Argentinos Juniors  1  Tigre  1

There were five or six of them, middle-aged chaps, working men no doubt with families and bills to pay. But they spent pretty much the whole match, their faces pressed to the wire fence, spewing insults at the Tigre manager, Ricardo Caruso Lombardi. These were not jocular snipes which Lombardi could deflect with witty ripostes. This was pure hatred and the manager was clearly unnerved, aware that if there were no wire fence, these men would tear him limb from limb. He responded, which was daft, since the group of abusers only got angrier. Eyeballs bulged, veins stood out on temples and they whacked the fence.

I didn’t know what Lombaridi had done to offend them but short of cooking and eating their wives and daughters, I could think of no crime that justified such vitriol. So I investigated and found out that he was a former manager of Argentinos Juniors – an unsuccessful manager so that hatred was justified afterall.

The abusers hardly watched the action on the pitch which was a shame since this was a great game with Argentinos Juniors playing smooth attacking football and effectively stifling the Tigre attack. Nicolas ‘The Vulture’ Pavlovich reaped the reward for this domination with a scrambled goal on 15 minutes. Then in the second half it all fell apart when the Argentinos goalkeeper, Nicolas Peric, momentarily lost his head and ran out of his box to palm away an innocuous ball. The referee had no hesitation in showing him the red card and the Red Bugs were on the back foot.

Tigre made them pay 15 minutes from the end when the league’s top scorer, Carlos Luna, headed home the equaliser in his team’s only attack of the match.

But the real violence has been happening elsewhere in Argentine football.  The game between Newell’s Old Boys and Velez Sarsfield in the city of Rosario attracted only about half of the spectators that normally attend. Thousands stayed away because they were scared and they were right to be.

Six Argentine football fans have been killed in the past month in internal battles for control of the barrabrava. It’s the same old story – there’s money in drugs and there’s power and influence to be had in aligning your group of thugs to the politicians and businessmen who run Argentine football.

But this year there’s an added incentive. Elements within the Argentine government are forking out all-expenses paid trips to South Africa in June for several hundred fans to support the national team. Numbers are limited and everyone wants a piece of the action. It’s difficult to see what’s in it for the government. There’ll be flags and banners waved on international television and with elections due next year some may even sport the names of the presidential couple, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner.

The latest victim of this violence was Roberto ‘Pimpi’ Camino who was gunned down outside a bar in the city of Rosario. He was an ex-leader of the Newell’s Old Boys barrabrava, hoping to make a comeback. Initial investigations suggest that he was perhaps killed by a group of drug dealers called The Monkies who have links with both of the city’s first division teams – Newell’s and Rosario Central. . They supported him when his star waned but when Pimpi started to operate a parallel drug enterprise, they took offence. Or Pimpi was killed by former policemen who felt he was not respecting their territory. The owner of the bar where the hit took place was himself an ex-policeman called The Bull while the man suspected of ordering the killing is a serving policeman known as The Black Angel. If your nickname is The Black Angel or The Bull you’ll get little job satisfaction handing out parking tickets and giving directions to tourists.  But I’m not sure I’d be frightened of anyone nicknamed Pimpi, however big his belly was.

Among the recent deaths was that of fourteen-year-old Newell’s fan, Walter Caceres, who was shot on a bus returning from a game and policeman, Sergio Rodriguez, caught in the crossfire of a fight at a train station between Estudiantes fans.

None of the violence took place in the grounds so the football administration is quick to distance itself from the killings. “Not our responsibility,” they’ll say. “Blame society.”

There have been 249 football related deaths in Argentina and all the indications are that it’s only going to get worse. Thankfully, Argentinos Juniors is a happy neighbourhood club. The police seem almost embarrassed to search me on the way in and the violence is only verbal and mostly directed at the officials and the opposing team.

Their historic rivals are Platense, a team that plays in an unappealing brown and white strip and are nicknamed the calamares or squid. They’re currently lurking in the nether regions of the second division so the two clubs have not met for some years but there’s a catchy little number sung on the terraces that suggests chopping up and cooking all marine creatures with tentacles.

Heavy rain again played havoc with the weekend football, with the superclassico between Boca Juniors and River Plate suspended after ten minutes  when it became apparent that the players would need snorkels and flippers to continue playing. Despite black market tickets selling for thousands, this is a game that means little since both giants are languishing in the bottom half of the table. Independiente , with a 2-0 win over Rosario Central, are now clear leaders with nine games to play.