Watching Argentina play football is to see pain inflicted on an entire country such is the hope invested but rarely fulfilled. It is suffering that Argentines have had to endure for a century with only two small moments of relief. Amidst three Final failures and seventeen appearances in total the World Cup has been won just twice, in 1978 at home and again in 1986 in Mexico. In the first successful final Mario Kempes was the star. He had made his name at Rosario Central, a club at the core of the victory and where the first President had been the Scot, Colin Bain Calder. In the second it would be Maradona in his prime but that day the first goal was scored by Jorge Brown. He is a descendent of the Diasporan-Scots, footballing
Brown brothers of the first decade of the 20th century and again from a club central to that day's success.
For the first win the manager was Cesar Menotti, playing a version of 4-2-4 cum 4-3-3 against a strong Dutch team but one without Cruyff, who had not travelled for fear of kidnap. For the second in Mexico it was Carlos Bilardo playing a completely different system, 5-3-2 cum 3-5-2, against a West German team managed by Franz Beckenbauer. And it was a final that was repeated four years later with the same managers, a result that was reversed, if narrowly, and Bilardo playing almost exactly the same formation but with largely changed personnel. Jorge Brown was not there. Only Maradona remained but four years older; still good but past his best.
Cesar Menotti was born in Argentina's second city two hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires. It is Rosario. His comparatively short playing career had also begun there, as a forward, with three years also at Rosario Central, after which he would go on to play in the USA and briefly in Brazil for Santos. There he had met Pele, of whom he was a great admirer, as he was of Brazilian football of Pele's generation, the 4-2-4 that was built around him, and of footballing creativity in general, well aware of the way it could be and was stifled. He also did not conform politically. He was a maverick both within and outwith the game. He was left-wing in a right-wing state and that non-conformism was reflected in the football he wanted to see as a manager. He would be quoted as saying,
"There's a right-wing football and a left-wing football. Right-wing football wants to suggest that life is struggle. It demands sacrifices. We have to become of steel and win by any method... obey and function, that's what those with power want from the players. That's how they create retards, useful idiots that go with the system."
Cesar Menotti
That is not to say that Menotti was disorganised. He was far from it. At worst he was unsystematic, something that he would not have been unhappy about, but nevertheless his national team had a framework and a spine that was in itself interesting, two big city boys, two country boys and one in-between. In goal and captain and centre-back were Filiol and Passaella, both born in the Province of Buenos Aires and playing their football in the city of the same name. But alongside Passarella was Luis Galvan born in the northern interior of the country, whilst ahead of him making mid-field purr was Ossie Ardiles, also from the interior from the country's third city, Cordoba. Then there was Mario Kempes himself, Menotti's Pele, playing as a dropped-off inside-right, who was born in Bell Vill, a smallish town on the Pampas on the Central Argentine Railway that connected Rosario and Cordoba, two hundred and fifty miles north- and westwards. Incidentally Bell Vill itself was named after Anthony and Richard Bell, two Scots brothers from Dunbar, who had set up a cattle-ranch there. Moreover Kempes would start his football career in Cordoba before a move to Rosario, aged nineteen. There he stayed three years until he was signed by Valencia in Spain, where he was playing at the time of the Final.
Carlos Bilardo was, however, on the face of it an entirely different animal. He was definitely from Buenos Aires, a first generation Argentine, the son of Sicilian parents, and he was highly intelligent. That is not to say that Menotti wasn't. Throughout Bilardo's playing career, some of it in the Second Division, he would continue to study medicine and ceased to play when he graduated as a doctor. In terms of tactics he also looked in an entirely different direction, not to Menotti's mentor, Miguel Juarez, also born in Rosario, but to Osvaldo Zubeldía and his work with Estudiantes de la Plata between 1965 and 1970, exactly when Bilardo was a player there.
Admittedly it should be said that Zubeldia was once again not strictly from Buenos Aires but from Junin in Buenos Aires Province, and that Estudiantes de la Plata is not completely Metropolitan either. La Plata lies some forty miles to the south of BA. However, his playing career had been in the metropolis and, as a manager, he also cut his teeth there before in 1965 a short and unsuccessful period as national team manager. It seems then he had a rethink. On joining Estudiantes that same year he became the first, in Argentine football at least, not just to study in detail rival team's tactics and playing styles but introduce rehearsed free kicks, use tactical fouls to stop the opposition, screening at corners and the offside trap. In Menotti's terms he played "right-wing" football and, although in British terms none of it was new, nothing more than good organisation that had been de rigeur in the professional game for at least half a century, in 1960s "Argentina" it was a revelation.
It was this Zubeldia style of organised play, in which Bilardo would first be immersed and then inherit. As a player he was its fulcrum, the defensive midfielder and on-pitch tactician in a team that would not just win one Metropolitan title, and be runner-up the following year, but also three Copa Liberadores and, in defeating Manchester United, the Intercontinental Cup. Then a year after Zubeldia had stood down he would step into his Estudiantes shoes for three years, wander a little before himself managing the national side very successfully for seven years from 1983.
That all being said it would not be unreasonable to assume Bilardo for his national team players would have drawn on what he knew, i.e Buenos Aires. Certainly Maradona was from the city and Jorge Brown played for Estudiantes de la Plata itself but the goalkeeper was a country boy, the two centre-backs had been born less than a year apart in Cordoba, Burruchaga in central mid-field was a real country boy and as was centre-forward, Valdano. The only thing that seems to tie them at least partially together is that all the defenders played in Buenos Aires and the attack, whilst it was separately playing abroad, had come from up-country.
And this last observation, although it may may appear to be light-weight, actually might spot-light what is symptomatic, what is at the root of the Argentine dilemma, or rather two dilemmas making a quandary. There has always been tension in Argentina's game. It is painted, when new, as between the "Ingles", actually Scots, who brought and, not without often unacknowledged difficulties, planted the game in the country, and the Crillos, the native-born, who came to it and took it up. It is a tension that was fallacious, hence
The Crillo Fallacy. The "Ingles" were in the main crillo too, Argentine-born and Spanish-speaking like the others. It was just that their second language happened to be English and not Italian, Gallego, Catalan or Basque. It was a tension that was ramped up for understandable, nationalist reasons, however a tone was set that has continued. As the "Ingles" problem died a death, not least because of the ravages of Great War, Buenos Aires became dominant. It is no coincidence that with a few exceptions Buenos Aires players filled national teams for the next seventy years, as did as a consequence the Buenos Aires administrators and the Buenos Aires style of play. The latter was particularly unfortunate as it a style that rejected that of the original transmitters and founders, the
Scots and their short-passing game, and looked instead to England and then to Italy, with in the 1930s it adapted long-ball, English-style under Vittoria Pozza. It was a period when there seemed to be almost free movement between Argentina and the Italian national team followed by the equally Italian, defensive and often brutal Catenaccio of the 1950s and 1960s. This was in sharp contrast to Argentina's neighbours, where in
Rio and
Sao Paulo and in
Montevideo the Scottish style short-ball would take root and local styles be developed be based on it.
This situation, whilst unhelpful, might have continued to be at least accepted had Buenos Aires remained as dominant a force. But times change. Modern communications have cut down distance and population spread. The city of Buenos Aires today numbers almost three million. There are sixteen and half million in the city and greater, metropolitan region combined and perhaps twenty million in them and the immediately surrounding area. Yet today the country has a population of forty-four million. and it now is split roughly half and half between BA and non-BA. In footballing terms it has meant clubs from Buenos Aires have been able to raid the interior for talent that it values but it has also had a side-effect. As football over the last century has spread into the provinces but largely outwith the reach of the capital it has allowed the implanting and development of other forms of the game and therefore the production of players with talents not necessarily valued in Buenos Aires but valuable elsewhere. It has also allowed clubs outwith Buenos Aires to flourish, find their own players and their own styles. It is no coincidence that Messi is from Rosario, that de Maria played for the same Rosario team as Kempes, that Dybala began at the same team in Cordoba as Ardiles and that Marcelo Bielsa is also Rosario-born, all beyond the constraints of the capital.
And so finally to the quandary - how to make Argentine national football function at a level commensurate with the talent the country produces. Firstly the Buenos Aires dilemma has to be resolved. There can only be one way. BA accepts that it is no longer dominant and that it has to listen to the rest of the country, not least because that rest is the source of the best thinking and much of the best on-field, creative talent, if not talent overall. Secondly, it has to understood that style and system are not at loggerheads. Choose one or the other according to talent available. Menotti and Bilardo did it right and made both work. Sometimes there will be failure but indecisive fudging between the two and therefore between management and players will, as seen at most World Cups, make that failure certain. And finally stop looking for the next argument. They started with the Crillo Fallacy, have continued ever since and have, with two, perhaps three, notable exceptions got Argentina nowhere.