Racing Club 2 Argentinos Juniors 1
There’s been a pattern to Argentinos Juniors’ play this season. They tend to dominate the first half with some neat passing from midfield. Their defence is solid but their attack is woeful. They’ll take the lead but then can’t use their dominance to finish the game off and gradually their opponents get more and more into the game until the equaliser, followed swiftly by a scrappy winner, becomes inevitable.
Such was the case today. This was my first visit to the Racing ground which somehow manages to be both huge and intimate. It’s got plenty of echo and the travelling support, with a consistent drum contingent, was ear-splittingly noisy.
Ear-splittingly Noisy
Franco Niell put Argentinos ahead in the first half. Racing were simply not very good and Argentinos should have made them pay. Perhaps they’re just too nice. The Colombian Giovanni Moreno played a blinder and his equaliser, from a free kick, was sublime, just sneaking over the wall and into the top left-hand corner. Nicolas Navarro had no chance.
There wasn’t much he could do about the second either, also scored by Moreno. But one of the best moments of the game was the save he made near the end. I was right behind the goal so had a perfect view and was sure the ball was about to hit the back of the net when Navarro leapt across the face of the goal and pushed it away.
He’s a fine keeper and exudes confidence in his defence. Although some fans have questioned why the manager brought him in at the start of the season when they already had a perfectly good stopper in the young Luis Ojeda, who more than earned a permanent place in the run-in to winning the championship. The money, they argue, would have been better spent on a ruthless front man.
Argentina has always been blessed with talented and interesting goalkeepers.
At the top of the list is Ubaldo Fillol, nicknamed The Duck, who played in the 1978 World Cup winning team and in the less- memorable 1982 campaign. He also had two stints at Racing and played 17 games for Argentinos Juniors in 1983.
Racing Club - Huge yet Intimate
The current number one Number One, Sergio Romero, playing in Holland, I believe is a worthy successor.
One of the more colourful characters in the Argentine game in recent years was the Paraguayan keeper, Jose Luis Chilavert, who helped Velez Sarsfield to a hatful of titles and the Copa Libertadores in the nineties.
He was a restless goalkeeper, often straying up to the half-way line and was a useful penalty taker, scoring sixty-two goals in his career, including three in one match in the Argentine league against Ferrocarril Oeste. He also played in Spain, France and Uruguay and was last in the news when he announced he would consider standing as president in future elections in Paraguay.
The darkest and most sinister of Argentine goalkeepers was Edgardo ‘The Cat’ Andrada who played for Rosario Central and Colon in Argentina and Vasco in Brazil. He’ll go into the record books as the keeper who let in Pele’s 1,000th goal, from a penalty, in a game between Vasco and Santos.
They say that goalkeepers, like drummers, are weird and Andrada would appear to fit that bill. He’s being investigated after a major figure from the dictatorship that terrorised Argentina during the nineteen-seventies and eighties said the keeper was part of a gang that kidnapped and tortured opponents of the regime.
Andrada - Just a Goalkeeper?
He’s been accused of being an intelligence agent for the military government and of involvement in the kidnap and murder of two political activists, Osvaldo Cambiaso y Eduardo Pereira Rossi. Andrada, not surprisingly, denies everything. “I was just a goalkeeper,” he says.
On the receiving end of those dark years of military terror known as ‘The Dirty War’ was another goalkeeper, Claudio Tamburrini who played for the second division outfit, Almagro. He was kidnapped in November 1977 by agents working for the air force and taken to a detention centre. He was involved in student politics but was probably picked up since another student, under torture, gave up his name, any name, simply to stop them hurting him. Tamburrini was held there for four months, strapped naked to a bed and subjected to regular torture until, with three fellow inmates, he managed to escape.
He made it into exile in Sweden where he still lives, as a writer and philosopher. He wrote a book about his ordeal and escape called Free Pass – Chronicle of an Escape. I interviewed him in Buenos Aires a few years ago when he was here to promote the release of the film based on the book.
The film is excellent, starting with powerful images of the four fleeing prisoners running naked along a deserted road in the early hours of the morning. He has a good life now as a well-respected academic and writer – some reward for an ordeal that continues to haunt the individuals it terrorised as well as the nation that produced it.
Like all the survivors of the Dirty War that I’ve interviewed, Tamburrini exuded a calmness, a quiet determination to overcome his nightmare and understand how the torturers could have done what they did to fellow human beings.
British poet Simon Armitage has written about goalkeepers in verse and prose and said this in The Guardian after the blunder by England’s Robert Green in the game against the US at the 2010 World Cup: “Goalkeepers are, by definition, weirdos and odd ones out: they put their faces where others put their studs, and their chosen function in a sport defined by its flow and energy is one of apparent inaction followed by occasional moments of joy-killing intervention.”
The front page news on Monday morning was simply that Boca Juniors won a game…2-0 at home to Huracan with that old war-horse, Martin Palermo, scoring the first. River Plate could only manage a 2-2 draw at Godoy Cruz. Estudiantes stay top after a 1-1 result against Colon while Velez keep up the pressure, just three points behind, after beating bottom club, Quilmes, 2-0. Arsenal are equal second after beating Gimnasia 3-2. Argentinos play All Boys next Saturday. They beat Independiente 3-1. San Lorenzo 2 Tigre 0; Olimpo 1 Lanus 0 and Banfield 0 Newell’s 0.
