Argentinos Juniors 1   Rosario Central 1

I fear the title is slipping from Argentinos Juniors’ grasp.  Too many draws in recent games have left the Red Bugs looking at the leaders through a telescope. The only good news is that they’ve recaptured their early season form and really should have won this game – only the woodwork and the Rosario goalkeeper, Jorge Braun, preventing an avalanche of Argentinos goals.

And Rosario played with ten men for much of this game, after Nahuel Valentini was sent off in the first half for a second yellow card. The visitors went ahead early on with a well-worked Emilio Zelaya goal. Nicolas Pavlovich equalised for the home side just before half-time.

Team's Best Friend

This was two workmanlike, unglamorous sides grinding out a draw on a wet, windy Friday night. Rosario Central is another of those big Argentine clubs that has promised much and delivered very little, living like so many in the shadow of Boca Juniors and River Plate. Instead of glory on the pitch, it gleans its glamour from its well-known fans. The excellent Argentine writer and cartoonist Roberto Fontanarrosa was one of the most enthusiastic, incorporating tales of football and Rosario Central into his writing and drawings, before his untimely death two years ago.

Another was that well-known revolutionary but less well-known football fan, Ernesto Che Guevara. He was born in Rosario in June 1928 so it’s no surprise they should claim him as their own. The city last year erected a statue to the bearded, beret-wearing revolutionary and recently opened a Che museum. But his ties with Argentina’s second city are flimsy, to say the least. His pregnant mum was on her way from her home in the north-east of Argentina to Buenos Aires when little Ernesto decided to make an earlier than anticipated appearance.

As soon as Mrs Guevara had recovered, she was on her way. But a revolutionary had been born, as well as a tenuous link with the city. But these days, anyone and anything that can is claiming a piece of Che, from revolutionary tourist sites around Argentina, Bolivia and Cuba, to vodka and t-shirt manufacturers around the world.

The man himself, your quintessential anti-capitalist, would be turning in his grave, wherever that is. There is some dispute over whether the bones unearthed in Bolivia near to where he died and now lying in the memorial in central Cuba, really were his. Whatever the case, he might be pleased to learn that he’s still a revolutionary inspiration to governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as student groups around the world protesting about the price of beer in the university bar.

And of course, he’s an icon for the fans and players of Rosario Central. He never saw the team play since he lived his young life hundreds of kilometres away in the province of Cordoba where, in the absence of any decent local first division teams, most of the kids supported either Boca Juniors or River Plate – both in distant Buenos Aires. But little Ernesto, showing early signs of his tendency to go against the flow, chose the blue and yellow stripes of Rosario Central, from the city of his birth.

As an asthma sufferer, he played the sport that doctors told him he shouldn’t – rugby, constantly trying to prove to himself that he could overcome any obstacles placed in his path. ‘We Will Be Like Che’ is the motto that children at Cuban schools are taught. They don’t mean that kids should grow a wispy beard, play little heed to personal hygiene and try to overthrow African and Latin American governments. Oh no!

What Che embodied, still embodies more than forty years after his death, is an idealist who stuck to his beliefs, no matter what. And whether you agree with those ideals or not, what strikes a chord in today’s public relations dominated, idealogically-lite world is that sense of single-minded purpose, a selfless quest for something better.

This is perhaps best summed up in the famous photograph of Che taken by Alberto Korda in Havana in 1960. Guevara was attending a memorial service for the victims of an explosion on a ship in Havana harbour a short while earlier. The photo didn’t even make the next day’s papers. It was no big deal. But with a little cropping, it went on to become more than a simple news photo…it embodied the ideals of a generation fighting against the old ways.

I was in Vallegrande, Bolivia, a couple of years ago for the ceremonies to mark Che’s death in 1967 at the hands of CIA-backed Bolivian troops. He was captured near the town, exhausted, weak and defeated, not much trusted by the local peasants on whose behalf he was trying to foment a revolution.

We Will Be Like Che!

But forty years on, many local people have embraced the image of Che – hanging it on their walls alongside pictures of Jesus. “I love Che,” one woman told me. “Better than the president we’ve got now. He’s far too left wing.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Moscow pulled the financial plug on Cuba, Fidel Castro’s government turned to tourism to keep the revolution afloat. Foreigners went in their thousands attracted by the beaches, the women, the rum and the romance of the revolution – symbolised to some degree in that image of Che. They returned home with a box of cigars sold to them on the street by a man called Pedro who had ‘a cousin working in a cigar factory’ and that Che t-shirt.

But why should Cuba claim him all for themselves? He was after all an Argentine. Although for many years that was not widely recognised in his homeland. From the mid-1960s to the mid-80s Argentina was mostly run by either military or Peronist governments – none of which found it in their interests to promote the imagery of Mr Guevara.

That’s different now. A few months ago I went to the house where he lived as a boy in Alta Gracia in the province of Cordoba. You can see the chairs on which he sat, the toilet in which he peed and a motor-bike very similar to the one on which he embarked on his South American adventures.

Che sells. Che inspires. Although he didn’t do much inspiring for Rosario Central tonight, who can count themselves lucky to slink back to Rosario with an ill-deserved point in the bag.