Argentines will criticise their government for many things but I hope they give them a standing ovation for the latest announcement.  The education minister, Alberto Sileoni, has said that schools should show the Argentina games during the World Cup. Not only should they show them, they will be incorporated into the curriculum. Mr Sileoni called the World Cup a ‘party with a huge effect on teaching.’

So no clandestine listening to radios behind the bike sheds, no phoning in sick, no sneaky calls home during the break to check the latest score. The Argentine Football Association is even going to work with the education authorities to produce a folder on the games. Wonderful!

Past your bedtime, chicos!

So when the World Cup is over, you’ll be able to stop any Argentine child on the street and ask him or her about recent Nigerian religious and ethnic strife, or the current state of South Korean cinema or perhaps whether they think the European Union should bail out the leaky Greek economy.  They’ll also be learning about recent South African history and whether Argentina is more suited to a 4-4-2 or a 4-3-3 formation.

So Juan’s school timetable will look something like this: 0900-1000 Maths. 1015 Mid-morning break. 1015-1115 History. 1115-1315 Argentina v South Korea. (Homework: 1,000 words – Lionel Messi has never reproduced his Barcelona form for the national side because he doesn’t get the same quality of service – Discuss.)

During the 2006 World Cup, many schools did suspend classes to show the key games. Some closed altogether in the knowledge that half the class simply wouldn’t turn up – because the kids wouldn’t come if they didn’t have to, obviously, but also because the parents wouldn’t have brought them and half the teachers would have called in sick.

It’s been said in one of those surveys commissioned to confirm what we already know, that 91% of Argentines are interested in the World Cup and will at least watch the games in which the national side is involved.

The week Argentina met Germany in the 2006 quarter finals, a national newspaper took a photograph of the busy 9 de Julio junction with Corrientes right in the centre of Buenos Aires at two on a weekday afternoon when it was chocoblock with angry, frustrated, impatient motorists all with somewhere very important to get to. The following day at the same time they took the same picture which showed just one car, a dog sniffing a dustbin and what looked like a couple of bemused-looking tourists, probably Canadians.

Every shop, restaurant, newspaper kiosk and petrol station will have their TVs on for the World Cup. I’ve even seen shoeshine men out on the street with small battery-run screens positioned next to their polish.

Football in Argentina is infused into children from birth. Boys play football at school and in the parks like they do anywhere else. It’s also a tradition here for all the kids in the class to have birthday parties to which all the others in the class are invited, even snotty-nosed Carolina who no-one ever wants to sit next to. That means you get at least 20 parties a year and a lucrative industry of fiesta salons has developed, providing entertainers and food.

A popular version among the boys is to hire an indoor pitch with trainer and play footy for an hour-and-a-half, followed by hot-dogs, fizzy drinks and birthday cake.

That’s tough for that 0000.1% of boys that don’t like football. They simply have to play with the girls and then wait until they’re older and can pursue their interest in model trains, music or clothes design.

And those same kids will continue playing football together beyond school and into adulthood. I’ve seen groups of elderly men, too frail to kick a ball, but still meeting for the post-football pizza and beer as they have every Tuesday evening for the past fifty years – just without the football.

Child Prodigy...Little Diego.

Argentina boasts a well-run and well-coached network of football schools which ensure that little potential talent falls through the net. The professional clubs all have nursery teams and both the clubs and parents will invest a massive amount of time and effort in nurturing little Carlos or Javier’s footballing genius.

But if Argentina falls down in the latter stages of this World Cup, I think I know what the problem is. They never had enough sleep as children and will simply run out of steam.

Tonight’s game kicked off at 8.30 and didn’t finish until well gone 10. By the time you’ve left the stadium and arrived home you could be talking about close to midnight. The terraces were crawling with children, yet Tuesday is a school day, kicking off at 8.15am.

There’s many a time that I’ve been leaving a restaurant at elevenish at night, early by Argentine standards, to see families arriving – with their children. It’s perfectly normal for my kids’ friends to phone at gone 10, on a school night, and ask to speak to them. I’m not allowed to say that they’ve gone to bed since that would make them the subject of ridicule the following day.

I think I’ll drop a note to Diego and tell him that the squad needs to be in bed by ten and then be fed a hearty breakfast the next morning.

Argentinos Juniors have obviously been getting plenty of sleep and eating lashings of porridge for breakfast since, despite a nervy performance against Colon, they seem to be staying the course.

Argentinos Juniors goalkeeper, Nicolas Peric, gets my man of the match award. He saved a Colon penalty on twenty minutes, blocked a couple of fine shots and was hugely entertaining as he stamped the ground in rage and harangued his colleagues after Colon scored a last minute consolation goal. First half goals from Oritigoza and Calderon and a second half strike from Ismael Sosa also helped, as did the fact that the match officials don’t seem to grasp the offside rule.

This win plants Argentinos Juniors in second place behind Godoy Cruz on goal difference. Earlier in the day, they put six past Tigre. Independiente and Estudiantes are sniffing our backsides, just two points behind with five nerve-tingling games to go.

At least Argentinos Juniors managed to dodge the rain and play the full ninety minutes. Two of their five matches played so far this season were abandoned after the skies opened and the teams were not equipped with the flippers and snorkels needed to finish the game.

This was one the boys from Buenos Aires really should have won against a poor Tucuman side. Sloppy defending allowed Claudio Sarrio to put the home side in front in the third minute. But from then on it was all one-way traffic. Javier Paez equalised with an impressive own-goal in the 28th minute. Argentinos hit the woodwork twice, had the Tucuman keeper contorting himself into positions he didn´t know were possible and saw countless sophisticated moves break down on the edge of the penalty area.

It wasn´t going to be. But if Argentinos Juniors keep playing this way they will reap the benefits, eventually, with the results they deserve. Theirs is a history of remaining true to their footballing ideals, for which they´re rewarded every one-hundred years or so. Given that they last paid a visit to the trophy engravers in the mid-eighties, glory is due some time in the middle of the twenty-first century. That was the message I came away with after a visit to Argentinos Juniors´ newly opened museum.

Old Shirts

On the bus to the ground I warned my kids not to expect too much from the  museum. It wouldn’t be like the Boca Juniors or the Real Madrid museums that we’d visited previously. We’ve got photographs of us pretending to pee in all the urinals in the Bernabeu changing room since we know that at some stage, before some particularly nerve-wracking match, David Beckham would have used at least one of them. So would Alfredo di Stefano, Cristiano Ronaldo, Steve McManaman and Luis Figo for that matter. We’ve pissed where the greats have pissed.

At Boca’s Bombonera stadium, we sat where Diego Maradona sat before each game, beneath a small shrine and statue of the Virgin Saint of plump little arrogant but amazingly talented footballers. The dazzle created by the collection of silverware in both museums is so great that the use of sunglasses is recommended.

That’s not the case at Argentinos Juniors. They did in the mid-eighties, remarkably, unbelievably, win two Argentine national championships and the South American club title, the Copa Libertadores. But it has to be said that the Argentinos Juniors museum is a modest one telling the tale of a modest club. They do, however, do it very well.

The ticket man was unsure about the prices and called upstairs. I got the impression that any reasonable contribution would have been welcome. This is one of only three football club museums in Argentina – the other two being the aforementioned Boca Juniors and the not-to-be-outdone- by-their-rivals River Plate, who have just opened theirs. There are no open-topped tourist buses parked outside.

El Diez

The museum is only open for three hours on a Saturday morning. We wandered aimlessly into the ground, not sure where we going, until we came across the word ‘museo’ stencilled on the concrete pillars. We were welcomed by our guides, Alberto, Eduardo and Dario. The first thing we were told, as a point of pride and not an apology, was that the museum had been financed and stocked by the fans. And they keep donating dog-earred programmes and newspaper cuttings, pre-sponsorship shirts and a ticket from that 1954 match against San Lorenzo which they’ve found stuffed into the pocket of some baggy shorts.

Our guides were first and foremost fans. The club, with various changes of neighbourhood, stadium, name and footballers’ hairstyles has been in existence since 1904. And in place of pride in the entrance was an original piece of wooden terracing.

There is silverware on display on the shelves but the gaps between the cups have to be filled with old programmes, newspaper articles and other bits and pieces of footballing paraphernalia representing past decades. There’s a wooden corner flag pole, bits of goal net and a knife once thrown on the pitch in a particularly tense game.

Alberto, our well-informed guide, was constantly interrupted by his colleagues, keen to impart their own memories and opinions. A video was shown detailing the club’s history and as I watched, I could hear the guides, who must have seen the goals from those key games a million times, unable to contain muffled cheers since that 1977 goal against Independiente still meant something to them.

Argentinos Juniors prides itself on being the seedbed of Argentine footballing talent – the Temple of Football, they call it. Among those over the years to pull on the red shirt with a sometimes diagonal, sometimes horizontal white stripe are Juan Román Riquelme, Juan Pablo Sorín, Esteban Cambiasso, Fabricio Coloccini, Fernando Redondo, Julio Arca, Claudio Borghi and 1986 World Cup winner, Sergio Batista.

The Libertadores Cup - Really!

One name, of course, stands out above all others. The stadium, for Christ’s sake, is called the Diego Armando Maradona and his family claims the only executive box at the club. His picture is everywhere – a fresh-faced, cocaine-free, innocent look about him. Many of our guides had seen him take the pitch as a precocious sixteen-year-old and still talked with unbridled enthusiasm about his raw talent. Diego was at the inauguration of the museum in December, still harbouring a soft-spot for the club which gave him his start in the kids’ team, the Cebollitas or Little Onions.

He went on to the much bigger and more prestigious Boca Juniors but with the money received from that sale the club could put together a team that a few years later conquered first Argentina then South America.

When I tried to explain my affinity for West Ham, as a club that put more store by playing well than winning at all costs, our guides nodded enthusiastically and with understanding. “Yes, that’s us too,” they said. We all know deep down that that’s simply a euphemism to justify our loyalty to a team that is simply not very good. But without that kind of self-delusion we’d all be Chelsea, Barcelona and Boca Juniors fans.  And where’s the fun in that?!

What I’ve known since I’ve been watching Argentinos Juniors and was emphasised at the museum is that this is a neighbourhood club. It’s riddled with nostalgia. Nearly all the fans live in, or used to live in, or their grandparents lived in La Paternal. Grandads salute grandsons on the terraces on a Sunday afternoon. Boys and girls met here, relationships were formed and babies carried on shoulders, forced to watch another 0-0 draw against Newell’s Old Boys.

This is the kind of club where you feel like tossing your hat into the air when they score. And the museum reflects all of that. The guides were flattered, possibly flabbergasted, that a foreigner should support and become a season-ticket holder of their modest club. Alberto kept calling his mates over and saying: “He’s English, his oldest son was born in London, the youngest one in Spain…..AND THEY SUPPORT ARGENTINOS JUNIORS!!!”

If I was just an enthusiastic observer when I went to the museum, I was a fan by the time I came out. My nine-year-old son, Lucas, who had until then called himself a Boca supporter like his mum, confided that he was switching his allegiance. He’d found his team, the club that fitted his character and personality, where he felt he belonged. His mother is in shock but Boca, surely, have got enough fans already?

Photos by Benja and Lucas