believed, any Spaniard that’s ever won anything worth winning.

I saw a couple of Cuban batters, sporting bellies I normally only see on those sellers of Choripan sausages outside Argentine football grounds. They have to hit home runs simply so they can walk rather than run to the bases.

It all ended 8-2 to the visitors but the Industrials had done enough in previous games to progress in the play-offs. We left well before the end with the visitors 5-2 up since this was a game that was going to stretch well into the tomorrow.

It’s always fun to venture into other lands and explore local customs but equally reassuring to be home in familiar territory. And six draws, four of them 0-0, in the ten games of the first day of the Argentine football season was, unfortunately, all too familiar.

The only interesting result was Lanus’s stomping 4-1 win over the should-be mighty San Lorenzo. San Martin beat another of the supposed giants, Independiente, 1-0, while Atletico de Rafaela won 3-0 against one of the favourites for the drop, Banfield.

Racing against Tigre, Belgrano versus All Boys and Colon and Arsenal were all goalless. Estudiantes against Newell’s and Velez and Godoy Cruz all shared a goal apiece.

 

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12/12
2011

Games 17, 18, 19: v Arsenal, All Boys, Olimpo

Argentinos Juniors 1 Olimpo 0

I’m sorry that I’ve fallen so far behind while so much has been happening. Two wins out of three for Argentinos Juniors sees them finish the season with 22 points and qualify for the Sudamericana Cup…the Intertoto Cup of South America. That was a 2-1 home win over Arsenal, a 1-0 defeat at All Boys and a 1-0 victory over Olimpo on the last day of the season at home.

But I guess more importantly, the world has been saved from the threat of global warming, at least on paper. I’m still in Durban, South Africa, recovering from observing two weeks of negotiation at the United Nations Climate Change talks.

Climate Change Saviours?

My work entailed interviewing anyone and everyone who had some connection with what they call the Conference of the Parties or COP17. They included scientists, negotiators, meteorologists, oceanographers, forestry experts, politicians, youth group representatives, Indonesian dancing girls, earnest Scandinavians, researchers from the Amazon and the Sahara, excited Australians who claimed to have found a way of turning camel dung into a renewable energy source that would provide power for half of Asia and more green pressure groups than you could shake a cucumber at.

We all pretty much know what the problem is. The world, but particularly the rich nations with the United States at the top of the list, have been burning so much carbon fuel – oil, coal and gas – into the air for so long that the world’s temperature is rising. And if we keep on at the present rate we’ll be fried, but not before we’ve suffered floods and droughts and starvation and possibly even plagues of locusts of biblical proportions.

Boca Juniors. A White Rhino?

Many claimed to have the answers. Vegans told us that not eating meat was the cure. His Holiness 1008 Shri Shri Soham Baba, a monk wearing orange robes and sporting a large silver tea pot, puts his money on greater spiritual awareness. He first noticed the effects of climate change while living in a cave in the Himalayas. More electric buses, more bicycles, less petrol burning cars, less long distance flights.

Everyone, it seemed, is green and no-one is polluting. One oil company executive told me his firm was exploiting oil reserves in the Ecuadoran Amazon causing the minimal amount of damage. A US navy rear admiral said he travelled the world and saw the undeniable effects of climate change in all corners, reports his findings to his government which simply chooses to continue polluting.

I visited the boat of a Swiss sailor, a former ski instructor, who noticed the ice melting around his office. Dario Schwörer embarked on a fifteen-year mission to highlight the effects of global warming by sailing the world, climbing all of the world’s highest mountains and using only his sails, his bike and his feet to do it. He’s travelling with his wife and four children. When the seas get choppy he hangs the kids from the ceiling on elastic ropes to keep them out of harms way. “Dangerous?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied. “Our biggest danger is from drunken drivers when we cycle through city centres.”

There were 194 countries represented in Durban. We could all cite many examples of any two countries with unresolved disputes stretching back hundreds of years. Try getting 194 to agree on anything.

The Rest...dung beetles?

Basically, the poor countries say they don’t pollute much yet suffer the worst of the droughts and the flooding caused by climate change which in turn has been caused by the rich world. The wealthy nations admit that there’s a problem but feel the developing countries should stop buring carbon fuels and take on equal responsibilities. And do India and especially China still qualify as developing nations?

The phrase circulating around the negotiating chambers was ‘equal but differentiated responsibilites.’ If ever there was a legal-political term designed to flumox the people then this is it. We’re all in the same boat, but some more than others.

As I’m sure you know by now, after some tense last minute huddling in dark corners, the negotiators saved the process and came up with the wording that pretty much brings all 194 nations on board.

The trouble now is that they’ll all have gone home and will, at this very moment, be poring over the small print with their lawyers to see just how differentiated they are and in what ways they can wheedle out of their full responsibilites. Meanwhile, the world continues to pollute, the temperatures are rising and the floods and droughts are becoming more severe and more frequent.

Of all the many people I spoke to, perhaps the most poignant was a young man from the remote Marshall Islands, somewhere out there in the Pacific Ocean. He was munching on a BigMac and fries during another of the many lulls in the negotiations. Every year, he said, they could observe the sea levels rising. “We move further inland,” he explained. “And one day we’ll have no-where left to go.”

I’ll be expanding my carbon footprint shortly with the flight back to Buenos Aires. By that time Boca Juniors will have finished celebrating their Apertura championship victory – unbeaten and out of sight of second-placed Racing Club.

They talk a lot in South Africa about the Big Five, the five mightiest beasts – lion, elephant, rhino, leopard and dung beetle. Sorry, that last one should read buffalo. I went on safari yesterday and only saw the rhino.

Buenos Aires has its own Big Five. Boca Juniors, River Plate, San Lorenzo, Racing Club and Independiente. Only Boca deserve that title at the moment. The rest? Dung beetles!!

 

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