“Enrique hooks it to Maradona. Maradona on the ball now, two closing him down. He breaks away down the right, the genius of world football! He goes past a third, looks for Burruchaga! Maradona forever! Genius, genius, genius!... Gol?!... Gooool! Goooooool!...I’m going to cry! Good God! Long live football! What a goal! Maradona! Cosmic kite, which planet have you come from?! To turn the whole country into a clenched fist, shouting for Argentina! Thank you, God, for football, for Maradona, for these tears and for this scoreline: Argentina 2 – England 0!”
— Legendary commentator, Victor Morales, England vs Argentina, World Cup quarter-final, Azteca Mexico, June 22, 1986.
The imp from Villa Firorito probably learned to run in his mind, even before he could walk. For as long as anyone could remember he has been a rascal on the run – dribbling past censure, poverty, defenders, referees, scandals and myths to embrace that instant gratification of a goal. One may try to replicate the heady high of being the ringmaster of La Bombonera, Azteca, and San Paolo with all the stimulants in the world, but they would each fail spectacularly.
Grimacing, pleading, limping, praying, celebrating – dampen the sound of the crowd’s crescendo behind him as he runs, slow down the frames and play Isaac Albeniz’s Asturias underneath his highlight reels – Diego Armando Maradona suddenly becomes this operatic symbol of the constant human struggle between anonymity and adventure, ignominy and glory.
El Diego had a devilish habit of prancing with the ball, with a bit of his tongue sticking out the corner of his sweaty lips; fittingly too, forever taunting fate and the flatfooted. The designated King of the Paupers, this maverick’s marauding raids were not merely dribbles – they were expeditions into the unknown. His imagination weaved and charted impudent courses for countless others to follow – the pied-piper of parvenus has generations of wishful footballers and would-be-kings wanting to follow his tune. He was a warrior-poet of potreros and of pavements, who wrote epics with the strokes of his limbs, levelling footballing empires in his wake.
Just as El Diego was an expeditionist, tripping up booby-traps of flailing legs of the barrios – Jonathan Wilson, multi-award-winning football historian, had to negotiate his fair share of brisk-walking around the streets of Buenos Aires, prodding the booby-traps of hearsay and dismantling the grand old myths of Argentine football. The scholar from Sunderland has anatomised Diego Maradona’s Argentina in Angels With Dirty Faces, with gumption and style – making it a literary foray unlike any other on the subject of football culture, in terms of comprehensiveness and insight.
In the final part of the two-part interview with Scroll, the award-winning author speaks about his latest book and the serendipitous rewards of investigative journalism.
(The first part can be read here)
Argentina is a nation of contradictions and clench-jawed biases, big enough to resist being tied down by facts. Is this your most resilient work yet? Were the occasions you were thrown off course?
It was certainly my most interesting my work yet, because there are times that you realise that there is a lie that was being told hundreds of years ago, and something that everyone just believed and kept copying. So, it’s really exciting when you prove it’s not true. All of a sudden, Imre Hirschl – a hugely influential figure for Argentine football in the 1930s, with Gimansia La Plata and then at River Plate – was shrouded in mystery. He claimed he played with the much-acclaimed Ferencvacos side that toured Argentina in 1929. I wrote that in Inverting the Pyramid – I had no reason to not believe it to be true, as every Argentine source confidently asserted it to be true. And for this book, I went to the Ferencvaros and said, -tell me about him and they said, we’ve never heard of him, he never played for us. The man who produced the first great River Plate side, one of the better mangers from the famous coffee houses of Budapest, was now suddenly a man from nowhere.
(Some say he played for Budapest Athletic Club, some say he played for Hakoah Vienna or New York, some link him to Racing Club in Paris, while Uruguay’s Penarol claims him as one of his own, and deems him to be “one of the best players in the world”. Upon further investigation, he turned out to be, loosely speaking, a butcher, playing for a semi-professional, factory team, Husos FC, in second division Hungary, and later a World War I veteran!)
So, when you start unpacking something like that, that is really exciting – that’s the dream of any writer, to find stuff that nobody has ever known before. So, yes, it does make it difficult, but I believe, that’s we live for – to find the truth, and when you have the truth which has been forgotten, in his case for 85 years – it’s a really good feeling.
This book is an expedition, a collection of stories that span centuries. You have managed to excavate mythical anecdotes in the most unexpected of places, and tie it up with footballing themes. How do you go about finding these stories? Did you ever feel like Indiana Jones?
I’m not like Indiana Jones, sorry! James P Montague is (football literature’s) Indiana Jones! No, I spend most of my time in libraries, I’m not exciting in any way! Libraries and cafes – that’s my environment.
So, when you’re writing a book, there are two sorts of information you need: You know the kind you have, and the other is stuff that you go out to get. I need to talk a player who played for this team, who is still alive, who is still fit and healthy, who will be good to talk. Okay, he will, I’ll try and get hold of him. You go and meet him. Then, he may mention things that may trigger other thoughts, and may put you in touch with other people. You can be calculated about that kind of thing. You may know that, okay, I’ve got to read this biography of Marcelo Bielsa. I have a friend who works for El Grafico, who is very helpful in terms of going through their archives and finding stories for me. So, with that sort of focus, you say to him, I want to know about Racing from the 1960s, and he’ll go through the archives, find something interesting and send it to me.
But in many ways, the most exciting stuff is the serendipitous stuff – what you find by total accident. And you come across those by reading – I got myself loads of novels by Argentines and many books about Argentina, and I read them. Some of those were… useless, no information on them at all. Probably all of them, though, in some way or form, helped me understand the tone.
I went through a spell of watching huge amounts of Argentine cinema from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Most of them are on YouTube – which is quite nice. So, I write a column about Manchester United, and I think, okay, before I do this next column about Liverpool, I’ll watch half-an-hour of this Argentine film to refresh my mind. So, you sort of hope that the connections appear – you can’t really force it. And then you get a link that is completely accidental.
Can you give us an example of that?
I went to Sunderland v Arsenal, I ended up getting there far too early, so I thought, okay, let’s kill a bit of time. There was an exhibition on tapestry by Grayson Perry – a British artist, a winner of The Turner Prize, likes to cross-dress. One of his big themes is about what masculinity is. So, he went to Sunderland – a typical working-class post-industrial town to investigate that on a brilliant documentary. He goes to pubs, dressed as a woman, despite being clearly a man, talking to people who don’t necessarily appreciate that kind of thing. And one of the things he produced later was this series of tapestries called Vanities of Small Differences.
One of them charts a kid born in Sunderland, who ends up moving away because he gets a good job, and then he gets a sense of not really belonging to either culture. (And as being a Sunderland-born myself, and having pretty much done that journey, it really moved me.) The first scene is a baby being born presented with a Sunderland AFC jersey, which is now the mark of his tribe – which is to say: You are Sunderland, you will not leave Sunderland, this is your tribe!
That was in the back of my mind when I found out Lionel Messi, when he was one-year-old, was given a Newell’s Old Boy jersey. And that’s exactly the same thing of the child being given the mark of his tribe – you are Newell’s, you are Rosario! And then, Messi breaking away from all of that to go to Barcelona – you now suddenly understand a bit more of the trauma of that.
So, that link between Messi and Grayson Perry, you certainly can’t plan for that. You expose yourself to new ideas, the connections spring at you, and things just fit together.
We come across critiques in the book, where Argentine philosophers and journalists labelling British football as “theoretical”, while their football is set in practice running out there on vacant concrete lots with the ball till knees legs would buckle. Could you comment on this paradox?
This concept is slightly confusing. In the early 20th century the Argentinean’s idea of English football was all about being mechanistic - being very cold and planned. I believe that that’s only partially true. Yes, English football was mechanistic, yet mechanistic not in the way they thought it was. I guess, the Argentinean experience of the English was probably school teachers – people who lay down rules, all about laws, the right way to do things – ironically, English football is actually a working-class game back in England.
From growing out of public schools and universities that laid down the laws, to professionalism being legalised in 1885 by the English FA, because the players needed money – the protagonists back then were nowhere near rich.
The ethos that prevailed there, was the ethos of the factory. It’s the people who work in the mines, who work in the shipyards, or work in the textile mills. There’s no place for slacking off, no place for being clever, no place for bright ideas – you just do your job, over and over, and over again – and if you work as hard as you can, people respect you for it. That’s the ethos that governs English football, and that’s the decree.
Whereas, the Argentinean game, because it grows up on the streets and not in the schools, it’s uncheated, uninhibited, it looks for ways around the rigid laws and players have to learn to look after themselves. Thereby, becoming more inventive. But then, you have a paradox – the greatest of all Argentinian teams is called La Máquina (The Machine – nickname given to the River Plate team from 1941 to 1947, that won 8 titles). So, this revulsion against mechanism was quickly overcome.
Also, I believe, there are two types of machines – there’s the rudimentary mill; and then there’s the watch, which has real aesthetic beauty to its mechanisms. I guess, that’s what we get from La Máquina – the idea that this is a beautifully fragile mechanism, with lots of minute, individual parts which all fit together brilliantly. Whereas the mechanistic British football, it’s more industrial.
Is there any other myth you’d like to dispel about Argentinean football?
Something that has been quite unhelpful for them for a long time, is the dichotomy between Carlos Bilardo and Cesar Luis Menotti. Greyed-out sideburns, Houndstooth blazer, and like Matthew McConaughey in True Dectective, a chain-smoker, sharing a talent for making his cigarettes defy gravity, letting it hang from the corner of his mouth – Menotti was the embodiment of the South American “cool”, and the manager who brought Argentina their first World Cup in 1978. “You can lose a game,” he used to say, “but what you cannot lose is the dignity earned by playing good football”.
Menotti believed that football was to be enjoyed as a spectacle, and was supposedly the complete antithesis of track-suited, drop-and-give-me-fifty, Carlos Bilardo. He was the coach who would cement himself in history as the man who guided Maradona to his destiny, winning the 1986 World Cup, was from the Osvaldo Zubeldia school of anti-futbol – where the result was to be the-be-all-and-end-all in a football match.“Football is about winning and nothing else.”The sort of football, the Argentine press remarked, as one would watch and play “with their eyes half-closed”.
There’s this idea that there are two ways of playing football, and you either fall in one category or the other – which is just not true. There is a spectrum, and I don’t even think Menotti and Bilardo are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Menotti had clear Bilardista elements in how he physically prepared his players. His sides were laced with pragmatism and gamesmanship - which was not sort of this pure form of football, despite what he said.
Marcelo Bielsa has broken down the dichotomy by providing a third way of play, which is neither one nor the other. The idea that there was this dichotomy between Menotists and Bilardistas – I don’t think that was helpful – a lot of coaches who could have found a middle ground were restricted because they found themselves being pigeonholed. It took somebody was as eccentric and as strong-willed as Marcelo Bielsa to break that mold.
Jonathan Wilson is one of the most venerated historians of the beautiful game, and the author of 8 critically-acclaimed books. His latest book, Angels With Dirty Faces is available in stores. He tweets @jonawils
Srijandeep Das is the chief editor of Football Paradise, which has been bestowed the prestigious Judges’ Choice Award at the International Football Blogging Awards 2016, at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium. He tweets @srijandeep