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

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

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.