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After years and leagues of exploration, Angel has managed to

integrate himself into the deepest fabric of football and, by an
inevitable fusion effect, integrate football into his own fabric. This
book is therefore proof of a great adventure. On his imaginary green
table, the ball is a crystal ball that allows him to organize childhood
memories, revive characters, review professional episodes, relate
ideas and create a story of passions. Under his microscope, the
game's plot is both a personal experience and a multiple plot. In
reality, it gets so confused with its own cells that we may be looking
at an intimate diary.
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Angel Cappa

The intimacy of football

Greatness and miseries, game and environment

ePub r1.0
Contrast 20.07.13
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Original title: The intimacy of football. Greatness and miseries, game and environment.
Ángel Cappa, 1996 Cover retouch: Jorge Fernández

Digital Publisher: Contrast

ePub base r1.0
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I'm angry at silence for

how much I lost.
Don't stay silent who
wants to live happily.

Atahualpa Yupanqui

Who can say that in life the

game has
less value than serious things?
Alberto Moravia
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To the fighters without reward,

who are an example of dignity.
To those who raise utopia as a way of life and
resist accepting the end of history that
those who rule want to decree.
to the disobedient
that they always have "an order to mess up"
as a poem by Benedetti suggests.
To those who are accused of being romantics and
dreamers and marked as
losers, who still prefer poetry.
To those who try to change reality, to make
it fairer, more human, more beautiful.
To those who suffer the injustice
of an order established for a few and
rebel.
To those who live football from the
illusion and only think about the result
when the game ends.
To my friends.
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Presentation

Julio-Cesar Iglesias

Angel Cappa's best friends know that he has the same love relationship with football
as the bird with the snake. Moved by a mysterious curiosity, he approaches him,
follows the swings of the ball with an almost magnetic punctuality, and suddenly gets
caught in the curves of the game with that gesture of astonishment that only those who
manage to look and be fascinated can compose.

In this contemplative attitude there is, however, a deceptive component of

possession. Angel follows the evolution of the team without batting an eyelid, but while
giving himself over to the pleasure of enjoying himself, he discovers the arcana of the stadium.
Convinced that the world of football is more like a firmament than a blackboard, he
focuses his eyes parallel to find the secrets of the maneuver; Thus, seeking the
maximum depth of field, he measures angles, calculates distances, and tries to find
the relationship between will and ingenuity.
He makes a stubborn attempt to analyze and, when he seems most self-absorbed,
when in the heat of the afternoon the snakes begin to transform into streamers, he, like
blotting paper, is seizing all the profiles: the goal keys, the air breathed by the scorers,
the screams of the fans and the echo returned by the concrete.

After years and leagues of exploration, Angel has managed to integrate himself
into the deepest fabric of football and, by an inevitable fusion effect, integrate football
into his own fabric. This book is therefore
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the test of a great adventure. On his imaginary green table, the ball is a
crystal ball that allows him to organize childhood memories, revive
characters, review professional episodes, relate ideas and create a story
of passions. Under his microscope, the game's plot is both a personal
experience and a multiple plot. In reality, it gets so confused with its own
cells that we may be looking at an intimate diary.
Those of us who tend to read him carefully will once again measure
him page by page and say "Deep down, the book was transparent to him
like a second skin." Then we may agree that this man is capable of
counting stars.
However, we must not kid ourselves: when he sits in front of the big
bear, he is not satisfied with passively admiring it. Actually, what he wants
is to hunt her down.
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The secrets of the fulbo

I met him like this, with the L in the middle instead of the T and ending in O.
And so I like to recognize it now, after having gone through all the academic
denominations in time and, above all, after having overcome unscathed the
traps of maturity and the temptations of utilitarian realism.

I always imagined that the age of reason would be something like the
graveyard of illusions, because they always told me (and still tell me) that the
day and time would come to settle down, to see things as they are and not as
one would like them to be.
And things, in football, with the T in its place and the final L, advise that
you have to win and stop fooling around. It seems that emotions are the
weakness of losers and that only what is useful for accounting for the goal is
good.
They never really convinced me, and not because I had more or less
intelligent arguments, but simply because the teams and players that excited
me as a kid almost always won. They were teams that got tired of playing and
players who dribbled, threw pipes and scored taquito goals.

Eduardo Villar, from my city, was the first to discover talent as the most
efficient and turn Sundays into the announced day; and Grillo, on the big stage,
dribbled up to the linemen, with the impertinence of his dropped stockings and
the daft daring of the paddocks to win on any court.

My uncle Luis Polchi, a center of those from before, also helped me to

value emotions, because those sensible guys who already in that
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then they talked about work of the week, tactical discipline and set pieces, he
defined them with the simplicity and clarity that people from the neighborhoods
have to find the truth in two words: "These guys" —said Luisito— "they don't
know any secret of the fulbo». And he was right.
Of course, this book is not intended to reveal the secrets of the fulbo. Not
even soccer.
I am lucky to feel only what I am, and I am nothing more than an amateur,
madly in love with this game, respectful of its feelings, who lives learning from
others and who made this passion his job, his way of life.

The frustration that I possibly have for not having played at the level that I
wanted, I turned into admiration and affection for everyone who plays football
as a professional, to whom I always reserve my intact amazement.
My father took me to football for the first time when I was three years old,
and it is possible that since then I have been accumulating these things that I
now want to pass on.
I am only sure of having one virtue: my experience is common. That is to
say, I have experienced the same things as the vast majority of people of my
generation who were born in a neighborhood and who had a school of life in
football.
There is a story by Valdano that tells of a goalkeeper from his town who
scored a goal against himself because he went to look for the cap inside his
goal with the ball in his hand, after saving a penalty. El Kilo Guerra, from Villa
Mitre, did something similar. After catching a cross between several players,
he went to attend to a teammate who had become entangled in the net, and
forgot to release the ball.
That is why I feel authorized to write about football. Not because I think I
am more than anyone, but precisely because I think I am one of many, and I
guess it will be interesting to review values and concepts, share memories
and discover details of a collective experience.
Even if you're lucky, out there these things help someone think.
Let no one expect, therefore, advice or recipes that I do not have. I only tell
what I lived and learned. I confess that it took a lot of work to do.
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Writing is not easy for me. I try to be as simple as possible, to avoid

any literary claim.
And a final warning: I defend my convictions as if I were in
possession of the truth. Don't give it importance, it's a way of speaking
typical of cafes, where I trained. Deep down I just have doubts.
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The pride of the ball

My grandmother used to tell her daughters that they were too proud to be
poor. He was right, the first thing they take from a poor man is his pride.
It is the first right he loses. Therefore, for the kids in my neighborhood, the ball
had a meaning that transcended the entertainment for which it was intended.

With the ball, they and I felt important, safe.

We found in the ball above all joy, of course, but also a reason for pride that
did not appear anywhere else. Like all the poor, we were destined to be for
someone else, to have no identity except for the few cultural traits that the
neighborhood could preserve. The ball rescued us from that nothingness and
only with the ball could we know who we were.

In addition, the ball also brought us closer to beauty and to that feeling
fullness it produces.
In short, the ball tied us to life more than anything else.
Taking care of her, even if we didn't know it, was taking care of our way of
being. And although we didn't really know it, we felt it, we intuited it.
Sometimes luck, or ingenuity, brought us an official leather one, like the
ones used in League matches, and it was like caressing happiness. We felt
like the luckiest people on earth. To protect it, we greased it every day with
suet that we ordered from the neighborhood butcher. We took it wrapped in
newspaper to the paddock and nobody dared to touch it before the game
started, to keep it impeccable until the first moment.
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It was one of the many rituals around football that made us happy.
Hitting him hard and high was considered an unforgivable offense. Each
one as far as he could, but we all treated him affectionately.
During the match we all wanted to own it. We asked for it backwards.
We said "take" instead of "give me", with the intention of convincing the
one who was carrying it, to let go of it.
The ball gave us our own respect and that of others. Mastering her
was the inevitable beginning. From there, each one earned a place on the
ranks, according to their ability and talent. The ball was an essential
reference in our lives.
When Alfredo Di Stéfano made a monument to her with those precise
and heartfelt words, he said it for all the poor kids in the world: «Thank
you, old woman».
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The origin
The Boca field was boiling. Skinny Menotti did not touch the ball. He receives
a pass under the boxes and when he wants to turn, a rival kicks him and takes it
away. El Flaco, red with anger, follows him twenty meters, throws himself at his
feet and retrieves the ball. Receive a standing ovation from all four sides. Later
he played well, Boca won and he appeared on the covers of sports magazines.

That same night he returned to Rosario, his city. The next morning he went to
buy the newspapers at the kiosk he had always used, where a childhood friend
attended.
The friend didn't even look at him. He treated him with evident indifference.
Menotti, puzzled, asks him: "What's wrong with you, didn't I play well?" The friend
looked at him with contempt and replied: «Come on... now you throw yourself at
his feet too...».
Menotti's friend from Rosario did not forgive Skinny for throwing himself at the
feet of an opponent. That gesture was interpreted as a betrayal of the purest
principles of football. Only the clumsy were allowed to commit acts of that nature.
Throwing oneself at one's feet was an improper rudeness, a resource of the
incapable. Something inexcusable for the neighborhood codes. For his friend,
Flaco Menotti had fallen into the trap of utilitarianism.

In my neighborhood, Villa Miter, Angelito Strano did not play often because
his obligations, such as going to steal copper and lead from the railroad and then
selling it to the Russian Diente de Oro, for example, did not leave him much free
time. As he also raised pools (a kind of clandestine lottery), it was not convenient
for him to be seen too much by the strips.
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For this reason, although he had a player file, Chin Bermejo, coach of the
lower, I hardly ever put it on.
But that day three or four were missing and he called him.
He played right back, wearing a pair of boots two sizes larger than his size.
It was one of the best. The match was tied and with four or five minutes to go,
the referee gave us a penalty.
No one wanted to throw it away, until Angelito arrived. "Deee...Leave it to
me," he said stammering as usual.
He put the ball and stopped two steps away, with his hands on his waist and
an attitude between serene and spare. The referee gave the order and Angelito,
without taking a run, shot very gently. The ball, biting, went two meters outside.
As if nothing returned to the post, the game ended and in the locker room,
between tears of grief, they wanted to kill him. "But what did you do, do you
want to tell me?" asked Chin with a face of few friends. Angelito, who was
changing his clothes, without having showered of course, replied with a dignity
that left everyone speechless: "Cooo cooon penale noo nooo se ga gaganan lo
party...", he said and left.
Nobody knew until today if he threw it out out of respect for the most
immaculate codes of good football, or if he actually resorted to that ethical
principle, as an irreproachable way of hiding the mistake. The thing is that,
beyond the anecdote, the soccer culture in Argentina of those times was
impregnated with those values, which were cradled in the humblest paddocks
and extended to the most renowned classics.
Football had an ethical purity and an aesthetic beauty that made us
dreamers, worthy. That was our school.
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What is playing well?

I was 10 years old and played what was then called baby-soccer and is
now known as futsal. That night we had won 17-0, but something had gone
wrong.
In the locker room, after the game, more than being happy there were
serious faces, almost sad. "You can't play football like that. We were a
disaster," the visibly angry coach told us.
Without intending it, Roberto Cortina Bazán, who later became a sports
journalist, was giving us the first lesson of our football careers, and perhaps
the most important. He was telling us that victory, which was the goal we were
looking for, is not the only thing that matters.
That we could not, that night, be satisfied because we had not fulfilled our
dreams, with our illusion.
But how is it possible not to be happy having won 17 to 0? One of the
implicit and most respected values in the neighborhoods at that time was that
victory had to be earned by playing well. Nobody respected those who won
with mediocre intentions.
It was common to hear someone who had lost say even proudly «yes, we
lost, but we gave them a dance...!», and also some regretful winner confess
«we won... but from a free kick».
Of course nobody explained to us philosophically what it was to play well,
or why it wasn't worth winning without doing it well. Nor what was the
relationship between the result and the game itself. But the truth is that we all
knew perfectly well what it is to play well and why one is not fully satisfied
even when winning, if one plays poorly.
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Obligations, utilitarianism, interests alien to ourselves, to our

consciences, made us capable of differentiating one thing from another. I
mean, win or play well, they were always together.
It is a dichotomy that we would never have considered.
Many years later, and already based in Spain, I had a certain relationship
with an Argentine journalist and we used to talk about this topic. Both of us,
more or less the same age, remembered common anecdotes of the type
that I am telling here. We shared emotional memories about great Argentine
players, memorable plays and the like that speak of a defined culture.

While Jorge Valdano and I were at Tenerife, we had to face Sevilla,

who at that time was coaching Bilardo and, of course, ideological differences
arose. There was a dialectical crossroads and the game finally became, as
always happens in these cases, a battle between the two ways of feeling
and interpreting football.
This journalist, already involved in his professional obligations and
faithfully responding to the strictly commercial line of the publishing house
for which he worked, tried to remain on the sidelines of the dispute.
He simply waited for the end of the match to agree with the winner.
He went from one rally to the next, juggling not to commit while still
looking it.
He informally asks me what I thought of the match. “Difficult”, I told him
as if to get out of the way and added: “you know, we will try as always to
play well, then we will see what happens”.
That was precisely the answer that this journalist was waiting for to let
me know that he had a distant, objective position, as they say.

Taking advantage of the moment, like a ball hitting the area, he asked
me: "But tell me, Angel, what is playing well?".
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Ernesto Grillo: identity

That day he scored a goal against the English with his socks down and
his recently invented gambeta, from the angle that reason has not yet
conceived and that can only be admitted by the lazy art of the paddocks, that
same day, I say, Argentine football registered his identity internationally.
At that precise moment everyone knew how we are and we knew that
being like this, as we are, it was enough for us to take the ball away from the
owners of the invention and compete on equal terms with anyone.
Even those serious about serious football had to recognize the universal
validity of the home football , since Cricket stood with both feet on the ball in
the middle of the game and dribbled to the guards.
Seeing him go out on the court was already an incomparable joy and
when he played it as a taquito or defended the talent from the shore with all
the courage of the revolted mud, we felt strong, safe, happy. He was
handsome to always ask for it and especially in the most furious stops on any
court in the world. With Micheli, Cecconato, Lacasia and Cruz, he formed the
forward that we all have in our souls and that once, in Europe, scored five
goals against the famous Real Madrid of cups and titles.
They say that that day Di Stéfano, who went to greet them in the locker
room before the game, called the Independiente coach aside to warn him:
“Are these kids going to play us? Look, this is serious, huh...». They were
new to Alfredo and to almost everyone, but they were the ones he had always
known, and after five minutes he realized that he had seen them before in
Sastre, De La Mata, in Pedernera, Pontoni, in Tato Mur.
It is curious for those who only respect success, because that forward
from Independiente did not win any title and yet occupies the best place in
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the memory and affection of several generations, including those who never
saw them play but who know how to dream backwards, with the story that
the legend tells them.
When one Monday the Glostora Tango Club chose Grillo as the figure of
the week, I, on the other side of the radio, 700 km., in Bahía Blanca, felt that
my pride did not fit in my body, and the ten years that I was then They didn't
know where to run with excitement.
Ernesto once told me, when I had the privilege of working with him at
Boca Juniors, that he wasn't champion until he played for Milan. I do not
believe you. It seems to me that he was already in the corners of his
neighborhood, when he began to dribble rivals, empty cans, wells and stones
and made formidable goals. That is why Grillo is much more than that goal
against the English that legalized the suburban surprise, although, of course,
it is also that impossible goal that we are still shouting and that we shouted
again when Maradona in 86 repeated it corrected and increased.
Grillo, above all things, is the neighborhood that partying on Sundays
and with a ball invents a mocking and compadrito art that those above
cannot see and the giles despise.
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When there were wines, they were crazy

Possibly playing close to the line, somewhat isolated from the others, perhaps
because they gave it to them and left them alone with their luck, or more likely for
no reason, just by chance, the thing is that when the pointers existed in Argentina,
which we called wines, extreme in Spain, were almost all of a very peculiar
character. They circumvented even the usual rules of life and earned a nickname
that was more of a compliment: crazy.

There were very famous ones, like crazy Bernao, or crazy Corbatta, and also
modest ones from the neighborhoods, like crazy Carro de Bahía Blanca, and all of
them had in common the ability to do the most surprising things, for better or for
worse.
Of all the crazy people that I met, or that I saw play, I want to talk to you about
who was perhaps the craziest or the most brilliant: René Housseman (with
Garrincha's permission, whom I saw very little).
The crazy Housseman escaped from all molds, and not only in football. He lived
and lives as he played, by inspiration. There was nothing prepared or programmed
in it. He always came out where no one expected him. On the field and in life.

The Gypsy Juárez, inspiring source of all the menottismo, including Menotti,
came to say of him that he was more brilliant than Pelé himself, "because Pelé,
within his permanent creativity, finally did what one could suspect, no matter how
difficult it was." out," said the Gypsy. «On the other hand, Housseman invented
what was not written anywhere. And he always invented, in each play, in each ball
of each game ».
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Menotti, who was his coach, once told me that in 1973, when Rene received
the ball in the last twenty-five meters, there was no alternative, it was a penalty
or a goal.
I was going to say he was a born dribbler, but he was actually much more
than that. Of course he dribbled, and with inexplicable ease. He left them turned
to the defenders, but the thing did not stop there. In any case, I would say that
the gambeta, which lifted people from their seats, was only part of the play that
always surprised. The crazy Housseman reduced the astonishment to a natural
and daily fact.
He dribbled through the air, and that's no exaggeration. A pass would come
to him waist-high, for example, and he would jump up to meet the ball. When
everything indicated that he was going to dominate it with the inside of his foot,
he turned his foot on the same ball and with the outside he took it to the other
side, changing the direction in the air. I only saw him do something similar, the
Salvadoran Mágico González, who played for Cádiz.
Housseman's appearance in football only bears comparison to Maradona. It
had three or four years of peak, then, with the same naturalness with which it
arrived, it moved away, without anyone being able to do anything to prevent it.

There is an anecdote that perhaps explains it a bit: one Saturday afternoon

René did not appear due to the concentration of Huracán and Flaco Menotti
began to get nervous. An hour later he tells Poncini, "Come with me, I already
know where he should be." They arrived at Bajo Belgrano, where he lived at that
time (1972-73) and a game was being played in one of the neighborhood's fields,
surrounded by the locals.
El Flaco looks and doesn't see him playing. He was calming down, when
suddenly he finds him on the substitutes' bench. He approaches, touches his
shoulder and asks: "René, what are you doing here, old man?"

-What I do here? Housseman replied, "Look at the headline, it's a

freak.
He thought that Menotti was reproaching him for his substitution in the
neighborhood team, and not for his absence from the Huracán camp to play a game the next day.
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official first division match.

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Humble Beto!
The day I returned to Argentina, after almost six years waiting for the defeat
of the military, was Saturday, there was hope in everyone's face and on Sunday
River and Boca played at the Monumental. I never suspected a more fortunate
return: the Argentine football classic was waiting for me: Maradona and Brindisi
on one side, Kempes and Alonso on the other, the fans singing, the welcome
papers for the teams and the sun, which seemed to me the greatest and warm
that I never saw.
Over there Beto Alonso for a ball, with his back to the opposite goal, with a
rival blowing on the back of his neck. He steps on it with his left foot, shows it,
hides it, waits. Then a guy, next to me, in the gallery, yells at him with his heart,
with his eyes, with his whole face open: "Humiliate Beto!"
At that moment I understood that I had indeed returned, that I was with my
people in my football. It made me want to give a hug to that fan I didn't know
and who had returned me, without knowing it, to the environment that I longed
for so many times.
Beto Alonso represented, fundamentally, what those of us who grew up in
neighborhood paddocks like so much: the mocking gesture, the almost insolent
daring of those who know everything with the ball. He was so elegant that just
seeing him run down the court one felt the presence of a crack. Beto didn't play,
he drew things with a delicate, rebellious, skillful, unpredictable, subtle left-
handedness, and one couldn't see enough eyes to retain so much talent, to see
so much surprise.
It was the one that ended the goal that Pelé left unfinished in the 1970 World
Cup in Mexico. Against Independiente on the River field, he went to look for a
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long ball and in front of the goalkeeper he let it pass, to recover it behind him
and touch it slowly to the net.
The slightly mocking tone that is part of the Argentine style somehow
characterizes all the talented people in the world, really. If we admit that football
is cheating, cheating has something of a mockery. If I feint to shoot and don't
shoot and the defender goes to the ground looking for the shot that doesn't
arrive, it's a mocking gesture. So is any other action that announces one thing
to do the opposite. If we want we can call it mischief, but we would be going
around the same thing.
What happens is that the Argentine soccer culture, perhaps South American
if we ignore the nuances, dwells especially on that detail. He savors it, enjoys it
for himself, turns it into an objective, or better, removes the objective to leave it
as the taste of coffee, as Borges said. That is, useless in itself, but essential.
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thanks for football

20 years ago, the economic groups of this

country needed to call again the military,
their usual puppets,
to apply a hunger plan
Lucía García
member of HIJOS

...I want to tell you that these 20 years of

struggle were sad at first,
hard at the time and very happy today.
Today we recognize the joy of the one who fights.

Hebe de Bonafini
President of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

Football gives us all illusion, happiness, it allows us pride. Me too, but

he also gave me life. I tell it as a testimony of a violent and stupid time,
atrocious and also utopian, for some poor guys like some of us who
wanted a more just society, in which
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Argentina of the 70s, sometimes with a suicidal innocence. It was around July or August (I
no longer remember exactly) 1976. I had just come from a clandestine meeting, where we
had made pamphlets against the Military Junta that a few months before had taken power
by force of arms and terror. He had the car full of those pamphlets and it would be around
three or four in the morning. I was going to store them in a garage, so that the next day I
would distribute the pamphlets among my colleagues and distribute them in strategic places.

I was driving distracted, probably thinking about the few of us who were left, perhaps
about the uselessness of that militancy and how difficult it was to abandon it because it was
like abandoning the commitment to life.
Suddenly they close the street where he was walking, in front and behind.
Dozens of soldiers and policemen appeared as if they had sprung up from the ground,
armed to the teeth.
It was a control of the usual ones at that time. They did them by surprise at any time
and in any place. They had lists that they consulted, with names and addresses of suspects.
Almost all of us were included.
Two cars in front of me fulfilling the requirement. Drivers outside, with their hands on the
car, their legs spread, were subjected to the usual searches, while their documents were
thoroughly checked. One more car and it was my turn. I was lost.

I only thought of the torture that awaited me and how good it would be to be shot.
However, he did it from an incomprehensible serenity, which I only experienced at that
moment, the worst of my life for sure.
"Documents," a policeman demands from the car window.
I give them to you. Look at them. He looks at me and
asks: "Are you Cappa, the one who played football?"
-Yes.
"What are you doing here, Flaco?"
—Nothing, I came from a friend's house. Is there a problem?
-Nope. Just routine," the policeman said, handing me back the documents and
he added aloud. Let it go, che, it's already reviewed. Bye, Skinny.
Soccer had saved my life.
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Some of us can tell, simply by chance. But many other comrades,

and even those who were not even active, fell into the hands of the
bloodiest military dictatorship in Argentine history. For them my most
respectful and emotional memory.
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the best lesson

That Sunday that I learned it was raining. It was winter and we traveled to
the field as always, in the back of the Russian Samuel's truck, huddled
together and happy, eating oranges sold by the Turkish Jadurcha, two for one peso.
Villa Miter was going to play Olimpo and the whole neighborhood lived that
match with special interest. We didn't know it, but we sensed that we could
take the only possible revenge. We had to beat those in the center, the
powerful. On the shores, humiliation is an everyday thing, except on Sundays,
which are ours.
The Olympus court was full of overcoats and voices. The entire
neighborhood occupied the five thousand seats of the popular. The rest,
including the stalls, was for them, the owners of the house.
Ten minutes later, a ball crosses from right to left and finds Eduardo Villar,
who caresses it and advances.
I still remember our amazed kid faces, glued to the
wired, blue cold.
In two steps, Eduardo reaches the area with the ball tied to his foot and
an Olimpo defender hot on his heels. He defends the ball with his body and
begins a dance of steps, feints, soft touches, short dribbles, starts and brakes,
in front of another defender who had gone to the crossroads.
A devilish and beautiful dance, as if to stop the world for a moment and
enjoy it.
The two swollen held their breath. Ours, anxious, waiting for the usual
genius of the teacher. The one from Olympus, fearful, for the same reason. It
was ten or fifteen seconds of silence
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incomprehensible, until suddenly an immense burst came like an avalanche

of happiness.
The referee had charged a penalty, because one of the Olimpo defenders,
tired of looking for the ball where it was not and kicking the air, had interrupted
the mockery by grabbing it with his hand and hitting it with all his might
against the ground, revealing his anger and his shame.
We looked at each other to believe it, we hugged, we laughed and wept
with such joy, with such happiness, that it is impossible for me to tell. It was
revenge. We had outsmarted those in the center, the powerful. We had
humiliated them.
That day I understood forever.
I knew that football is precisely that, that those in the center cannot grab
it even with their hands.
It was the best football lesson I received in my life.
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how to play
After having seen so many good players, some exceptional, so many good
teams, some also memorable; after having attended and participated in so many
endless gatherings talking about football, having taken part in eternal discussions
in the cafes in my neighborhood and in much of the world, having listened to the
best know-it-alls of all time, from Titín Prieto from Villa Miter to Flaco Menotti,
having consulted many of the best players of the last forty years, I almost
unintentionally reached a conclusion: you can win a football match in several
ways, even by chance, but there are only one way to play well. More or less like
poker, mus or trick. There is no alternative, it is played well or badly, although from
time to time luck influences helping or harming our game.

I would say that the first thing that defines the quality of a football team is its
relationship with the ball. And that is an objective assessment; it does not respond
to any aesthetic or utilitarian option. It is played with the ball, therefore the
treatment that a team gives to the ball will logically define its category. It is not the
only factor to take into account to qualify a team, but it is, as I say, the first. It is
impossible to play soccer well by hitting aimless balls, not worrying about the ball,
because in that case everything will depend on luck, and playing well is precisely
taking chances away from luck.
Accepted that inescapable condition, let's see what a team should do
with the ball if you want to play well.
To know if he plays well or badly, we can judge him by the number of times he
reaches a goal situation by elaborating the plays, without taking into account those
caused by unprovoked opponent errors, rebounds or
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other random interventions. In other words, how many times you achieve your
goal.
Speaking of scoring situations, they also serve to determine the speed of a
team. It will be fast or slow depending on how long it takes to get a chance to
score. Many times a team that plays to pump balls over the opponent's area
gives the feeling of being more direct and faster, when in reality it is only
appearance because they are playing without surprise, preventing rivals. Thus,
although the ball frequently reaches the opponent's area, it does so with all the
advantages for the defenders and not with any real danger of scoring.

To really get to a chance of scoring, you have to create the play, and first
have a start, a consistent start from the bottom, to distract.
All of this is done by playing, which is why touch is another of the fundamental
factors of a team that intends to play well. It touches what is necessary to
distract and surprise. It is more than necessary to play badly, because instead
of distracting, it warns the rivals and gives them time to stay organized.
Since there is no deception, it is useless. In addition, that excessive touch and
therefore tedious, would be revealing the lack of players with enough capacity
to see the play as soon as it is presented. The move appears for a moment and
is hidden. Seeing it at that moment and taking advantage of it distinguishes
good players and defines a good game.
The other aspect to take into account to know if a team plays well or badly
is to know what it does when it does not have the ball, when it defends. What is
discovered immediately is if they make goal situations easily or if, on the other
hand, it is very difficult to reach him with any possibility.
To defend a team can be organized in zone and even with personal bests.
Either way you can present serious difficulties to your opponent. The essential
difference is that the zone favors the recovery of the ball, while the personal
marks favor more the interruption of the game.

If a team wants not only to defend well, but to play well, it has to score in
the zone, because that way it will better distribute the spaces and
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distribute efforts more reasonably. And an extremely important detail: it

will favor the collective sense that this game has.
If he marks in the zone, he refers to the spaces to reduce them, make
them smaller, and thus force the rivals to fine-tune their precision. It can
be lowered forward or backward, it doesn't matter. You can push forward
or wait grouped behind, it doesn't matter too much and depends on the
circumstances and above all on the particular qualities of the players.

Finally, a team that plays well has variants: it knows how to play on
the counterattack, manages time to know when to speed up and when to
pause, knows how to take advantage of the details that sometimes define
matches and has the personality to impose its game on all pitches and in
all circumstances.
In short, playing well is having touch as a foundation, seeking surprise
through an order that facilitates the expression of talent, using intelligence
to interpret the game, scoring in the area to recover the ball in better
conditions and, above all, have a relationship that is at least friendly, with
the ball if it cannot be more intense and affective.
Of course one can play well, even very well, and lose; Throw balls at
the march with ten players next to the goalkeeper and win. However, and
as the history of football shows, much more is gained by playing well than
by speculating by chance and success. As in all games, moreover.
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I don't think, therefore I play

Today's football has a disappointing feature: the players have stopped

thinking, they don't know the game.
I am one of those who believe that football begins with the feet. In other
words, you need at least an acceptable technique to aspire to play at the first
level. But it continues in the head: you have to know why and for what things
are done.
Soccer, like any other game, has individual or collective codes or
concepts that come before any tactic or system.
They are independent of all football philosophies, as they serve any of them.

They are elementary concepts, which we could call lifelong, that one
normally incorporates spontaneously in the first games played in the
neighborhood.
They have now been forgotten.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there are very few top-level players
who know how to play football. There are, of course, but it is rare to find them.
In general, they play with what nature was kind enough to give them: some
are skillful, others fast, or they hit the ball well, or they dominate the aerial
game.
A former Uruguayan player, based in Italy, told Menotti and me a few
years ago that players currently pass the ball to each other but they don't
know why. And he was right. Try talking about soccer with a soccer player
for more than ten minutes. There is nothing more difficult.

What has happened?

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As I have verified in these years, tactics have taken away the brains of the
players. He comes to tell you something like "don't think, we think for you, just obey."

Those coaches who give greater importance to the blackboard than to Platiní or
Maradona, were trained in this way. Little by little they turned them into disciplined
executors of their tactics. They managed to get the player out of the game. Don't
worry about understanding it, thinking about it. That's why he no longer plays, he
complies.
For that reason, he does not speak on the field, during the game. Not for lack of
character as is often assumed, but because he does not know what it is.
The tacticism has remained with the role that corresponds to the players. “Do such a
thing in such a circumstance, and do such another if things change”, they have been
told, and over time they have become long-winded systems officials who in almost all
cases are totally indifferent to them.

The truth is that they also accommodated themselves to the ease of not thinking.
"The coach told me, I comply." It is that, along with the leading role, something more
important was taken from them: the joy of playing.
It is possible that this is one of the reasons why the games tend to be
monotonous, predictable, unimaginative. It is necessary to return to the concepts of
all life and to the humility of the good teacher.
The player no longer plays, in the strict sense of the word, he works.
Borges said that the writer who writes what he proposes has not written anything. To
be good, the work must transcend the proposal. For tactical coaches, however, the
perfect game is the one they scheduled for Saturday night.

By not letting him think, decide, the footballer is deprived of pride. Those of us
who believe that the player comes first want footballers who are proud of their
profession, who maintain their enthusiasm and joy to play better and enjoy themselves
more. Enthusiastic people to be able to give everything they feel.
Football goes through the mind, through feelings and through courage, to always
do what I must and feel. It's not work, it's an effort to live happily doing what I feel as
best as possible.
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From so much talking about tactics and systems, from so much watching videos
and studying rivals, we forget two details that we once considered fundamental: the
player and the ball. We have forgotten football. "Good teachers," says Paulo Freire,
"are those who teach nothing to anyone, who only guide, help discover and think."

Soccer coaches should always bear in mind that advice from the Brazilian pedagogue.

To recover the pleasure of the game, it is necessary to give back to the player the
power of decision, the protagonism and the passion that was stolen from him and
belongs to him.
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To be long you have to be wide

In soccer, the depth or length depends largely on the amplitude towards
the width of the movement of the ball. The ends attached to the line that
existed in the past, above all fulfilled that function: they opened the field.

Each one stuck to his band forced the opposing team to clear the middle
areas, the closest to the goal. For that reason, and not because they were
slower before, there were then more spaces to play. The amplitude in the
circulation of the ball is the basic foundation to be able to aspire to depth.
Also, logically, this circulation has to be fast and precise, although these two
important aspects are certainly complementary.

If my team makes the field 70 meters wide, the pressing that all teams
try as the latest discovery in modern football loses much of its effectiveness.

Barcelona or Ajax take the risk of the three defenders in the last line, to
enjoy the success of occupying the bands with fixed forwards and keeping
another striker in the center. They are discovered behind to complicate ahead.

Van Basten's Milan also occupied the attacking wings with two midfielders
who only circulated around there, and played with two strikers in the middle.
The system allowed him to be more balanced in the background with a line
of four players.
The main issue is that when the play is made there is a player on each
band so that the circulation has ample. The depth, which is to look for the
goal situation, results in this way
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much more effective. Looking for a statement to this centennial concept,

we would say that to be long, you must first be wide.
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What is the tactic?

When we talk about tactics (in some places they call it a system), 4-2-4, 4-4-2,
5-3-2, we are referring to the way of occupying the field of play, to the spaces. To
the way of distributing the people so that the efforts are equitable. That is to say
that, in principle, the tactic is a question of spaces. But I think that just as important
as spaces is knowing how to manage time.

The distribution of spaces refers to the static team, to how the team is
standing, as we say in Argentina. The times have to do with the team in movement,
that is to say at what pace or at what speed the team plays, and that depends on
the situation of the team and the rivals.
I will try to explain myself. If the team is unarmed speeding up the game can
be an unnecessary risk. On the other hand, accelerating when the rival lost the
ball and was badly stopped is an advantage that must be taken advantage of.
If the rival waits well accommodated, it is necessary to play slowly at the start,
to create the goal situation with distractions.
In addition there are areas in the field that require a certain speed.
As in the beginning I bet on security, and in the middle game with the distraction,
things must be slower than in the final meters, where I must surprise by
accelerating the play.
It is what all the great teams did and do. Brazilians are masters in this (and
many others) aspect. They play and play at twenty an hour and suddenly a long
ball hits someone who stings the void and from twenty they go to one hundred
and eighty when they look for the goal.
Individually, I didn't see anyone better than Cruyff to manage the times. He
walked around with the ball at his feet, and left unexpectedly
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at full speed. And the opposite, it came accelerated and braked suddenly
to change direction.
In short, the change of rhythm or the use of time forms part of the
global concept of deception. I announce a speed and use the opposite.
That is why tactics, ultimately, is nothing more than the correct use of
space and time, if we want to say it pompously to define something so
simple.
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The best tactic is the ball

What defines good teams is not the system or the tactics, but the ball.
The treatment given to the ball not only depends on the offensive game but
also the defensive aspect. The ball gives order and therefore allows quicker
and easier regrouping when it is lost and you have to defend to get it back.

It ensures order, as long as it is handled judiciously. Playing and playing,

the team arrives at attack positions, armed, without the separations produced
by the ball so that someone can play it up while their teammates appear.

The reference of the ball is fundamental. If we want the exit to be safe,

we must leave at least three players behind the line of the ball. Once in
midfield, the midfielders have to appear behind the line of the ball to avoid
pressure, and in attack there can be no more than one player in front of the
ball, so as not to facilitate the opposing defense.

When four or five players with precision and ability to play are brought
together in a team, the positions, the paths that the operation indicates, go
into the background. They are less important.
That is to say, the tactic occupies its rightful place: important in
some cases, but never decisive.
Gerson, Clodoaldo, Pelé, Tostao and Rivelinho, had more or less
established places, but by no means fixed. They tapped and rotated.
They played and showed themselves. If the ball was lost, they returned where
the play found them. Naturally, each one paid attention or gave preference to
certain spaces on the court more than others, according to their preferences.
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qualities. Or rather, to be able to take advantage of its virtues. So Rivelinho

went to the left, Gerson through the center and Pelé came from behind to
the places that Tostao left empty, but the movements were not
predetermined, they arose around the ball.
And I speak of that team as an example, because it was the best I've
ever seen in my life and the most I can imagine when I dream of a team
that fulfills my aspirations.
The teams are armed and disarmed, too, around the ball. If a team is
capable of having the ball like that Brazil or all the great teams in the world
had, the rival has no other way out than to run to get it back, wear
themselves out, and lose control of the game and its qualities.

You can never talk about a great team if you don't give the ball the
proper treatment for that qualifier. It will be a good team, or a dangerous,
difficult team, or whatever you want to call it, but never a great team, like
Cruyff's Ajax, Brazil in 1982, European champion Barcelona or the most
recent Ajax.
When the veteran Argentine coach Angel Tulio Zoff is told about
modern soccer and ancient soccer, he says that the oldest thing he knows
is the ball, and it is still the most important thing.
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The evils of pressing

The crippling pressure applied on the opposite field, as a method for
recovering the ball, is more than twenty years old. He appeared at the
international level with that Dutch team that was called a clockwork orange and
that finished world runner-up in Germany. He had an obvious purpose: to have
the ball for as long as possible and, of course, more than the rival he was trying
to disorient and deprive of the possibility of thinking. That Dutch team was
copied during all this time and as always happens, partially and badly. Among
other things because it is difficult to copy the talent and it is tempting to keep
only the effort.

And that was, in general terms, what happened.

It should be said immediately that pressure is only possible if the rival team
plays poorly. Otherwise it would be extremely difficult to carry it out in a field of
100 meters by 70. Or at least keep it more than fifteen minutes.

If the ball circulates with speed and precision from one side of the field to
the other, from back to front and from front to back, with players who do not
move, who come off after two touches of the ball, in a kind of rondo (crazy in
Argentina ) all over the court, the pressure would deflate in a few minutes.

I also recognize that this recipe has its difficulties and largely depends on
the needs of the team that has the ball and its own possibilities and limitations.

Finally accepted the effectiveness of pressure, taking into account the

extenuating circumstances that I have detailed, which should never
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getting confused is your goal. You don't play to pressure, you press to
play.
This confusion of means and ends has made, in recent years, that
most of the teams around the world (including South America despite the
regrets) fight hard for the ball and when they get it, they lose it again with
the same speed, to press again. So everyone pushes and no one plays.
The foundation of football moved from touching to pressing. It is said that
a team plays poorly if it does not press correctly, because it gave the rival
an advantage. Nobody talks about the real advantages that are given to
the opposing team when the ball is divided
constantly.

It's like playing another game, a kind of pressing-soccer.

When one pressures the rivals to snatch the ball as soon as possible and
as close to the opposite goal, the question of the next step arises: and
when we have the ball, what do we do? question that in general terms
very few do.
In order to press, first of all a suitable organization is required.
You cannot start from the effort, you have to start from the organization.
Then you have to handle certain references or messages to know when
to do it and how, so as not to end up running after the ball. Finally, a
speed of action and a determined decision are necessary. You can't
doubt or be overwhelmed at a trot, for example.
The lack of concepts, in the first place (I press but for what?) and that
physical speed that is required, in the second place, are the main causes
of the error.
Once the ball has been recovered, the cassette should be changed
immediately. Something like saying "now I have the ball, well, I change
my attitude".
To press I had to reduce the useful field to the rivals. Reduce the
spaces to say it in other terms. Upon recovering the ball, the first duty is
to immediately enlarge the court. Make it 70 meters wide as fast as
possible. Get the ball from the place where I stole it and
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put it on the opposite. Slow down and gain precision and then decide.

Until that moment we worked defensively, from that moment we

played. When you recover the ball, you also recover the fundamentals
of the game, which is touch. The game starts when I give the ball to a
teammate who is wearing the same shirt as me, to put it in primary
terms. From that elemental concept, everything else develops. Without
that elementary concept, everything is confused and nothing ever starts.
That is precisely what football has been reduced to in much of the
world, where everyone runs and presses and hardly anyone plays. We
coaches think that if our team presses, it has already accomplished
tactically and our work is reflected.
The ball, meanwhile, suffers our lack of love or our indifference.
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How to get out of pressing

If, in order to press, one works insistently in training, not only the
proper organization but also the necessary attitude, to get out of that
kind of prepared bottleneck, of organized traffic jam, it is also necessary
to train certain behavior patterns and master some key concepts.

We have to know, first of all, that if we play well it is almost

impossible for them to pressure us, OR for that pressure to succeed.
The pressing clings to the hope of recovering the ball to keep the
intention alive. Above all, those who are going to give the first fight:
more advanced forwards and midfielders.
The first thing, then, is not to give hope of recovery. If I can't go out
playing for some reason, if I doubt, it's best to change the script to the
pressing players. A long ball and shrink. Now we are the ones who
press and they have the ball. The change of script should only be a
resource, used in case of doubt and to erase the opponent's hope of
recovery. Behind the ball the team shrinks at speed, otherwise, if we
do it slowly, the ball becomes a gift to the opponent who in that case is
successful.
The norm is to play and show yourself, with dynamics, constantly
changing fronts. I distract on one side, play short two, three times,
delay the ball and change front, where I will surely find the exit.
Once we get out of the jam, we have to cross the pressure line
immediately, to prevent them from reorganizing. If I change front and
at the first obstacle I go back with the ball, it is as if
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after working hard to get a car out of a muddy mess, when I do, I back up
and go back into the mud.
We must not move, drive, carry the ball individually.
We must play 2 or 3 touches maximum. If I don't move and play with
rhythm, even if they are inconsequential touches (but with the criterion of
changing front, at least), I discourage those who press and that's like
winning the first battle. The emotional factor plays a very important role
in pressing. Rigid positions should be avoided at the start. Those in the
background must jump the lanes, the lateral appear inside, the central
one outside, have the ease to play, to show themselves.
We should not always try to play forward, because then we would be
dividing possession of the ball. You have to enlarge the court backwards
and look for the other sector, and for that open the playing field well. As
we have said, if the field is used in all its width, the pressing will have
many difficulties.
The current Ajax of the Netherlands puts two players wide open:
Overmars and Finidi generally, and plays the ball accurately from one
side to the other, using them both, who when they find the space they
face. The European champion Barcelona also did it with Guardiola as an
exceptional distributor, and it was extremely difficult to put pressure on him.
Anyway and as always, it will ultimately depend on the ability or
inspiration of the players.
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Set pieces, true or false?

I read somewhere that if the press repeats something a few times it is
admitted as evidence. The set piece thing is one of those things that we all
end up admitting as a fact, without ever having verified it. I mean the
importance we give it. It is stated that today, as is equalized football (another
unreviewed statement), set pieces acquire the defining character.

In addition, the ability of a coach is usually judged by the set pieces that
his team has prepared. I knew of a coach who had a play set up in every
section of the field. One year he was champion and the next he was last in
the Argentine League.
One day, in 1993, when I was in the editorial office of the newspaper El
País in Madrid, where I had been invited to write an article and with that
information just received, it occurred to me, for the first time in my life, to do
some checking. He wanted to know if set pieces were indeed decisive. With
the computer, one of the editors consulted the statistics. They were from the
92-93 season. We verified that the team that had scored the most goals from
set pieces in that League was Español: 10, which relegated. Barcelona was
champion, who had converted half: 5, and in that section came in twelfth
place.
In the 94-95 season Real Madrid, where I worked, came out champion.
We only scored one goal from a prepared play and we were also the highest
scoring team.
First of all, I want to dismantle that hasty statement that makes us believe
without hesitation that set pieces are decisive. It is possible, however, and I
consider it, that someone has statistics that
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prove the contrary. I'm just saying that when I wanted to verify it, I had data that clearly
indicated to me the relativeness of the generalized belief in this sense.

I also want to say that the best thing to do before such affirmations is to think and not
admit them without further ado. Set pieces, I say, are important, of course, but they never
decide the fate of a team.
If we have a corner or a foul in our favor, it's stupid to waste it, of course. But you
have to know that they depend very much on the launchers. If we take the corner well,
there are more chances that it ends, at least, in a dangerous play. If it arrives rainy, soft,
because there is no one in the team capable of doing it properly, we are subject to luck.
And in the faults the same. The drawings that we can invent in training are all good if
finally the one who shoots the goal knows how to do it. Otherwise it is very difficult for it
to end in a goal. And the other way around, if I have good free-kick shooters, the cartoons
are hardly needed. Good shooters don't want set plays, they just want to be left alone so
they can do their job effectively.

What really decides the fate of the team is its game. That is the most important. Set
plays help, of course, but I insist that they depend much more on the shooters than on
the preparation. That is why it seems to me a contradiction to spend a lot of time on set
pieces, instead of devoting it to improving the team's game, to helping it grow.

Why then is it stated that set plays are decisive and

define the quality of coaches?
It seems to me that it is because since the 1960s, the growing professionalization of
football has made many feel compelled to resort to science that measures and calculates
everything, in order to arrive at efficiency, and to despise the usual knowledge as old-
fashioned.
There are coaches who have even incorporated a ball-throwing machine to prepare
their goalkeepers, and in general we live trapped in the labyrinth of stopwatches, statistics,
computers and psychologists, with the illusion of controlling everything. Feelings have
become societies
anonymous and, in that environment, a wall thrown with elegance at the moment
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fair, it no longer excites, nor does it have the scientific tone of a prepared
play, where two pass over the ball, so that a third pretends to shoot and
leaves it so that finally a fourth scores a goal.
But it turns out that at the moment of truth, with reality in hand, the wall
is usually more useful than everything else.
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jersey numbers

When the numbers appeared on the players' shirts, more or less fifty years
ago, it was probably done so that the public could identify the protagonists.
Over time, it also happened that each number acquired the meaning of the
position it represented and even the style of the players who used them. Thus
the number 9 was the most prestigious in Argentina years ago, because it had
been used by none other than Pedernera, Pontoni, Di Stéfano, Walter Gómez,
before Erico. The appearance of Pelé made the 10th the most desired from
then on, something that Maradona finished ratifying. All the kids who dreamed
of wearing the 9, then sighed to wear the 10.

The number 10 shirt was the passport of talent. If one used the 10 it was
because they considered it the best. If he wore the 5 instead, the boss, the
owner of the team, the screamer, the boss, the leader. It was like that, in
Argentina, from Pipo Rossi perhaps, or from Leguizamón perhaps. The truth is
that Rattín was the emblem of the number 5, definitively consolidated in
England in 1966, when he was expelled from the field and defiantly came out
in the middle of an infernal shouting.
No one in my neighborhood wanted 4 or 3, which were the laterals. A
popular saying had magnified the prejudice: "Anyone can play 4", the elders
used to say, and you had to run away from those numbers if you wanted to
continue dreaming. In other words, in addition to identifying the players, the
numbers were acquiring their own identity.
They tell me that in Spain the number 10 was also synonymous with a
good player. Velázquez from Real Madrid, Panizo from Athletic Bilbao, Zamora
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from Real Sociedad, Germán de Las Palmas, Marcial from Barcelona, gave
that number the meaning of subtlety and good play.
In those days if one was more or less short, ran a lot and stood out for
solidarity, it was 8 without a doubt. If they called him "crazy", he was a wing
and he wore 7 or 11 depending on whether one leg or the other dominated.
The one who broke the mold was Cruyff who was wearing the 14, but given
the quality of his game we can forgive him for not wearing the 10 or at least the 9.
The numbering, which in South America is different from that of Europe,
slightly different to be precise, had, in addition to that identification purpose, a
soccer meaning. It went from smallest to largest and started with the
goalkeeper. Time also gave it the taste and prestige of tradition.

As always, capitalism does not understand sensitivities and is in no way

respectful of feelings. That is why he has just totally altered that numbering
criterion and has abruptly erased the identity of the numbers.

No one can say anymore when going to try out a team: "I play 6", because
it doesn't mean anything or nobody knows what it means. Now, in order to
better sell the idols' jersey, each player has his own number throughout the
season and also his name engraved. Thus it is possible that an 8 from before
is a 35 from now, and a modest 3 has become a 24 in one team, an 18 in
another and a 21 in a third. They have broken the sentimental schemes and
surely increased profits, so it seems inappropriate to claim something from
them. Right away they would put on the table the argument that seems
irreproachable to them: "This way we earn more money", they would say and
they would stare at us with the face of having said the only indisputable and
totally logical truth.
"Money turns everything upside down," said Bertrand Russell. One does
not know what to say in the face of that argument, because they always take
it for a fool or for being old, also for an annoying guy who does not like it at all.
But how horrible it is to see a team with those unusual numbers that have no
other reason or criteria than the commercial one!
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catch and play

Good archers are like good medicine: they prevent rather than cure. Bad
goalkeepers, on the other hand, are the same as bad medicine: as they don't
anticipate the play, they don't prevent, they try to cure, to remedy it once that
play is defined.
“To know if a goalkeeper is good or bad”, said Renato Cesarini, one of the
first coaches in Argentina who handled concepts, “I look at the photo in the
newspapers when they score a goal. If they're sitting on their butts, they're
useless. If they are stopped they are good».
Until Amadeo Carrizo, in Argentina we believed that the goalkeepers were
only there to save. They suffered the discredit of a prejudice that began in the
paddocks, where those who knew the least, the fattest or the owners of the
ball who somehow had to make them participate went to the goal.
Not even Amadeo himself escaped prejudice. Once in Mar de Plata a party
was being put together on the beach, when Carrizo had not played
professionally for many years. The players on both sides were being chosen,
and around there they asked Amadeo: "Are you going to the goal, Amadeo?"
"Did you see me foolish face, to send me to the goal?" he replied jokingly. Of
course, he played as a striker.
But it was precisely Amadeo Carrizo who began to play with his feet inside
and outside the area, who began the era of goalkeeper-players and who
somehow put an end to that of goalkeeper-attackers, which at that time was
Antonio Roma, from Boca Juniors, as one of the best representatives.

Carrizo faced the strikers hand in hand and stood still holding on until the
last moment. He did not throw himself and it complicated the
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life. He reduced the angle of the shot because he always played early and tried to guess to
solve before. In addition, once with the ball in his possession, he began the attack of his team,
enabling a teammate, the best placed. He never raffled off the ball with a long, high, aimless
delivery, as was the custom then.

In Spain José Angel Iribar was the standard-bearer of that school. It was almost never
thrown. He was in the right place an instant before. I guessed.
prevented. It was disconcerting because it finally seemed like an easy save, when it was a
very difficult shot. One was left not knowing if it had been a complicated or simple intervention.
Like all the greats, he made the difficult easy. He also came out playing and with his hand he
reached the middle of the field. After Carrizo, Hugo Gatti appeared in Argentina. They called
him crazy because of the way he dressed and some of his statements, but in reality, I rarely
saw a goalkeeper who played more seriously than Gatti.

Hugo Gatti was the most responsible and confident goalkeeper in his role as a player who
can touch it with his hand in his area.
It is a Menotti concept. As César forced his goalkeepers to play forward, outside his area
if necessary, every time they intervened, the journalists said that "the goalkeeper even had to
go out and decide outside the area." Menotti replied that there was no reason to be alarmed,
since he considered the goalkeeper just another player, with the advantage that he could
touch it with his hand inside his area.

Gatti lived football like a party and always took the drama out of the matches and the
results. When I worked at Boca I was lucky enough to learn many things from Gatti, who was
already 46 years old at the time and was still in the first division. It was amazing to see him
train by guessing.
When they shot him at the bow he anticipated the destination of the shot out loud, according
to the posture of the body of the one who was shooting. He did it to prepare his greatest virtue.
Later in the games that logic was almost always played and the forwards did not understand
how it was that Gatti knew what they were going to do before they did.
In addition, he deceived them, because he suggested a place to them, leaving him apparently
unprotected in order to be in that place before when the striker shot.
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I learned the advantage of playing out quickly. Before stopping the ball, Gatti
knew where he had to play it to surprise.
"I can't stand goalkeepers who have the ball in their possession and with
one hand send their entire team forward," he said. «They allow the rivals to
settle in and then it's a raffle, you never find anyone unmarked» «If you
serve quickly, and for that you need savvy, intelligent people to receive in
conditions, we leave 3 or 4 rivals out of the play and we faced 7 instead of
11 »added Hugo.
Indeed a dynamic team starts with a dynamic goalkeeper.
As soon as he has the ball in his possession, the goalkeeper has to go out
playing quickly, it is the way to give speed and surprise to the team's game.
Once Gatti got to the locker room, he wasn't there for anyone. Not even
for his teammates. He dressed and began a concentration work that I never
saw in another player. Little by little he was getting into the game and when
it started he found him absolutely attentive to his role.
He lived the game from the goal and analyzed his rivals one by one in case he had to
face them. He not only knew about goalkeepers, he knew about football. He was a
giant illusionist who changed even the clichés of the happiness of the goal, because he
manufactured happiness avoiding them.
That's why when he stopped playing it became a feeling. Crazy
Gatti is a feeling of hope. The hope of good football.
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The wall and the gambeta, where are they?

Possibly the speed at which it is played, or perhaps the urgency of what
is useful in each action, or who knows the devaluation that beautiful or
simply tasteful things suffer, but the truth is that both the wall and the
gambeta have become in luxury items on the playing fields. They are seen
less and less, to the point of amazement and even excitement if a team
knocks down two walls in a row or unexpectedly, a good dribble appears in
the midst of so much fighting, pressing and breakneck speed. That is why
talking about the wall is almost an exercise in nostalgia, but it still seems to
me to be one of the oldest, most beautiful and most effective moves in
football.
As we all know, it bears that name because the first walls in history were
made, precisely, against a wall. It was a street resource that found the
inspiration of the first vocational soccer players and that later reached
greater formality in the fields of official matches. The one that returns it acts
as a wall, accommodating the body to offer the best surface for the foot.
Hence, much of its success lies in who throws it. If the delivery is strong and
precise, the effectiveness is almost guaranteed, because there is no legal
way to stop a wall. Only by obstructing the executor committing an infraction
of the rules, it is possible to defend oneself.

Silva and Acosta, two Argentine players from Lanús, were called
bricklayers in the 1960s because of the quantity and quality of the walls they
threw in matches. Two other greats in that aspect (and in so many others)
were Bochini and Bertoni in Independiente de Avellaneda. Gullit and Van
Basten in European football also excelled at throwing down walls.
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The wall is useful in all sectors of the field: in defense to play out, in the
middle to avoid pressing marks and forward to look for the imbalance that
leads us to the goal. But if the wall is in danger of disappearing into oblivion,
the gambeta even more, because it is intolerable for a football that believes
in the straight line.
The gambeta is a pure product of the imagination. It is what talent
improvises in case of need and also - it must be confessed once and for all -
what the pleasure of playing suggests. The culture of immediacy withdrew his
patience and without patience the gambeta loses freedom.
Each dribbler is required to be one hundred percent efficient. One time it
fails is enough to shout down reprobation from all four sides of bigotry. The
gambeta is improvisation and therefore belongs to the intimate repertoire of
each player. The only thing he demands, I insist, is the same patience that is
shown, for example, to the respectable willful man who runs nonstop and also
makes mistakes nonstop.
Of the many ways of dribbling and therefore of dribblers, we can make
two main classifications: 1) Those who wait for the opponent to try to take the
ball from them, to go out on the opposite side; those who feint with their
bodies without touching the ball, like Bochini in Argentina and Onesimo in
Spain.
2) Those who are going to cause the rival's error. They don't wait for him,
they go to meet him to mock him, like Beto Alonso from River, Latorre from
Boca and now in Salamanca, or Maradona to put the most significant example
in the world.
The gambeta also has areas where it is applied with greater or lesser
success, depending on convenience. At the beginning of the play, at the start,
it is just a resource, in the middle perhaps a necessity to develop the play and
almost essential in the definition zone where what matters most is creative
talent.
Knowing where it should be and where it is not advisable, we have the
obligation to recover the dribble and therefore the dribblers, and thus football
will recover one of its most beautiful and effective virtues.
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Inspiration must be earned

The footballer plays by inspiration, it's true. have to solve
almost always unforeseen situations despite their prior preparation.
However, you should know that inspiration is not magical, it does not
appear just at the right time. Inspiration must be found in weekly training
and permanent participation during the 90 minutes of a game. Inspiration,
indeed, must be deserved.
The player must try to properly train all his qualities, that is why each
practice must use it to improve something. Routine training is useless,
where the player accommodates himself to the effort and ends up getting
bored. Nor those who only demand sweat from the footballer, without his
thoughtful intervention. The player has to know what each thing he does
is for, you have to demand his attention to get him used to thinking. Thus,
later, he understands that in the game he always has to do something.
Never look. Or mark, or play, or win a space. That way, when inspiration
strikes, it finds you ready.
In that sense he is like any artist. The writer writes many pages to find
an inspired phrase, and the painter works hard to find his inspiration.

The footballer's job consists, above all, in knowing the game, because
at the first level inspiration is not enough. Knowledge is also necessary.
You must manage the concepts to understand how to play in each sector
of the court and at each moment of the game, and master all the secrets
of your position. Finally get to know yourself, to hide or avoid your flaws
and make the most of your virtues.
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It never hurts to repeat that tactics are the least important. A player
who really knows the game adapts to any tactic in less than five
minutes of talk.
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The goal play is not sought, it is found

What are you looking for, teacher?

I don't look for anything, I find.

Pablo Picasso.

Playing for the Bahía Blanca team in a friendly match against River Píate, I
realized with all the sorrow that this meant for me, that I was not a top-level
player.
About 20 or 25 minutes into the second half, being 0 to 0, we went on the
counterattack. Receive Cejas, a teammate who played center forward, comes
out at full speed, reaches the bottom line and looks towards the middle. He
sees me who accompanied the play and passes me the ball. He left me alone
with Amadeo Carrizo. Before the ball arrived I saw, out of the corner of my eye,
that Carrizo was throwing himself at me from the other post. I caressed the
possibility of the goal and perhaps even of victory and the emotion piled up in
my chest, pushing me. As I was coming I crossed it, without looking and with all
the strength I could. Carrizo had thrown himself with his legs well stretched out.
It hit him in the legs and bounced to the middle of the court.
The world fell over me. I wanted to die and at the same time I saw clearly
that I had to feint and let Carrizo go to the ground, and then, without opposition,
shoot softly, comfortably.
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Then I understood that this is precisely what distinguishes good players;

that which I did not have.
It was hard to shelve the illusion when I was only 20 or 22 years old, but
I already knew what my limits were. However, it helped me to learn a key
concept forever: football is deception. You have to play constantly looking
for surprise. Individually and collectively.
I go slow to speed up, I touch left to define right. Otherwise, by doing
what I say, and as has been said so many times, I turn this game of skill and
talent into a contest of strength and speed.

There are two ways to overcome the rival: win or surprise. If I have to win
it is because I gave him the opportunity to defend himself before. I mean, I
did what I said. Carrizo in front of me, on that occasion, anticipated logic and
was right. He met an average player, like me. Another in my place,
accentuates that assumption of Carrizo, threatening the cross shot and does
not shoot. That would have been enough. In other words, if I deceive I
surprise and if I surprise the opponent is left defenseless.
I do not have to overcome a resistance if I still have the possibility of
deception. There are times when there is no other choice, but above all in
the area, where you can think longer than in any other part of the field, it is
where this concept must be applied with more reason. As the journalist and
friend Juan De Biasse told me one day: «The area is the only place where
you can think about modern football. In another place it is more difficult, there
are no spaces, they hit you ».
Collectively, when a team has the ball, the goal is to get into a scoring
situation. If I go very directly I anticipate the paths and the intentions, and it
is, therefore, much more difficult to succeed. Adversaries are warned.

Individually, if a player has the ball at his feet and is looking far ahead,
looking to score an assist, it is as if he is shouting what he intends to do. You
will only achieve what you set out to do if you are lucky or the rival is wrong.
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The play must be seen at first glance. If you don't see it, you have to
touch it. It is searched by touching. The play appears alone. It's found.
The ways to get there are those discovered indirectly, through distraction,
or deception.
I spent many years with the disappointment in tow for that revelation
of the missed goal against Carrizo, against River no less, but finally it
was useful to learn firsthand, so I can pass it on to other players better
than me, who I had and am lucky enough to direct, with greater
fundamentals.
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defensive talent
In the bowling alleys of my neighborhood I had heard many times that this or
that defender played well, "but he throws himself a lot at the feet... he goes to the
ground a lot" as an objection that clouded his consideration.
Years later in Madrid, seeing Luiz Pereira that extraordinary central marker
who played for Atlético de Madrid, coming from Brazil, I remembered those
bowling concepts. Pereira almost never needed to go to the ground, because he
sensed the move, he was waiting for it. It was common to see him cut a pass with
his chest as if he had a magnet, and the truth was that he had anticipated the
intention of the one who sent the pass. He had even seen it before the possible
recipient.
Federico Sacchi, of the Argentina team in the 60s, also had the virtue of
almost scientific recovery, without friction. Perfume was another of those who
elegantly anticipated. Beckembauer, Krol and Koeman the ones I saw best in
Europe in that sense.
They all made good the concept that defending is recovering the ball, that is,
taking it from the opponent to give it to a teammate. The other thing, as you know,
is to interrupt the game, with a foul or aimlessly clearing, or throwing yourself at
the feet, which in any case are surely resourceful and very valid on certain
occasions, but the opponents continue to have the ball.
If we accept the concept that defending is recovering the ball—not
interrupt the game—we can talk about defensive talent.
The truth is that whenever we talk about talent we think of forwards or
midfielders. We think of attacking. However, to defend, to recover the ball, it is
necessary to deceive those who live by deception, precisely.
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Defensive talent is what allows me to read the game and thus be able
to anticipate the play a fraction of a second before it happens. Including
inviting the attackers to go to the site where I am waiting for them. Take
away the initiative, disarm them.
It is common to find defenders who play behind the play, that is, they try
to correct what the striker did for their benefit. They are still, waiting, and
only after the striker does something do they react. They always go towards
what the striker suggests . That is why they depend on strength and speed,
which, although they are two very important complementary attributes,
cannot be decisive or decisive. Defensive talent, on the other hand, is what
allows me, also as a defender, to announce one thing and do the opposite.
For example, accompany a striker who stings as the last man and release
him at the moment the pass is sent to him, to leave him out of play. For
example, suggesting a pass and then cutting it off, or offering him an alley
so that he can cheer himself up and wait for him.
In short, set traps for the forwards and change their plans.
That forces the defender to know the game, because only in this way
will he be able to intuit the move and anticipate it. In any case, cause the error.
In addition to those I named, there were many other exemplary players for
the defensive task with talent: Batista from Argentina 86, Schuster who got
tired of cutting balls in midfield (and then playing them with a chosen
mastery). Redondo is currently another first-rate recoverer, not very noticed
in that role due to his ability with the ball. Milla, from Real Madrid, is another
of those who live guessing.

Football is trickery to attack, as has been said, but also to defend. It's
actually a talent match. For this reason, in addition to being passionate
about the result, football captivates us, due to the beauty of its game. Some
continue and will continue to think that it is necessary to destroy it to win.
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The greatness of the great

In February 1983, Menotti and I were in Mar de Plata writing the book that was
later published: Soccer without cheating, and in the afternoons we would go to the
beach to sunbathe, play soccer for a while and, above all, talk about football with
friends and former players who came every day.
Among them Amadeo Carrizo, the first in Argentina to change the concept of
goalkeepers until then. From being the fat guy who knew the least and that's why he
held that position, he became the protagonist of the matches. He was the first who
played more than he saved. The first to shrink and steal the initiative from the
forwards and the one who started his team's attack with his hands or feet, because
he handled the ball as well as any other player. He lowered the centers with one
hand and before falling he already put it on the feet of the better placed partner.
Amadeo marked the line that was later followed by Gatti, Fillol, Baley and all the very
good goalkeepers that Argentina had and has.

One of those afternoons in Mar de Plata, Carrizo asked Menotti: —Flaco,

do you remember the goal you scored for me one day in Rosario and that you
won?
-Which...? I don't remember,” answered Menotti.
—Yes, one that you threw very hard, that almost broke the net.
"Ah... yes... yes," said Menotti.
"Do you know why you did it to me?" —Amadeo said and continued without
waiting for the answer- because I made you too small. To the guys who kick as hard
as you, you don't have to cut them down too much because you don't have time to
get your hands out. I should have stayed a few meters behind, to be able to cut her
off.
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The goal that Amadeo Carrizo was talking about had happened 20
or 25 years ago, and he was still thinking about the question and had
found the exact answer. But that wasn't enough. He needed to tell
whoever had scored the goal, to save his pride. It was a debt that he
had with his own pride and that day in Mar de Plata was settled.

They are details that reveal the greatness of the great.

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the four crowns

It is often said that the only indisputable thing about football is the result,
but I think that it does not allow discussion to highlight the four best players of
all time from the fabulous history of this game. It is true that we all make this
history together (the public, players, coaches, managers, journalists), but
these four crowns are recognized worldwide, without possible discussion, and
summarize the greatness of football, a mixture of art and science, of poetry
and efficiency, intuition and knowledge.

Di Stefano
It was the first of the modern era. He received in his suburban cradle of
Barracas, a neighborhood of Buenos Aires from before, when the ball was
the only identity card of a culture always postponed, the indelible mark that
accompanied him all his life.
He was born among compadritos and lawful tangueros, rag balls and
taquito goals, and he became a man alongside the kids of that time, skilled at
dribbling poverty so much.
He grew up dreaming of being Erico, a jumpy, elegant and goalscoring
centre-forward. He learned with Pedernera, Rossi and Moreno all the secrets
of football, and added to his natural speed and goalscoring ability, the
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shoreline science that made him a full-court player. He traveled to Colombia in

the first great exodus of Argentine soccer, and when the nets of all the goals
were too narrow for him there, Real Madrid called him and brought him together
with Puskas, Gento, Rial, Del Sol and Kopa, so that he would get tired of knock
down luxury walls, play taquitos at times and score goals even at the rainbow.
He raised all the cups of triumph and when time, "the implacable" says
Pablo Milanés, took away the crown of the first king of football, he settled in the
hearts of the whole world forever, to continue playing in every memory, in every
corner where they talk about football with emotion in their mouths.

Pele
More than his father, who was also a soccer player, Pelé is the natural son
of Brazil. From a Brazil strewn with sambas, surrounded by disturbing rumors
of turbulent favelas, immense beaches and endless carnivals to sing the
sadness of its people, until it hurts.
Pelé arrived, like a stalking black feline, with his eyes wide open and more
than a thousand goals to invent in each game. Pelé was the astonishment, the
impossible and beautiful play, the goal like an irrepressible longing and the
brilliant and opportune response of all things.
They baptized him in Sweden, when he appeared at just 17 years old to win
his first world championship and cry with happiness along with his friend
Garrincha, another debutant.
Like all the greats, Pelé invented football once again, while continuing to
follow the most traditional paths of wisdom with his imagination.
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He scored more than 1,200 goals, but the most beautiful of all was the one he
did not face Uruguay, in the seventies, when he decided to retire for the first time.
A sudden feint left Mazurkievich with his arms open, kneeling in front of no one,
while he, behind his back, joined the ball and sent it across the net. He passed
very close to the far post, but no one cared about that detail and we celebrated as
if he had entered.
At the end of the last game of that World Cup, with the Italian catenaccio
mocked into a thousand pieces and after giving Carlos Alberto the goal step
looking at him with the eyes he had on the back of his neck, he tried to take off
the king's crown that he had worn since childhood but we won't let him. We prefer
to continue watching him on our shoulders, crying from football and emotion,
celebrating with us the infinite joy of having seen him play.

Cruyff
In the seventies there was a current that spoke of running a lot, of dynamics,
of modern football, of sweat and tears.
On the first ball they gave him, Cruyff slammed on the brakes and everyone
went on. Then he went alone to glory, without even quitting, riding the tulips of
deception. The first was Gento, but as if that were not enough, Cruyff taught us
again at that time, that in football to be fast you have to know how to slow down.

Possibly due to his character, to be contrary, he began at that time of physicist

worship to announce one thing to do another: if he faked a pass, he dribbled; if he
walked slowly, he left at full speed; if he went at full speed, he braked suddenly. It
drove muscle theorists crazy, and they couldn't find any reason for it.
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Some, certainly disconcerted, highlighted his famous change of pace, when

perhaps it was the least important thing. Let's say it was just the vehicle where
he transported his talent.
Cruyff was a football manual: at every moment of every game and in every
place on the field he did exactly what had to be done, also adding his touch of
distinction. He had so much personality that the game was always played around
him. Even the referees looked at him out of the corner of their eyes before
sanctioning a mistake.
He retired when he wanted to, but in reality he couldn't either, because he
continues to play in everyone's soul and is present every time someone, anywhere
in the world, fakes something to do the opposite.

Maradona
One Sunday in Buenos Aires, from an unlikely place because of the
discomfort and when everyone was waiting for a center to enjoy the impossible,
Maradona scored a goal that silenced the Boca Juniors stadium with emotion.
That day even Fillol, who was the opposing goalkeeper, understood that Diego
was not exactly a footballer, he was a magician.
The relationship between Maradona and the ball was the most passionate,
the most intense, the most intimate in the history of football. No one had, nor has
his ability. At only 10 years old, he was already juggling at halftime in games.
People did not know, finally, if they went to the field for the games or for halftime.

He started playing in the First Division when he was still old enough to collect
the cards of their idols.
He was champion with Boca and lived with his fans a romance so noisy and
passionate that it shook the foundations of a stadium that always
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claimed as his own.

His time in Barcelona was also passionate and tumultuous, where hepatitis
the first year and a serious injury the second, prevented the partnership with
Schuster from being translated into all the titles that so much talent deserved
together.
He got them in Naples, which for the first time won a Scudetto and Diego
immediately became San Diego, and the marginalized people of southern Italy
chose him as the banner of their just cause.
But it was not until the 1986 World Cup that Maradona reached the summit
he had always dreamed of. He received the ball a little further back than the
middle of the field and, transformed into a soccer god, he wrote with his left foot
and for the best story of all time, the most beautiful goal, the most dreamed of.
One by one he dribbled past all the Englishmen who crossed his path until he
reached the network, which was not the network, but the sky, which had
prepared its best miracles to celebrate him.
The impossible is possible since then. Maradona turned dreams into reality
and claimed utopia to the horror of the utilitarians. Maradona became the fourth
crown in history.
A scepter that nobody has put on again.
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Uruguay for export

Let the lyricist not forget

that it stings poisoned when
he grabs a cobblestone
Jaime Roos

Left Pointer, a story by Mario Benedetti, a fan of Nacional, is dedicated to

another Uruguayan writer, Carlos Real de Azúa, whose most important
condition for years and according to his nephew Santiago, was that of being a
Peñarol fan.
The detail is revealing of a very particular situation in Uruguay: no one is
oblivious to the two passions that distinguish them: soccer and politics. "If I
had to define Uruguay," Alves, the excellent international goalkeeper who was
from Peñarol, told me one day, "I'd say it's soccer, politics and the beach, in
that order."
Perhaps it would be necessary to start there to explain the almost
inexplicable nature of a phenomenon that usually produces an unusual number
of good soccer players and very often some out of series.
Perhaps it is important to bear in mind that the two heroes most respected
and loved by all Uruguayans are the liberator José
Gervasio Artigas and Obdulio Varela, the captain of the world champion of the
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50. The two equally represent the celestial identity, which Uruguayans proudly defend
from their roots.
Actually, Montevideo is a soccer field with houses. The whole city is an excuse to
play football, to watch football, to talk about football. On Saturdays and Sundays it is
impossible to walk more than 50 meters through the city without passing through an
improvised field somewhere, with children, men and women, intertwined in memorable
matches.
"I feel soccer fever like all or almost all of my
compatriots," says the writer Eduardo Galeano, author of a splendid book on the subject
that he titled Soccer in the Sun and Shadows. "With no other activity," adds Galeano, "we
men from the Plata basin feel so identified, and very particularly those from the East."

The number of players that Uruguay exports, in relation to the number of inhabitants
and the poverty of means of its local championships, is truly surprising: the number of
players who are playing outside their country reaches the figure of six hundred!

"Don't try to understand it," the prestigious Uruguayan journalist Franklin Morales
advised me, "this has always been like this and no one knows how it is possible to move
on, but we move on."
The Professional League is played only in Montevideo, a city of 1,311,976 inhabitants,
with twelve clubs in the first division and eight in the second.

In many first division matches the spectators do not reach five hundred and instead
the Centenario gathers more than eighty thousand the day that Nacional-Peñarol face
each other.
It is the oldest classic in the world: the first one was played in 1900, and the next one
will be played with the same passion as all the previous ones and as if it were the first
time.
From Schiaffino, one of the first talents to leave the country and who is still
remembered in Italy as one of the best players they have ever seen, through Walter
Gómez, who inspired a very popular little song in the 40s that was sung by River fans in
Argentina: "people do not eat to see Walter Gómez", until reaching the most current like
Rubén
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Sosa, Montero, Fonseca or Francéscoli, the Uruguayans have to resign

themselves to seeing their best players on television. It is the destiny of poor
countries: to supply the rich with their best products. «The South not only sells
arms», says Eduardo Galeano, «but also legs, legs of gold, to the great foreign
centers of the consumer society; and after all the good players are the only
immigrants that Europe welcomes without bureaucratic torments or racist
phobias».
In all parts of the world there are Uruguayan players, and above all in Italy
and Spain, the two most important Leagues of international competitions. It is
also true, to continue looking for an explanation for the phenomenon of
Uruguayan soccer, that nowhere else have I seen so much respect for its
history, nor so much care and affection to protect the myths of that same
history, as in Uruguay.
Roque Maspoli, the goalkeeper of the legendary Maracana world champion,
once confessed to me that dozens of false stories have been told and are being
told with Obdulio Varela. "Some are true, but many others are enlarged,"
Maspoli told me, "but it doesn't matter, they all work," he added smiling.

Young people have a sincere interest in that story, which they are told over
and over again and which they always listen to with the same attention, with
the same respectful silence.
There are very curious anecdotes to understand the Uruguayan fervor for
soccer. Valdano told me that an acquaintance of his, a Uruguayan of course,
every time he sees Gighia's goal in Maracana on television, which gave him
the world title, wherever he is, he shouts it as enthusiastically as if it were
happening at that moment, hugs whoever is by his side and gets excited in
such a way that everyone looks at him as someone possessed by the devil.
Then he asks for forgiveness and recovers his calm.
I learned to respect and admire the Uruguayan people through Mario
Benedetti, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alfredo Zitarrosa, Eduardo Galeano, Daniel
Viglietti, Los Olimareños, and so many other exemplary artists, and above all
through the firmness of their struggles in defense of their dignity.
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When I had to live in Montevideo and have the luck to work for Peñarol
—one of my most pleasant and deepest experiences— I added to that
respect and admiration that was born in the distance, a unique affection,
barely similar, in any case, to the that I received and will keep all my life.
Possibly there, in that greatness of the Uruguayan people, is finally
the key to such a particular story.
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the pause
Many times reading statements from artists, writers, musicians, creators in
general, I have clearly understood things about football that, until then, I could
not define precisely. For example, Pedro Ithurralde once said that jazz is
"coherent improvisation", and if instead of jazz we play soccer, the definition is
very appropriate. Or also, from the same musician, that jazz is a music that "first
feels and then thinks", which, in my opinion, is football, a game that above all
goes through emotion.

One of the most forgotten concepts in football, even before the gambeta and
the wall, is the pause. The frenzy of life itself possibly dragged football down the
path of immediacy, so the pause is a waste of time. Everything has to be now,
in the most direct way possible.
Reading a collection of articles and conferences by that magnificent Spanish
actor, Fernando Fernán Gómez, From the last row, 100 years of cinema, I
rediscovered that basic concept to play soccer well.
The article is also titled, The Pause. "The actor must know how to use the
pause", says Fernán Gómez, "letting oneself be carried away by the whirlwind
of learned words is easier than opening a pause, however brief it may be", he
adds and highlights the fundamental need for the pause, comparing it with «
empty spaces in architecture». Menotti used to compare it to silences in music.

Pause could be defined, in soccer, as the decrease in the speed of the play,
waiting for the right moment to surprise.
Always playing at the same speed takes away the surprise of the game, and at
full speed, moreover, precision. Thus, football becomes predictable and the clash
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inevitable. Pause is one of those concepts that cannot be taught. It's about
choosing the right time to do it.
Both collectively and individually, when the pause is made, the move that
surprises is being sought, therefore we can say that the pause ends when the
move is presented. That will be the moment to accelerate again. The two best
players I saw making the break were Bochini, in Argentina, and Butragueño in
Spain.
Bochini received the ball and gave the impression of stopping the game,
as if the other players were his accomplices at that moment. Suddenly a short
walk (which are the most difficult) and one of his teammates alone in front of
the goalkeeper.
Butragueño came on the run and received the ball in the definition zone.
Suddenly he stopped and abandoned himself, he remained motionless, even
with his arms hanging by his sides. It seemed that the entire field stood still. At
just the right moment, Butragueño came out from the unexpected place or
scored a goal ball with all the opposing defenders hypnotized.

Laudrup is another of the players who handle the pause with mastery.
He carries the ball, looks to the left, slows down a little and when everyone
waits for the pass to the left, he touches it slowly to the right for a teammate
who enters at full speed.
What is currently more difficult to see is a team, as such, collectively, using
the breaks appropriately. Generally it is played at high speed and there is no
pause, and when you try to slow down, play a little, everything is done at 20
km. per hour. The combination of the two speeds would be ideal.

The teams play in such a state of excitement—perhaps appropriate for

going to retrieve the ball from their opponents—that it is the opposite of what is
desirable to play. They finally end up "dragged by the whirlwind of words...", as
Fernando Fernán Gómez says of bad actors.
Much more basic, but equally correct, the older ones in the neighborhood
shouted at us to “take a break, man!” when they watched the games in the
paddock and saw us collide more than necessary.
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One team is two teams

There is a concept to which I would like to add something to complete it,
Because I think a clarification is needed.
A few years ago Menotti spoke of obligations and possibilities. The
obligations to fulfill ensure collective functioning, and that allows the
development of possibilities that are individual. By fulfilling the obligations
he has with the team, a player ensures his performance.
He will never play bad.
The functioning of the team will make each player feel better to perform
more.
Well, but it turns out that when we talk about obligations we think only
of defensive tasks, of the effort that must be made to recover and help the
teammate to recover the ball. That the forwards pass the line of the ball,
when we lose it, that those in the back reduce, that the midfielders press in
an organized way, etc.
But there are also obligations for the team when we have the ball,
offensive obligations. Generous effort is needed, too, to ensure control of
the ball, if we want to play football well.

We often forget to remind a midfielder that if a striker of ours has the

ball and is alone, it is imperative that he come to his aid.
Make twenty meters of effort, even if it's just to distract rival defenders, or
return a wall. That is also a collective obligation. When we have the ball in
front of us, the defenders are forced to advance the line to take advantage
of any rebound and give our forwards security to risk.
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That the forwards are unmarked towards the outside to create gaps and receive towards
the inside, and not the other way around as usually happens. That the defenders alternate
to help the ball out and thus give numerical superiority to the midfield, and that everyone
show up, move to give options to the one who has the ball.

Of all these things we tend to forget when we talk about

obligations, and yet it is what allows touch to have a criterion and to seek its objective, which
is the goal, with more football foundation.
A team is always two teams: one when it defends, and another when it recovered the
ball and attacked. That is why when we talk about obligations we are talking about both
teams. The only way to make a good team.
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Postmodern football: birdies and shotguns

Sartre says that the things that happen to us do not have a determined
beginning, that it is we, by remembering them, who capriciously establish a
starting point and an end. I have a special admiration for Sartre and I am not
in a position, moreover, to discuss that point of view with him. In any case,
there is a precise fact in the recent history of football, which can be taken,
capriciously if you want, as the beginning of postmodern football, that of
pressing as a foundation, the one that tries to archive the pause, the gambeta
and the wall.
It is that day when they played without people at the Bernabeu, Real Madrid and
Naples, a UEFA Cup tie.
The night before Chendo did not sleep. I had to mark Maradona.
He had told reporters that he wasn't worried, but in reality he even daydreamed
about Maradona, and no wonder.
The first ball went to Madrid, and to Chendo, who forgot about Maradona
and went on the attack. And he remembered Maradona, because Maradona,
following tactical orders, threw himself at his feet after chasing him forty meters.
Almost immediately the play was repeated, and since he had no other way out
Chendo got up the courage and threw a shot at Maradona that he needed and
received a warning from the referee.
People, at home, did not understand anything and called the technical
service believing that the television was broken and inverted the images.
Valdano brought them back to reality. From his commentary position, which he
held then, he clarified the general confusion: "The little birds shoot at shotguns,"
he said.
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Unknowingly, coincidentally, that day Napoli and Real Madrid made the
beginning of the postmodern era of football official, and since things are
sometimes not so casual, the stadium was empty. Only the twenty or thirty
who usually occupy the padded box seats smoking enormous cigars
attended. The soccer people, those who barely have enough to smoke, were
prohibited from entering that day.
What at first was a punishment from the football authorities (the public
was sanctioned for an event that occurred in a previous match), became a
prize, because they prevented him from having to watch football live in
reverse: Chendo throws a pipe at him a Maradona and Maradona commits a
foul and is warned by the referee.
That day we should have started all over again.
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talent and order

In the midst of tangled scientific opinions that seek to find the proven truth
in football, the prudent but firm voice of Arsenio Iglesias appeared to say in
two words the entire content of common sense: «Football is order and talent»,
he said «there is no more mysteries or strange things.

I have known dozens of players who, once put into training, find
themselves obliged to discover important things and abandon the criteria they
held up to that moment. Good players no longer play well, but those who
perform tactically. The dribblers start to hinder the functioning of the team, the
touch ceases to be a foundation to give way to pressing, the work takes the
place of the imagination, and the strong and fast are, of course, more useful
than the intuitive and creative.

They invert the terms because unconsciously they begin to believe they
are more important than the players. They give preference to things that they
can handle and relegate those that are beyond their control.
The best teacher, a university professor told me one day, is the one
that ends up going unnoticed.
It is precisely what they do not want. Disturbed by the market, they are
afraid of disappearing from the showcase that the press means, because they
are afraid — justified on the other hand — of falling into oblivion. We live in a
society where everything that does not appear in the press is as if it did not exist.
Then they end up believing that they decide the matches by tactically arranging
their players and giving them the "pertinent orders". If it goes wrong
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"The boys did not comply with what was discussed" and if it goes well "everything
went according to plan."
Almost always unintentionally, they participate in a big lie and incidentally
contribute to nullifying the talent.
Because football is order and talent, as Arsenio summed it up, but order as a
starting point and talent to resolve. Never the other way around.
The ones who decide are always the players, even in those excessively disciplined
teams. The order and tactical discipline serve in any case to tie if things go well,
but it takes the talent of a player to unbalance and win, if we don't just trust the
luck of some lucky ball.

Nobody is more than what he seems, said Sartre referring to the essence of
man. I don't know if philosophically he was right, but footballwise yes. In football
things are as they seem. The ones we like play well, never the ones that covertly
complied tactically even though the public has not seen them.

Maschio, back from Italy, was the linchpin of a Racing champion, but in a
game, as they tell me, one of those tactical and important players who "you don't
see", snatched the ball and command from him. Racing had a horrible first half
and Maschio said to that player at the break: «Listen to me, so-and-so, do you
know why you are important in this team? Because they don't see you. I continued
like this and give the ball to me."
So it was and Racing was able to turn the game around in the second half.
Never the order, the tactics, the coach's instructions, can be more important than
the good player. The order of the terms, allow me this horrible commonplace, here
it does totally change the product.
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knock and go
More than 30 years ago Luis Pentrelli, a good Argentine player who also
played in Italy, declared that European football had changed him.
"Now I'm playing and I'm leaving," he told journalists to make the conceptual
change he had suffered more graphic. Unintentionally perhaps, as often happens
in these cases, he had found the best definition of football as a collective game
that can be claimed. I play and I go, indeed, it is the most accurate summary to
say how to play football.
The touch as the basis of the game, as an exit and as a preparation, and I
am leaving, to show myself again and offer another possibility to the one who
has the ball. He touches and I leave, as a precise expression of touching the ball
a lot, but having it little, as the most effective way to dismantle any defense.

Furthermore, the dynamics of current football make the concept that Pentrelli
summarized more necessary. You can't think with the ball at your feet, you have
to think playing. Static players are also useless (neither now nor ever).
You have to move to give criteria to the touch and speed to the game.
The touch and go, requires precision to touch and intelligence to solve before
receiving, and effort to offer options to the teammate who has the ball. In this
way the plays are made, the team is ordered and the game is mastered.

Luis Pentrelli found the right definition. It cannot be said better or with fewer
words. If someone asked us to give them an idea of what football is, in a nutshell,
we would have no alternatives. For me, at least, I can't think of anything better
than going to Pentrelli: I play and I'm gone.
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The tiqui and the touch

The first time I managed a soccer team was at Banfield in Argentina in

1986. In the fifth game we were last. I would say dangerously late because it
was a very short tournament and therefore with few opportunities to rectify.
The president called me one day and made me a reproach that on the one
hand resembled an ultimatum and also an order. “What I see is a lot of tiqui-
tiqui,” he told me, “and that way we won't beat anyone. Let's go to the steaks
and stop so much tiqui-tiqui». Of course I didn't pay any attention to him, we
continued playing as we thought best and we finished first in the group, with
18 games in a row without losing. The president is now a friend of mine.

The curious thing is that many years later, in Spain, Jorge Valdano and I
had to defend our style many times from the same accusation.
Even authorized voices publicly believe that soccer should not be tiqui-tiqui,
but rather more direct, since tiqui-tiqui is a waste of time, entertaining oneself
without quickly trying to achieve the only valid objective, victory.

I was struck by the coincidence of using the same terms

to fail that way of playing, despite the different football cultures. Utilitarianism
as the highest value of our societies is
Universal, undoubtedly. The urgent need for success as well, together with
the consideration of beauty as stupid if it is not practical. It is not in vain that
Antonio Gala says that "every reference to beauty in our society produces
laughter, unless it is quoted."
Luckily in football beauty is profitable. The shortest way to
Getting to victory means playing well, or at least better than the opponent.
Machine Translated by Google

And it is touched, precisely to play well. Touch is the foundation of this game. It
is played by tapping, it advances by tapping, the play is elaborated by tapping and
the definition zone is reached by tapping. The touch is not an aesthetic option, but
a necessity of the game.
I have to distract the opponent to be able to find the path of the goal, and I
distract him by touching. Touch is not a concession to the spectator. Of course, the
touch needs speed and criteria, so as not to fall into insignificance.

It is true that sometimes the touch becomes parsimonious, horizontal, tedious

and therefore insufficient, because it forgets the objective that is the goal.

But even in those cases —where it is touched badly and therefore played badly
— it fulfills the function of wearing down the opponent who has to run after the ball
in order to recover it. It is always better to play, and you play with the ball.

And besides, why not? is the way to enjoy with this game. Nobody can tell me
that you enjoy running after the ball.
The question is to differentiate the tiqui from the toque.
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the cracks
In modern football? they do not exist, if they are all Japanese except
Maradona, one of those know-it-alls from the River Plate cafes would say, to
end one of those impossible discussions, after three hours in vain and with
the threat of becoming eternal "like air and water" What would Borges say
about Buenos Aires?
The truth is that if we exclude the four crowns of world football (Di Stéfano,
Pelé, Cruyff and Maradona), it is still possible, one step below, to distinguish
several cracks in all eras. Also in this one, of course. The rest of the players
oscillate between fair, good and very good. The regulars make an effort to
accompany and sometimes they succeed.
They comply. They don't clash
Good players know what is going on, they are correct with the ball,
tactically disciplined. They help. The very good ones exceed the average
level. They contribute important work and distinguish themselves in their
teams and, sometimes, even in their selections.
But what is a crack?
The first thing that defines him is his ability to solve games, especially the
difficult ones, and particularly the ones he plays away from home. Cracks
modify reality. Also those who play from the middle of the field backwards,
because they support their teams in delicate moments.

The teammates find in the crack the confidence and hope that allows
them to continue fighting without despair or disorder, despite not finding their
way in difficult games.
Machine Translated by Google

He is usually the most technically gifted, but not necessarily, and it is not essential that
he be the oldest or the most experienced, although that is also frequent.

An inescapable condition to be crack is personality. It is the one that, above all things,
transmits security. A crack is one who always asks for the ball, and with even more effort
after having made a mistake. The one who shows up in the most hostile environments, the
one who never hides, gets discouraged, or resigns. A crack is round. So were Pipo Rossi,
Tito Gonçalvez, Checho Batista, Grillo and Bochini.

A crack is the player who, when it seems impossible to beat the rival team, because he
scores well, is very organized and there are not too many scoring chances, appears with an
individual play, dribbles two and places it next to a post, far from the goalkeeper . A crack
was Sívori. It was Mario Kempes, López Ufarte and Marco Van Basten.

So is a defender who, when his team is overwhelmed, disoriented, emerges to cut off
an advance, clear opportunely, head in the last breath, recover the ball or come out playing
with his head held high, as if nothing was happening. A crack is Baressi, and they were
Perfumo, Passarella. Also Krol, Beckenbauer, Sacchi.

If he sees that the match is closed and there is no way to win it, the crack goes down
and asks for the ball, in the middle he touches and does not hurry, he searches playing, until
he decides to enter the opponent's area with all his team hanging from his shoulders, and
he scores the goal that puts things in their place, calms things down, recovers his reason.

Crack was Platinum. It was Bobby Charlton and Bernd Schuster. they know how to read
the match. They know how to play, manage time, use moments.
Zola is crack in Italy. Guardiola and Raúl in Spain. Cantoná, the Frenchman who plays
in England, the Brazilian Romario.
A crack can play badly, like everyone else, but he is never inhibited, he never goes
unnoticed.
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The styles

Liceranzu, a stocky and seasoned central defender who Athletic Bilbao

had in the 1980s, was once asked, prior to a Copa del Rey final, what he
expected from that game. "I hope it rains," he replied. To any South
American, a response of this nature would seem unusual and above all
inconsiderate with the illusion reserved for an event of such magnitude.

Bochini, the last of the effective romantics to appear in Argentina, the

unshakable standard bearer of a style carried to the bitter end, thought of
Cruyff that he ran but played well. That is, he was a good player despite
running too much for his liking.
Football as a reflection of society, or better still, as a cultural fact,
responds to the way of being of those who practice it. One loves, hates,
has fun and plays football as it is, as are its customs, its values, its
concept of life.
That is why Liceranzu's "I hope it rains" was nothing more than the
desire to find the usual environment for him in that final. With rain and
with the field fast, he would be in his habitat and so would his team. We
all know that the rain in the north of Spain is almost like the air, it is part
of the interior landscape of each of its inhabitants.
In Argentina, on the other hand, when it rained more than normal, the
game was suspended. The field had to be dry, the game was slower
because it required more precision. You thought more than you ran. An
elegant and mocking touch was enjoyed more than a head butt full of fury
and courage.
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Perhaps that is why Valdano, without being a mystic, got used to looking at
the sky on Saturday nights. It is that when he arrived at Alavés, his coach made
him rest if the weather was rainy.
The thing is that running, in Argentina, was for many years synonymous
with not knowing. Even the most exaggerated trained little, as a way to show
that they knew a lot and did not need the clumsiness of
run.
Hence, Bochini does not like the guys who run, in principle.
Then, if they play like Cruyff, well, he tolerates them. Between Liceranzu and Bochini,
however, there have been many years of rapprochement and some topics have been overcome.
Europeans understood years ago that games are not only won by running,
and we South Americans learned that a well-made dribble or a taquito pass is
not enough to achieve victory.
It is even possible that we have exceeded our understanding and have gone
even further than the Europeans in ancient times. But this is an issue to deal
with separately.
He said that football has become universal to a great extent, although the
peculiarities that distinguish a German from an Englishman and a Brazilian from
an Italian endure and will endure despite everything.
The cultural approach cannot erase identity.
And that is the style: identity. That by which we are what we are and not
something else. Identity that does not imply value judgments. That does not
mean being better or worse than the other. Simply different.
Defending our identity is the only way we have to grow, improve and even
incorporate things from other football cultures.

Wanting to be like another is giving up being.

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in love with the ball

Someone once said

that I left my neighborhood.
When? When ?
If I'm always reaching
A. Troilus

All the great players I have met have one love in common: the ball.
Everyone is completely in love with the ball. They are or were in full activity
and continue to be even after having retired. In that sense they have an
admirable fidelity. In front of a ball they change their gesture, their attitude,
the brightness of their eyes. It seems to me that you cannot be a soccer player
without being madly in love with the ball.
There are dozens of anecdotes to tell about each of them, from the most
famous like Maradona, who as a child slept with a ball and as a player was
capable of doing wonders even with an orange in the middle of a match, in
response to an angry spectator, to the one-armed Gamero, from my city, who
played little games with a coin that he lifted from the ground with his foot, to
end up keeping it in a pocket of his jacket and thus win bets to have a free
glass of wine.
Valdano tells that in the middle of the World Cup in Mexico, in 1986,
Maradona sent a ball to where the journalists were, in training.
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One of them grabbed it with his hand and returned it. "How are these guys going to talk about
soccer?" Maradona said, "if they grab it with their hands... for God's sake."
He couldn't admit it and he was right.
Armando Gallucci, a soccer hero from Bahía Blanca in the 1940s, who lived in my
neighborhood, was the first to transmit the virus of love of baseball to me. They called him
Laembroiderer, because of the way he dribbled and also, they say that in official matches he
used to throw rabona penalties.
«What do you want -he said almost blushing when they asked him- how was he going to
shoot them normally... a penalty...».
In the patio of his house he had a long corridor that ended in a faucet where a hose was
connected to water the garden. He stood ten meters away, more or less, and with a rag ball
he hit it as many times as it took to open it, with one leg and the other.

He had been retired for years, when we used to play every day in the paddock near his
house. He would appear silently and watch for a while, leaning against the wall, until we
discovered him. We immediately stopped the game and handed him the ball.

He placed the instep well down, gently, barely, to let her know that this espadrille was
hers, to put her to sleep first and then begin her daily fantasy performance. He put it in the
hole he made under the neck, with his back horizontal and his arms wide open, as if to fly, to
go through the clouds with the ball and with us. Thus began a ritual dance of technical
gestures that he repeated or invented daily. The ball went from one foot to the other, from the
heel, with the thigh, with the shoulder, until it pretended to hit it far, but it hit it with spin and
the ball went up and down in a straight line, without deviating a millimeter. "Ooooooo... I
messed up," he said, and he didn't care about the other leg. "Huyyyy... I screwed up." Finally,
he would go upstairs to look for it with one foot and lower it deflated to leave it on the ground,
melted. And he was leaving.

But he stayed. Live in the heart of each one of us so that we never forget to dream.

And that screwed her up.

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those who never fall in love

I say, what will life be like for those who are in football and don't live it from the
emotion, but from the result?
Of those who never get excited about a good move or a good
player, one of those who spend games suffering.
What will become of them on Saturday nights, when we dream
illusions and they make calculations not to lose?
How does a guy feel who doesn't feel?
How much uneasiness does the only skillful player on the team cause you, who are
forced to line up as a starter? And how much fear does the talent of the opposing team
cause them?
Who would have ripped the fantasy from them so abruptly, as to
leave them alone with uncertainty?
How do those who never take risks learn to play?
How do they console themselves when they lose, those who only love the result?
What do they know of joy, those who never enjoy?
How do they discover pleasure, those who never laugh?
How do those who never want to play understand football? And life?
How do those who never fall in love reach happiness?
When they win, how long does the win last in their pocket?
Poor people, right?
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Specialists or polyfunctional?
Antonio Sastre, an Argentine player from the 1930s, played in
almost every position, including goalkeeper. "I played where they
needed me because football was a great passion for me, it was crazy
for me," he declared then about that rare quality. Because it must also
be said that he was one of the best players in the history of Argentine
football, and there are not many who can say with certainty in which
position he played better.
The truth is that there have always been players, few and of course
not as good as Sastre, capable of performing with similar efficiency in
different places on the pitch.
It is not normal, or what happens frequently. The most common
thing is that the players adapt to a position or a function if they prefer
it, which corresponds to their natural qualities. Indeed, the first selection
is made by nature, which is the first coach we all have and perhaps the
wisest.
When we kids get together and start playing a game, the most
skillful play half forward and the least skillful half backward, without
anyone deciding. Natural conditions place each one where they can do
it best. When we federate and officially play in an organized team, we
are assigned a position according to those qualities.

Time gives us experience and a particular vision of the match.

We see it from our place, we get used to it and we adapt to that
way of interpreting the game. In other words, we acquire what we later
call a trade. The job is that for which
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We dominate the usual situations. It allows us to guess what is going to

happen, anticipate it, because we have already experienced it in a similar
way many times. It prevents us from surprises. The trade makes a journalist,
for example, resolve an article decently despite not being inspired that day.
Football-wise, I would say that the profession relieves us of a large part of
our obligations, and therefore frees us to play with greater freedom.
We specialize to fulfill a function. A football team is like a car, where the
brakes have one function, the accelerator another, the steering wheel
theirs, and all of that together allows the car to function as a unit.

In any case, in a football team there are very similar functions, which
only differ by the starting point: the wingers and the lateral midfielders, the
two central markers, and in some cases the lateral ones, although this time
with a curiosity: I have seen many right-backs play on the left, but never a
left-back on the right.
For this function, the line of the ball is decisive. Not all players are
trained to play in front of or behind the line of the ball with the same ease.
Stielicke was an unrivaled free kicker (ie playing behind the line of the ball),
and a very good midfielder but comparable to many other good ones in that
position.

On the contrary, Schuster was an exceptional organizer and free rider

with limitations. The two were suited to both positions, but both performed
much better from their usual places.
When football passed from the hands of players to those of coaches
(from the 1960s onwards), the need for multifunctional equipment arose.

Tactical coaches handle players like pieces on a chessboard and

believe they can arrange them to their liking. That is why a player who
today was an organizer, tomorrow can be a central defender and a winger
past, according to the theoretical needs of each match. As part of the tactic,
they intend to accommodate the players to that planning. They do not
respect its characteristics. They prefer neutrals, to use them according to their pretension
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That is why they proclaim that the football of the future is the football of the
multifunctional, chess football.
Obviously one tries to improve the players and that means perfecting their virtues
and correcting their defects. Get used to a great marker to be correct with the ball, to
a talented player who contributes when it comes to defending, but to assume that
everyone can play anything is to ignore the laws of nature, to ignore common sense.

Even accepting that one day soccer players will all be multi-functional and will
mark the point just the same, that they score goal balls and know how to define
themselves as the best, there will still be a position, a place, where they feel more
comfortable and perform better . I don't see the need or advantage of a permanent
rotation.
Suppose we are conductors of an orchestra and we have a musician who knows
how to play the piano, the violin and the trombone, but one of those instruments is the
one that dominates the most, why not give him that one so that the orchestra sounds
better?
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Efficiency or beauty?
There are discussions in football that go on over time, simply because
they are poorly planned. For example, the one that proposes the dilemma
between effectiveness and beauty. That is, the choice between playing
well or winning. If we accept the approach, the answer is obvious, but
also false. That is why philosophers often say that more than correct
answers, philosophy consists in correctly posing problems. Another of the
non-existent dichotomies that usually arise is the one that asks if we play
for the result or for the show.
As we can see, it is actually the same with different disguises. If we
want to respond without undoing the trap, we are lost. The truth is that
there is no reason to separate effectiveness from beauty, nor good play
from victory, nor spectacle from the result. Let's start by recognizing that
football is talent in competition and therefore efficiency, since winning is
the first thing we seek, although it is not the only thing.
Beauty consists precisely in the way of looking for it, because football
is beautiful in itself. The handling of the ball, the perfection of a pass, the
control of the ball with any part of the body, the trick of suggesting one
thing and doing the opposite, all of this requires plasticity and harmony
that for those of us who like this sport, it's beautiful. The combination of
passes to advance with the ball avoiding opponents, and the same ability
to dribble and outwit opponents, are invested with a particular beauty.

Now, those actions somehow mean taking the risk that they don't go
well and for that reason there are people who get nervous and prefer the
straight line of the long ball. So they think that two touches
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followed is a waste of time, and a dribble to clear the way is an unnecessary

risk.
"That's for when we're winning," they usually say lying, on the other
hand, because the time for a good game never comes.
They feel safer if they spend all their energy preventing the opponent
from playing, and they wait for him to make a mistake to take advantage of it.
They want to avoid risk and they don't know that gambling involves risk and
that the only way to eliminate it is to eliminate the game itself. Is that why
they play not to play?
If we realize the trap of the poorly posed dilemma, we will have to say
that football is efficiency and beauty, that it is played well to win and that it
is not necessary to deny the spectacle that football is in itself, in order to
obtain the victory that is what that we all want.
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The efficacy of pleasure

In a match against Ireland, in Liverpool, which defined England's
qualification for the European Nations Championship (1996), the
Netherlands scored a goal that deserves to go down in football history as a
model of football conviction.
There were only five minutes left and they were winning 1-0. I mean it
wasn't a goal that came from calm, it wasn't an easy goal. It was a
compromised situation. And I clarify it because I have to say, immediately,
that they scored that goal after 31 consecutive touches, uninterrupted.
They had the ball in their possession for 1 minute and 27 seconds, without
the Irish being able to touch it. If I want to be precise I must confess that
one of those passes actually grazed the legs of an Irish player, but you will
agree with me that this insignificant detail cannot be taken into account to
dismiss this monumental move.
There were 5 minutes left, I repeat, and the game qualified the Dutch
to take part in the European Championship. Instead of digging in and
throwing the ball out, buying time with some other mischievous ruse, letting
the final minutes be consumed by nothing, the Netherlands spread wide
and bunted.
He played and played, as good Brazilian teams did in times when
Brazilian teams happily defended their beach and carnival identity, when
Romario and Edmundo were no exceptions.
This goal from the Netherlands must also serve to respond with
facts to those who usually ask sarcastically, what is playing well?
It was amazing to see how the ball went back and forth from one side
to the other, from back to front, and from front to back, all the times it was
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necessary, but all, without haste, without anxieties, without urgencies, I

would even say enjoying the situation, enjoying football.
On the 25th touch, the ball returns to where it started, to the despair
of straight-line-loving resultsists. Frank de Boer received the
penultimate pass and then the move appeared, which always appears
if one has the precision and patience that the Dutch had.
From so much coming and going after the ball that they never
touched, the Irish left Kluivert the space of a park. They fell into
distraction and despair. They forgot the marks, the spaces and especially
Kluivert, who came only to the last subtle touch of Frank De Boer and
found the ball that the Irish saw pass and could not catch.
It was in front of him, poking gently, and the archer was coming out to
avoid the final blow. Kluivert, who had him right in front of him, went a
little to the left and touched her, delicately so as not to spoil the play,
over his body, and football rediscovered its essence, its foundation, its
beauty.
I want to testify to this goal, one of the best I have seen as a
collective play, for its beauty and also as a reference for all those who
fight for effective football, of course, but full of the illusion of joy, of
fantasy.
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The coach's job

What is the secret of directing actors? actor and stage director Mario
Gas was asked in an interview. "It's about loving them, about looking
for people who are capable of doing sensitive, intelligent work, who
jump off the bike, and work in depth, without much established order,
and without nonsense," he replied.
I couldn't find a better answer if someone asked me what the secret
of managing soccer players is. That is what it is about, no more and no
less.
In reality, the figure of the coach is important, but of course much
less than what the media and consequently the people give him.

Football, as a consumer product, is much better sold through

individuals who are idealized in the first place. However, of course it
has its influence, and therefore we are authorized to speak of certain
conditions that it must meet, especially so as not to do harm. I say this
because I know some coaches who, without having too many virtues,
are intelligent, choose well, and intervene as little as possible so that
things take their normal course and go well. I also know the opposite.
That is, those who try to be in everything, to intervene as much as they
can, to direct even the thoughts of the players and generally end up
ruining everything.
This job has difficulties, like all, although it is much more exciting
than most. One is gambling permanently. It's like making a living from
roulette, although —it is hoped— with greater foundations.
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The most difficult task, in my opinion, is choosing the players. If one chooses
well, a large part of the work has been done. Within a squad of 20 or 24 players,
you have to know as soon as possible who are the best in each position. If one
hits, he will make the best possible team. If you make a mistake, you will be
responsible for the time the search lasts, and not being able to find it will be your
biggest failure.
In addition to choosing the best, I have to know how to define each one of
them. That is, knowing what virtues and what defects they have so as not to
expect things that they will never be able to do, and to make the most of the
characteristics of each one.
There are players who need the ball at the foot, others who have to be
enabled long and if I, as a coach, am not able to discover it, I will never be able
to get the best performance out of that player. Since I didn't know how to define
it, I don't know how to use it. I will not be able to correct it or add anything to it.
Another aspect that, in my opinion, distinguishes a good
coach, it is an argued and precise interpretation of football.
We must be clear about what it means as a game and as a social
phenomenon, in order to respond to its greatness and its history, and to be able
to accumulate concepts that will give us a clear ideology to defend, especially in
difficult times. That ideology, on the other hand, will take us away from the
pragmatism that always misleads us. If we believe that something is well done
because it worked, we will never learn anything and we will never be able to have
convictions.
It is precisely the convictions that sustain us when things do not turn out as
well as we intend. In them we find security. The coach is also someone with a
remarkable capacity for observation. Inventing is easy, observing is more difficult,
it is often rightly said. The coach lives by observation. Details you see in the
team, in the players, in the opponents, can be decisive. From these details must
come the improvement of the players, the team, and the most effective way to
combat rivals.

The good coach will also have to have the facility to transmit not only football
concepts, but also the appropriate state of mind.
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for the fight. The competition is usually a very tough test, you have to go through
and overcome difficulties, and to a large extent it depends on the objectives and
the ways to achieve them being well determined and correctly assimilated by the
players. Finally, among the most important virtues is driving ability. The coach is
a leader by imposition, but he must also be a leader by adoption. His players
must accept him as such and prefer him as such.

When there is no compromise between the group leader and the group, it is
much more difficult for things to work. The coach, as a driver, is or should be a
seducer. The ways to seduce are infinite. It depends on the personality of each
one.
Some gain authority for their knowledge, others for good people, there are
those who convince by force, who are authoritarian and only demand obedience,
also those who come for affection.
I know of coaches who in concentrations played cards with their players until
well into the morning, between shots of whiskey and in the midst of the smoke
caused by cigarettes. The next day those same players killed each other for the
cause. I also know coaches who don't even talk to the players, who give their
orders in an aggressive and inconsiderate language, and get the total dedication
of the squad.
That is why academic psychology is still very far from understanding
changing rooms, which have very particular codes and standards.
Well, if a coach has those qualities that I just mentioned,
what does he finally do? What is your role, your responsibility?
Although it seems obvious, his mission is to make a team capable of
performing at its best, which is not easy at all. So, once you discover the position
that corresponds to each player, your task is to prepare him to perfect his
specialty. Training, from my point of view, means helping to grow, to improve.

Training in collective terms is nothing more than a rehearsal for the day of
the performance, for the day of the match. It is also a maintenance of the physical
and technical faculties of the soccer players and, in addition, a mental preparation
for the next challenge. The
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Training sessions should serve, above all, to correct individual and

operational errors, and add variants to the team.
The training methods are of each one. I prefer them intense and brief,
with game actions and in small groups. Each member of the coaching
staff works with a group. I prefer individualized work to collective work,
but as I say, here each coach has his own method. The theoretical work
remains. My opinion is that it should be intended to explain the game as
such, so that the player understands it and participates actively. It is about
making the players complicit, not obedient. To give them back the pleasure
of playing, the illusion of doing it, and to give tensions only the importance
that corresponds to them.
I also prefer short, concrete talks and individual ones to group ones.

We are left with the relationship with the press and with managers,
that is, with their environment. The press is necessary to send the
messages that each moment requires, to make the public participate in
the purpose of the team and inform them how things are going. As it is
not possible to speak with each one of the sympathizers, the media fulfill
that role, or should fulfill it. The press is also important to defend the idea
that one has of football.
It would be convenient for the directors to make them fully understand
that while the adventure lasts, we are on the same side. That it is not
about bosses and workers, as many understand it, but about fellow
travelers. It would also be interesting to achieve mutual support so that
everything works better and that each one occupies his or her rightful
place, with the utmost respect for the other.
To be just as important as any of the players on the squad, not more
than any of them, and of course less than all of them combined, the coach
has a good job to do, don't you think? But how do I explain to them what
it feels like when one's team plays well, gets excited, and also wins?
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Training Basics

It was around the 1960s when soccer training took on a methodical and, in a certain
sense, supposedly scientific character.
Until then, things were less rigorous: a few laps around the pitch, a match, some crosses,
others shooting at goal, a bit of college-style gymnastics, and playing. Nor did he train
every day, only three times a week and there were no concentrations. The coaches chose
the eleven starters and gave encouragement, some concept or another, of the topics and
traditional, applied not always with opportunism, and that was all.

Soccer belonged to the players and they played it very well, they understood the
game, and they had the necessary modesty to treat the ball with the utmost care. At least
he tried to be correct, in case he did not have many qualities.

Tactically, the field was occupied more or less the same, since always it was marked
in the zone (the mark to the man reached about half of the 50) and the ball was handled
with criteria to reach the goal after fabricating the situation.

About the middle of the 1950s, together with the growing industrialization, football
acquires a more utilitarian, less playful character. Certain tactics appear to prevent rivals
from playing comfortably and physical preparation begins to have an importance that was
not given to it before.
The physical trainers become the center of the footballer's preparation. Terms such as
Farlek, interval training... efforts are measured, tests are carried out to control the evolution
of training.
Coaches begin to modify traditional systems. It looks
more to rivals, who are studied to discover their strengths and
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counter. It is pulled from front to back and the objective that was also to win,
naturally, is slightly nuanced: first is not to lose.
The planning of the matches is made in the similarity of the great battles.
Players become soldiers of effectiveness. The beauty of the game is left aside
a bit, to dedicate all efforts to the result, almost exclusively.

Soccer is more tactical, less unexpected, more rigorous physically. It is

believed that the more athletic a player is the better he can play. If a player
runs faster, he will arrive sooner, if he jumps more, he will head better, if he
has more strength he will win the divided balls.
It wasn't like that, as we all know, but that was the trend, with the usual
exceptions. The concepts that used to make the soccer culture of the players,
were disappearing behind the service to the operation.

The work during the week was rather massive, there was little or no training
with groups or individually, except for the goalkeeper. The trainer was a
strategist, like the general who designs the battle. The player did not have to
think, but obey. The truth was on the board. The 1990 World Cup in Italy was,
perhaps, the culmination of a mediocre and petty era. It was played so badly
that even Henry Kissinger himself cried to heaven.
And I quote it because no one can suspect that it is a romantic. He came to
say something like that, like we couldn't continue in this way, so speculative,
without running the risk of running out of spectators. In other words, that way
of understanding football, which in principle had business as its main argument,
ended up questioned by the businessmen, pointed out as commercial ruin due
to lack of customers.
A few years earlier, a football current that proposed going back to the
sources had already initiated subversion. The slogan was more or less: "the
foundation is the concept." The workouts changed. What is supposedly
scientific gives way to common sense. Football is not a fact of science, but a
cultural fact, and experience, intuition, common sense, are also sources of
knowledge.
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They work more individually, in small groups, on actions of the game.

Indeed, the foundation of training is also the concept. There are no more
artificial separations between physical, technical and tactical preparation.
Be part of the player, not the system. It is believed that if the player is well
considered, he can adapt to any system, to all tactics.

The leading role that corresponds to him is returned to him, so that he

can decide on the field. It is not about avoiding the risk of playing, but about
preparing to face that risk inherent in the game, in the best possible way.
The player has to know the game, he has to think. It also recovers the
pleasure of playing, and therefore, yields more.
Europe began this return to the origin, and memorable teams emerged,
such as Van Basten's Milan, Koeman's Barcelona, Romario and Stoichkov,
Overmars' Ajax, Finidi, the Van Boer brothers.
Interestingly, in South America the reverse process occurs. Almost
everyone plays pressure, they collide, they fight, they run, much more than
they think. In any case, players appear, who allow the hope of an immediate
correction, to return to style.
In general terms, football has improved in the last decade, and the
training is intended to reinforce the historical foundations that made this
sport an incomparable event.
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Physical preparation does not exist

It is about preparing a footballer so that he fully performs the 90
minutes of the game. That is why I say that professionally there is no
physical preparation of an athlete separate from their specific activity.
Nobody —at a professional level— prepares physically, but for
something: to run, to jump, to swim, to play basketball, to play soccer.
It is a mistake to believe that basic physical preparation works for all
sports. Each sport has its particularities and demands, and the basic
conditioning must be designed and programmed in the direction of its
specialty.
Naturally I speak of professional athletes and I assume that the
essential conditions are sufficiently guaranteed. We cannot speak,
then, of physical preparation as its own section within the global
preparation of a professional soccer player. I think it is better to
integrate it into the training of your specific activity. In general terms, a
soccer player during a game makes intense and brief efforts, with also
brief pauses.
Its activity is anaerobic. We can train that quality by doing activities
that contain football concepts. In any case, on certain occasions, it is
necessary to complete the preparation of a footballer with exclusively
physical work, according to the needs of each case and each player.

I think it is much better to talk about the soccer preparation of a

soccer player, without separating each one of the aspects that compose it.
This work methodology is more in line with the reality of its activity. For
that, the coaching staff of a soccer team must plan together
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training, giving priority to football, which is the common thread of

preparation. We can also work on all the movements that the player
makes in a match, exclusively from a physical point of view, and
achieve positive results, but we will undoubtedly be distracting valuable
time from his specialty. We would subtract time from conceptual
training, which is ultimately what will decide.

A player will never play better because he is better physically

prepared, but he will do so the more football concepts he masters, the
better prepared he is from a football point of view, the better he knows
the game, knows how to hide his weaknesses and exalt his virtues the
better technique you have.
The physical does not decide, it helps in any case. Let's occupy
the time in soccer, that way we can also improve their physical
conditions.
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The triumph

Ithaka gave you a beautiful trip.

Without her you have not start the path.
But nothing else can give you.
Konstantino Cavafis.

The ball shakes the net and the stadium explodes. The emotion,
which began as a tickle at the tips of the fingers and went through the
whole body shaking it in a very special way, bursts in the throat with the
happiest cry: champions!
Something lifts us off the ground and makes us fly. We feel in the
air, dazed, radiant and at the same time alien, stripped of the weight of
reality. It is victory.
It lasts an instant. Perhaps it resembles what one supposes
happiness to be.
One has the impression that all his past was destined for that
moment, it is fully justified.
However, at a given moment the ecstasy suddenly deflates and we
find ourselves in the middle of an inexplicable void. What we were
looking for along an endless path full of difficulties, like a secret promise,
is elusive, it is nowhere, it was false, it is a disappointment. We remain
as fools for the effort in vain and we
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we feel stupidly tired. We check that everything is the same.

We with the same convictions and above all the same doubts.
We are as insufficient as before.
The goal is a lie, but when we learn it, it's too late.
Then we feign a drunken joy, perhaps to justify ourselves to ourselves,
but every moment we discover ourselves with a lost look.

There is a certainty that bothers us even more: the best thing was
the way, how did we not know it before? The illusion of winning is much
more comforting than victory itself.
Nothing is more deceptive than the final triumph, nor more abstract. In back of
victory is nothing. In short, winning is running out of reasons.
We check it, we recover and we find an excuse again
to walk the path again, to dream again.
Don Atahualpa Yupanqui said it many years ago: «The horizon
it is always beyond.” Man is nothing more than a project.
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The defeat

Who does not know sports sorrows,

knows nothing of sadness

Julio Ramon Ribeyro

Everything was prepared. The concepts explained, the training

sessions finished, the willing spirit, the brand new illusion. But in games
the precision does not appear, the functioning does not exist, the rivals
come to us easily, it costs us the soul to make two passes in a row, we
cannot clearly elaborate a goal play. It is defeat.
What until now worked, now turns out to be the opposite. The hour
of frustration. When one has the horrible impression of not being fit for
this job. One feels clumsy, useless, even ashamed.
To top it off, you have to talk, confront the journalists who seek the
limits of the news. Confront the enemies who abandon their hiding
places and dare to throw stones at us in the open. To the directors who
until that moment shared the dreams and especially the photos in the
newspapers.
Shake hands with players to help them up. Acting as a column,
transmitting security and serenity, when one only wants to ask the
miraculous fairies for help, when one only has doubts and especially
anguish.
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Undoubtedly the moment of defeat is the ultimate test where men are measured.
It tells us where each one is and how far they can go, where we are and how far we
can go. The reactions of the technicians, of the drivers, in these cases, are varied and
respond, in general terms, to the personality of each one. Some do not find another
way out than what they call "work" "We only go out working" they say, because in
reality they can't think of anything and with that they know that they look good, that
they fit into the model that society expects. "You have to give them a cane," people
claim and these coaches comply with the social order. Others give in, because they
only think about lasting and believe that by acceding to the claims of the strongest —
journalism, managers, public pressure— they pay for protection.

Only the convinced and capable, affirm their ideas, appeal to serenity
and they propose fidelity to their principles.
The first thing to accept, and the hardest thing in reality, is that in this game, as in
all games, losing is not a tragedy, but rather a possibility. The invisible threads that
make a team emotionally strong or weak are so sensitive and unpredictable that the
same phrase can be a great stimulus at a given moment, or the trigger for a collapse,
in others. Some of the many factors at play failed at the moment of defeat, but which
ones?

Since there is no way to accurately diagnose it, it is best to analyze what can be
analysed, what is concrete, and that, in this game, is precisely the game.

The right thing to do, I think, is to start from scratch, return to the fundamental
concepts that make up our style, and try to take the drama out of this matter, which is
by no means dramatic.
"What will happen if they lose?" Arrigo Sacchi was once asked, prior to a European
Cup final. "Nothing serious," replied Sacchi, "the world will continue to turn, the sun will
appear again... nothing serious."
That's how it really is.
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Smarty and suicidal

Soccer is also made up of certain characters who are not strictly the direct
protagonists, but who are still part of its history and to some extent also help to
make it.
Enrique Santos Discépolo speaks in a tango about cafes (“Cafetín de
Buenos Aires”), and says that they were for us a “school of all things”. Precisely
these characters that I want to talk about lived in cafes. They were guys who
knew almost everything, but they especially handled the essential codes like
nobody else to walk straight through life.
"A miraculous mix of know-it-alls and suicides," says Discépolo, where we
learned philosophy, dice, poetry and, above all, although Discépolo doesn't say
so, football.
Football was also a “school of all things” for us and these characters I am
talking about were its teachers.
Demanding, inflexible in their convictions, memorizing and with strict
judgments, they led the opinions and always put the final point to all the
discussions.
The know-it-all in my neighborhood was called Titín Prieto and I remember
him with his eternal gray hat and a half-finished cigarette between his lips, a
Humphrey Bogart type, with a deep and penetrating voice, to beat just the right
thing. Every day after lunch he would appear at the Villa Miter club, sit at his
table and order a coffee, stalling until the others arrived. The severe gesture.
Only. Reserved.
In the first irremediable argument, someone approached him looking for the
truth:
—Ché Titín, what do you think of Fulano, they say he's a phenomenon.
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"Somewhat... not so much."

The word of Titín Prieto, from Villa Mitre, was final. No more was spoken. It had the two
essential conditions to enjoy that unquestionable prestige. The first, that no one ever liked
him at all. The other, to always be angry or seem so.

Jorge Delgado, prop man for Peñarol in Montevideo when I worked there with Menotti
and Poncini, was another of the great backroom characters I met and from whom I also
learned many things. Huge and black, like the general in The Autumn of the Patriarch that I
imagine, he stood out for his great personality. He was a soccer man, who had started as a
player, the son of another player from Peñarol, and ended up in a function to which he gave
maximum hierarchy.

Respected as a hero, his football opinions had the weight of the indisputable. It was of
short and forceful judgments, dry as a slap in the face, unappealable.

"What do you think of Fulano, Don Jorge?"

—Elegant, fine, does little things... grouper.
He never doubted and a glance was enough to define any player in four precise words.

"And this other, Don Jorge?"

—Runner… complies.
His opinions, by the way, contained the traditional nonconformity that coined the
discussions of all the cafés in the Río de La Plata: «You know what they are, pititrilos they

are, what are they going to play, let...»

The permanent complaint that insinuates an ancient and profound wisdom, to leave the
present as a caricature of good football, which was always
before.

However, Jorge Delgado knew how to separate the goals.

—Don't think that before everyone played well —he told me sometimes— everyone gets
into the photos, but watch out, there are a lot of sneaks in those photos. And he laughed
enjoying his mischief.
The truth is that all these anonymous characters, although prestigious, shaped our taste
and also our knowledge.
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So much so that any of us, when going to comment on football, is

presented with the image of Titín Prieto, with a gray hat over his eyes
and a half-smoked cigarette. It is not going to be something that we say
some gilada.
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managers
In the early days, those of the “glisinas fences and life in orsay”, as a
tango says, the directors were soccer people. Simple people, workers who,
perhaps with a lot of effort, had managed to become independent and set
up a small shop and have some money.
They had played football as far as they could according to their ability and
they could not remain oblivious to that activity and even less indifferent to
the colors of their club.
It happened the same way in the most modest clubs and even in the
most exalted ones. I am only referring to the origin and the feelings that
encouraged people to be a director of a football club. I do not take into
account other factors, such as politics for example.
In that sense, Santiago Bernabeu in Spain was an example of what I am
saying. He was a simple football man. Pedro Amalfitani de Velez Sarfield
from Argentina another.
In those early days of modern football, those managers did everything.
From painting the field to hiring players, to buying the jerseys and organizing
a raffle to raise money and build a stadium.

Not only did they understand the game, but they felt it first hand and
shared the feeling of all the fans. They suffered and enjoyed with the same
intensity as any partner. They were looking for the triumph of their team and
the glory of the entity. Those were his goals, his desires and his purposes.
As football became the best advertising platform and therefore of prestige
and power, those first directors gradually moved away to make way for men
of
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business, the big businessmen who naturally solved the financial problems of the
club out of their own pockets, which until then had not found a solution.

They received in return the popularity they lacked to feel important. Without
having a clue about the subject, once they felt important they made decisions
from the authority that gave them the money. On very few occasions they
coincided with sporting interest. They only reaffirmed their authority through
arrogance. They replaced players, coaches, downplayed assistants, sought
notoriety.
They ended up believing themselves to be the owners of the club, the bosses,
and as such they turned their backs on the feelings of the people, and they made
the tremendous mistake of not knowing that football is nothing more than a
collective feeling.
They confused the clubs with companies and disrespected the protagonists
(players, coaches, kit men, masseurs, doctors, pitch keepers), considering them
their employees.
Naturally not all were and are not like that. There were and are exceptions
that direct through intelligence if they are stripped of feelings and lack sports
knowledge.
I also know them sharing projects, delegating responsibilities to those who
know about the issue. They are the least, but they exist.

Those who are sensitive enough to know that they are at the forefront of a
great social phenomenon, who design a club idea in accordance with the
greatness of football and the history of the club and sustain the company until
the end, and that over time, although they didn't leave football, they integrate into
the environment and get infected by the feelings of the people.
They are the ones who are successful in the long run, the ones who don't
depend on the result of each Sunday, the ones who don't change projects or
coaches or players to the rhythm of immediate results. They are the least, it is
true, but it would be unfair to ignore them.
It is also true that we cannot expect neighborhood grocers to return to run
the clubs. Among other things because
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There are hardly any storekeepers left in the neighborhoods. But we do

have to pretend that the people who take charge of a football entity have
enough intelligence to understand the phenomenon and the generosity to
—at least— match their vanity with the interests of the club...
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Journalism: From rigor to commerce

And truth be told:

this beautiful spectacle,
this feast of the eyes,
is also a dirty business.
Edward Galeano

In the World Cup in Spain, in 1982, a journalist questioning the Peruvian

coach, the Brazilian Tim, reviews all the comments made by the Peruvian
press about his team. It abounded in details and quoted newspapers and
other media from Lima and much of that country.
Tim listened patiently. Finally, the journalist, after such an extensive
prologue, asked him:
—Well, what do you think of these journalistic comments?
"I haven't read the press or listened to the radio in 17 years," he replied.
Tim.
At that time, it seemed to me just a witty exit, full of irony and sarcasm,
but I did not fully understand the infinite reason of Tim, author on the other
hand of a famous concept of football, that of the blanket to define the
options of the teams : «It covers your head and uncovers your feet or vice
versa», said Tim and to conclude he added: «Football is a
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short blanket. He suggested that you had to choose between being offensive and
unprotected or defensive and giving up attacking possibilities.
A few years before that outing in the press room of the 82 World Cup, Tim, with a
long career in several South American countries, had had another speech about soccer
journalists, in Chile, on the occasion of a coaches' congress. César Menotti had declared
that 90% of football journalists know nothing about football. When Tim was asked about
those statements, he said: "Menotti says that because it's

very generous".
The truth is that as football became the object of desire of the big capitals, warned
of its tremendous call, sports journalism gradually changed its character.

In principle, it fulfilled its function by limiting itself to telling what happened, without
too committed opinions. Later, based on a greater knowledge of the subject, he already
issued evaluative judgments, and, from that point of view, he was a respected critic,
sometimes even by the protagonists themselves. At that time, it had a strictly journalistic
approach and it is possible that in some cases it had a pedagogical tone. Many times
he stood up as a defender of good play, fair play and all the values that would make a
show more entertaining and exciting.

At least in Argentina, where I know the matter more thoroughly, there were
journalists whose word was expected and above all respected: Borocotó, Félix Daniel
Frascara, Dante Panzeri and Osvaldo Ardizonne, to name a few examples.

To appear on the cover of some of the most widely distributed magazines or

newspapers, you had to earn it for a long time. It was a kind of consecration.
Naturally not all journalists of that time were capable, nor all the intentions as pure
or as clean, but in general terms that was the journalism that surrounded football.

Of course it's not about personal issues, moral values or better times. The change
is due to different economic and social structures.
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Sports journalism is acquiring a more accentuated commercial character as

capitalism becomes more radical. Soccer, which is a game to create and enjoy,
is similar to the concept of life that is imposed on us and that speaks of effort,
production, obligations and hardship. Pleasure is no longer quoted and gambling
is transformed into a free time business, and subject to the same work rules.

Bertrand Russell—analyzing the phenomenon of pleasure versus efficiency

—says that "there used to be a capacity for playfulness and games which has
been inhibited to some extent by the cult of efficiency."
Well, that cult of efficiency only admits winners and losers. The winners are the
ones who sell. Losers, moreover, are a bad example. Such a limited scheme
dispenses with the content. The one who wins is right and the one who sells too.

That is why the journalists worried about telling, prosecuting, from the
knowledge of the subject, and careful to write it or say it in the best possible way,
almost finished. That effort is of no interest to anyone.
What sells is the appearance, the scandal, the empty controversy.
People were used to reading the headlines, so it doesn't matter who writes it
and how they write or speak it.
The covers are only occupied by the big teams, which are the ones that
summon the most and sell the most. And they sell in both ways: because they
win and take advantage of the euphoria of the supporters with praises that reach
heaven, or because they lose and take advantage of the fan's anger, with
shocking judgments and punishment.
never balance. Always the exaggeration.
The football journalist underwent a curious metamorphosis to the rhythm of
postmodernism: he is no longer respected by the players, who are well aware of
his ignorance of the subject (sometimes even confessed), but he is feared and
sought after. Not appearing in the press today is equivalent to not existing.
In the media dedicated to football, everything is talked about
related to soccer, less soccer. If it was criminal, if it wasn't, if he said about that
one, if that one answered him. Just as theater and film journalism talks about the
weddings, divorces and other social commitments of
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actors, less of theater and cinema, the soccer one tries to ignore the content to
dedicate himself to selling the product.
It also occurs, although with more direct ideological purposes, with general
information journalism. Never before have we received so much information from
all over the world and on all topics, and never before have we been more uninformed.

We have all seen dozens of images of the war in Bosnia, for example, and we
have heard and read many other news about it, but very few or almost no one is
able to explain precisely what is really happening in Bosnia.

The sports press is subject to the same rules of the game.

It took several years for me to understand the reasons that forced Tim not to
read the sports press or pay attention to other (in) communication media.

So that? if we already know that these means only respect success. He who
loses is never right, he does not sell, defeat takes away rights. They are strictly
commercial values imposed by the law of the market, the only god they worship.

We got used to thinking that if something makes money, if it wins, it's well done.
It is the most cretinous justification for many of the atrocities of this society.

However, we still have hope. There are still, in all parts of the world, capable
men who work as journalists, who love their profession, who study, who want to
improve, who do not accept giving up their values in exchange for success, who
write or say with discretion, with pleasure, escaping to the commercial habits that
always resort to the facileness of the phrase made or the common place. That they
are faithful to their opinions, honest with what they see and not with what you have
to see to sell.
Generally, they are those who fight at a disadvantage, from more modest
positions, with less publicity, who do not want to give up their illusions, their
concerns.
They are the ones who deserve everyone's respect. Those who still believe
that quality and honesty are possible. Those who, without a doubt, provoke the envy of
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the successful ones, who live waiting for the latest sales figure to know if
they acted correctly or not.

"How do you live with success?" Argentine painter Guillermo Roux was
asked. "You have to take it with a grain of salt," he replied, "because today
success is the simplest and easiest thing in the world." And he added later:
"Anyone can be successful, even without doing anything."
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Attention Fioravanti! (Football on the radio)

One was imagining the game as you listened to the story. «Cecconato has
it... advances to the right... avoids a man... Cricket asks for it to the left...». And
one saw Cecconato carrying the ball and Grillo entering only from the left. I saw
the field, the people, even the color of the shirts. The radio was an invitation to
the imagination, especially for the kids from the interior of the Country, who did
not have the opportunity to go to the Capital every Sunday.

They made connections with all the courts and the panorama was complete.
But above all we were seduced by the meticulous, detailed, even flowery story,
careful in the language, with many synonyms like those used by Fioravanti.

The reporters anticipated the moves for a moment, which allowed us to

guess the whole situation. For example, if Sívori had it, he would tell us who
was to his right, who was farther to the left, who was supporting him and what
he could do, how far he was from the goal, in short, we had the move fully
represented in the mind. Even if Sívori touched her to the left, we already knew
if it was the right thing to do or not, and we even protested if we thought she had
made a mistake.
Suddenly the game was interrupted. Attention Fioravanti!. Yes, who is it?
Fioravanti gave way. «Boca goal... Borello from 35 meters. Mouth 1, Velez 0.»

And the game continued in the voice of Fioravanti, who was possibly the
most listened to. I also remember Alfredo Aróstegui, with a crutch that I still have
in mind every time the ball goes out of bounds: "the person in charge of putting
it in motion again has to be...".
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The radio brought the match to the kitchen at home. Gollllll! Fioravanti said,
lengthening the L and the shout of the crowd was perceived in the background and
we got in among them, to enjoy if the goal was ours, or suffer if it was from the
opponents.
The game ended and we stayed listening to the comments of the connoisseurs
who explained the reasons for the victory or the defeat, but above all, very especially,
we waited to see if they interviewed our idol.

Attention Fioravanti...! we are with Cricket. Then my heart stopped. He didn't

even want to breathe to hear what Cricket was saying. «I was lucky», Cricket said,
«it was a ball that Cecconato gave me, I stopped it with my chest and shot
crosswise. I enter. I was lucky". And then I relived the goal. Cricket stopping it with
his chest between two opponents, Fioravanti had said, a turn, a feint and the ball
that crosses violently to enter next to the far post.

Cricket spoke to me, he explained the goal to me, there was no one else
with me in the kitchen at home, who was he going to talk to if not?
Then, little by little, he returned. I landed from the trip to Buenos Aires, to the
Independiente stadium, to return to the patio of my house, and get back into the
imagined game. I put on the Independiente shirt, grabbed the rag ball, my younger
brother at the goal, and repeated the move Grillo had told me a hundred times. I
was Cricket.
The center came, I stopped it with my chest and... it went away. Again. The center
came, he stopped it with his chest, a feint... Again...
Until I got out. More or less it came out, and I ran with open arms to the stands,
where the clothes were hanging to dry, shouting the goal with my voice that
simulated a crowd... Attention Fioravanti...! we're with Cappa... «well, I was lucky»,
I said to my clenched fist that was Fioravanti's microphone, «I stopped it with my
chest and...».
That was radio for us at that time. Also the radio has
to the guilt of making us dreamers, of living illusions.
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The directed gaze: Soccer on TV

Television produces a spurious and emotionally damaging gratification
for a passive and apathetic public, easily manipulated by demagogues,
says one of the characters in the novel Vastas Emotions and Imperfect
Thoughts, by the Brazilian Rubem Fonseca.
Without wanting to make a direct connection, it made me think of the
soccer games they broadcast on television, which, really, are becoming
more and more difficult for me to watch.
There is an inconsequential foul in the middle of the field. The game
goes on almost immediately, but we can't watch it because the TV is
dawdling at the foul. He shows it to us over and over again, from one
camera and from another, from one shot and from another. We get ecstatic
over details that are of no importance to the development of the game.
Gestures, tense muscles, pieces of grass that break off, beads of sweat
appear in close-ups.
When they show us the game again, the ball has gone to the corner.
We have no idea what happened. We resign ourselves, anyway. The corner
is taken, the ball hits a post, there is a rebound, a ruckus near the area and
the harassed team goes on the counterattack. We don't see it either. The
television is repeating the play of the corner from all imaginable angles,
slow, slower still, the goalkeeper who stretches, the ball that hits the post.
Not a single detail of that play remains without us seeing it over and over again.
The game continued, of course. How and in what way the backlash was
resolved, nobody who is watching on television knows.
Not all televisions are like that, nor all the games, nor all the plays,
naturally, but without a doubt that is the trend. Let's go to a
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inconsistent exhibitionism, towards a superficial show, without content.

Suddenly a winger throws a cross, we follow the ball with a camera, when
the center is about to reach the area it is picked up by another camera
from another angle, we no longer know where we are, where the ball is,
what is the play.
I mean that television directs our gaze towards what it wants us to
see. In that sense, he tells us a party that is not, at least it is not as we
see it.
The game, which is ultimately what we want to see, appears almost
mutilated by constant interruptions and alterations.
In the middle of the game, the coach's face. Much longer, still, if you
are one of those who stand up and gesticulate. When we least expect the
word of the club president. The match continues, but what we are actually
seeing is a show built around the match. Not the party itself. The
substantial becomes accidental, to put it in scholastic terms.

Television is more interested in a player carrying the ball in close-up,

including a close-up of just the legs and the ball, than the panorama of
that play. We are out of references. We cannot know if that player carrying
the ball could have given it to a better placed teammate, or if he was right
to shoot on goal. We cannot form our own opinion.

By directing our gaze, television also directs our thoughts.

In other words, we become a passive public, only receptive to messages,
a client. In reality, the market needs customers, potential buyers secured
in the armchair at home. The game ends and the client can only speak
with reason about some specific plays and very little about the game
because he saw it very biased, very interrupted and without the appropriate
panorama. We ended up watching the great spectacle of football, where
the game, which is what interested us, occupies a discreet background.

Perhaps it is true what that character from Fonseca adds about the
media, "obviously," he says, "the businessmen of the
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mass culture only think about profit”, but in any case a point of
agreement could be found where the game can also be seen, right?
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culture and football

It's amazing what you ran today, Fulano, what a way to help your
teammates! What a waste... what generosity...!
José María Muñoz was an excellent soccer announcer in Argentina
and had a habit of showering soccer players with abundant praise after
matches.
In this case he was talking to a River player who had been particularly
generous in the effort.
At the end of the interview and to leave him one more detail in his
favor, Muñoz asks him a question, sarcastically, with an irony full of
admiration:
"But tell me, Fulano, how many lungs do you have?"
—One… like everyone else, Muñoz —replies the player, appealing to
all the humility he could, making an effort not to reveal the immense
happiness of the moment.
There are hundreds of anecdotes like this in football and almost all of
them have the evil purpose of pointing out the clumsiness, if not the
ignorance, of footballers.
Love and hate are the two poles that form idolatry, with the same force.
John Lennon was killed by a fan, someone who loved him.
It is true that the majority of soccer players come from the dispossessed
class of society, and that many of them have not had the possibility of
accessing the instruction that the other social layers take advantage of as
a right of all that only they enjoy. And it is also true that there are many
ways to kill the idol. This culture is one of them.
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But it is also true that culture is often confused with information or instruction, and that,
in any case, the player is blamed for the lack of a right that is denied him. First, as a
member of a marginalized social class, we cut him off from completing a proper education,
and then we try to humiliate him by pointing out his lack of education.

But there is also the confusion of the oppressed, as Fanon explained.

The oppressor is also the role model. The educated, in this case, serve as a reference for
the player who begins to dress like him, to learn the use of cutlery, to choose restaurants,
to speak like him, and finally and unfortunately to think like him.

In short, he makes a tremendous effort to fit into what he believes to be his new status,
his new social class. He ends up out of class, without real support, despising the culture he
had for an education he doesn't even have.

He is alone in a confusing situation that they push him to interpret as the passing of
the outcast who becomes a lord. He is not comfortable in his new role, but he understands
it as an obligation. He looks at his own as those who were not able to arrive and tries to
hide them so that his rise is seamless. He is hurt by her attitude, but accepts it as payment
for being cultured. No one helps him to discover reality. Nobody presents him with another
point of view to clarify things for him.

He even loses the representation he had every time he went out to play a game. He
doesn't know who he's playing for anymore, and that's the worst thing that can happen to him.
When he scores a goal, he doesn't know whether to shout it for what he understands to be
his progress, or for the happiness of his people, whom he loves, but wants to hide.
He repeats common places, set phrases that he reads in the newspapers and little by
little he runs out of ideology. It is only the feigned and forced form of the important lord, the
cult. He lives in fear of being identified with his neighborhood, with his people, whom he
also considers uneducated. He feels pampered by the class that until very recently despised
and humiliated him, and although he suspects the ephemerality of the matter, he cannot
resist the temptation of his perfume, his women and the pleasures that seemed so far away.
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He experiences the paradox of mixed feelings and is baffled.

He lives imitating those he despises deep down, and makes an effort to detach
himself from those he really loves.
They vilely deceived him with the concept of culture. With the wrong, intentionally
wrong concept of what culture is. They took reality from under his feet, and
condemned him to loneliness and uprooting. Once he stops scoring the goals that
enlightened Cholulism celebrated for him, he will find himself hopelessly lost and
disoriented.
Official culture calls it the fall of the idol. They made him up, tricked him, took
him up to the clouds and later took the ladder away from him, to look at him with the
usual contempt, when they see him crashed into reality.

How to get out of the trap that the consumer society prepares for the successful
soccer player? It is true that not everyone ends up dazzled by the lights of the center
and that some know how to get out of that trap. The best way, undoubtedly, is not to
have entered. Much of the Uruguayan players that I know, for example, even in full
swing of flashes and interviews, remain in the same place of prudence and discretion.

Also the Basques, by the way. They do not stop being what they are, but not as an
act of benevolence towards those who stayed below, like someone who looks over
his shoulder with an understanding and hypocritical attitude. This is not how the
Uruguayan and Basque players that I know overcome this situation.
They remain what they were, truly. The changes they necessarily experience are
superficial. They may have a better house, a better car and better shirts, but inside
those shirts is the same man who wore poorer quality clothes a few years ago, not
many.
They continue to be passionate about football for the game, not for success.
They feel part of a collective passion. They affirm themselves in reality, their reality,
and maintain their cultural signs, although some take the opportunity to receive more
cultural information, which is something else.
Then success passes through them without injuring them. They do not adopt
poses of humility, they are humble because they understand the keys to this game
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cheat that they propose, and because they have lived in the two poles of
the same situation.
Of course this intelligent attitude, which allows the successful to keep
the ground under their feet, to always be grounded in reality, is not the
heritage of Uruguayan and Basque players only, it happens that perhaps
they, as members of a deeply rooted popular culture and oblivious to the
temptations of frivolity, have a greater chance of being what they are. In
any case, there are of all nationalities and cultures, although almost all find
it hard to avoid such a perfumed and attractive invitation to the abyss.
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Where does soccer start?

If we talk about football, Jorge Valdano and I agree on almost everything.
However, sometimes, in so many trips we have made and concentrations where
we have been together, there were details that confronted us dialectically. They
are those occasions where the question is only
theoretical and where we both want to be right. I want to tell you about one of
those somewhat Byzantine discussions, certainly, that to some extent amused us,
and served us to exercise reasoning and to accumulate arguments.

—I tell you no, Angel, football is above all intelligence, it starts in the head.

—Look Jorge, if we don't start from an adequate technique, it's impossible to

talk about tactics, plans, systems or even concepts. The execution of all that would
be defective and therefore everything else would be worthless. I mean, it starts at
the feet.
—It's not like that, because without intelligence to play, ability becomes a
virtue without an objective, and I'm telling you, it's often even harmful because it's
inoperative. The gambeta, for example, that we like so much, without an objective,
is a merry -go-round and control of the ball, do you know what it is? circus juggling.
—It's fine Jorge, but when we approach a player with an indication, we do it
assuming that he will be able to do it, right? We can't tell someone who hits them
with their ankles to drive deep balls, and we can't tell our team to come out playing
if they can't make three passes in a row.

—But Angel, to go out playing, to score balls, you have to understand the
game. To skill I have to know how, when and where
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use it.
—Of course you have to know the game, Jorge, but in reality soccer is the
execution of an idea, of an inspiration, and no matter how much I know the game,
that knowledge is of no use to me if I can't do it.
The more level the game has, in addition, the more technique is needed.
—I insist: if we pass the ball to each other and we don't know why, the
technique is nothing short of useless. It's like mastering the language perfectly
and having nothing to say.
The thing went on for another hour at least. At last we had to recognize that
to be a great soccer player you have to bring both theories together. Being great
in soccer implies having a great technique and knowing how to use it.
Intelligence and skill, in football, is like form and substance in art, they go
together. That's right, although I'm sorry to have to abuse copyright to get the last
word, but... it starts with the feet.
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we have to say no
Football is for us, professionals and fans, a means of expression and
communication, with its own emotional content, that is, a way of being.
Football, as a cultural fact, is part of our identity.

The content of the game —not the result, which is accidental— is

what gives it that particular meaning for those of us who are formed
around it. There are ethical and aesthetic values that we have incorporated
through football as it is played.
We also have a regulation designed to defend the talent and joy of
the game, which severely punishes everything that threatens the meaning
it has had since its origin, which punishes violence and cheating.
Since television throughout the world has decidedly intervened in the
business, it calls for measures to modify the current conception of football
in order to make it more spectacular to make it more attractive to the
public, at the cost of losing meaning. That is, they want to expand the
market. It is a law of capitalism: expansion.
In the business code, to stop is to go backwards. The clientele is never
enough. For this reason, from the highest authorities of FIFA and UEFA
they permanently insinuate certain regulatory modifications that,
undoubtedly, would conceptually alter the game.
They started offside, I think I remember, and they did tests that didn't
give the result they expected. They talked about throw-ins, to do them
with the feet, to eliminate the barriers in free throws, to shoot the corners
closer, to play the games in four periods (like North American basketball)
and to establish the minutes that could
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request the coaches in full match, to give instructions.

Finally they suggest, indirectly as they usually do these things to see what kind of
reactions it causes, to enlarge the arches (50 cm long and 25 high).

Obviously if the goals are enlarged, the goal would have another meaning
and another importance. They assume that if the matches end 12 to 10, for
example, they are more attractive and would attract more people, including those
who are uninterested in soccer. Frivolity gives them money in almost all activities,
why not in football?
We seem to be at a dead end. We are going directly towards an empty
football, with spectacular gestures, where the athletes will be more valued than
the talented ones.
However, we can still do something.
Professional players, at the behest of Maradona, Cantona and other notables,
formed something like an international union, to defend their interests and claim
the leading role that corresponds to them in decision-making. The coaches should
do the same, and the fans should do the same, because without them none of
this would make sense.
They have to know and understand that football belongs to us, to all of us
who love and enjoy it. They have to realize that we do not want confrontations of
any nature, nor are we against anyone in particular, but we cannot passively
allow them to take away our identity, to steal a piece of our way of being. We
have the right to be heard.

We still have something left. We have to say NO.

If they perceive significant resistance, they will think twice, they will be
prudent and they will have no other choice but to consult us and then together,
choose the best for football.
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the future of football

The first formation of the footballer, until not long ago, was spontaneous.
Driven by his instinct, by the desire to play and to imitate the most
appreciated professionals, he just wanted to have fun, enjoy the game.
Currently, especially in Europe, spontaneity in the first steps of the footballer
is more difficult or almost impossible, for different social reasons.

In principle, this situation is inconvenient, because there is no better

start for the formation of a soccer player than free and spontaneous play.

When dressed in formality, football carries obligations that can deprive

the beginning footballer of fun, creativity and enjoyment of the game,
essential conditions for proper training.
However, this real situation treated correctly can even be beneficial.
Certain fundamentals must be taken into account and the possibilities that
the organization can offer must be taken advantage of.
The most important thing for the child who begins to play football -10 or
12 years old—it's the pleasure of playing.
More than correcting possible defects and of course after rigorously
avoiding any tactical consideration, the effort must be made to allow the
child to have fun with absolute freedom, especially to enjoy the ball. The
efforts of the monitors must be directed towards this goal.

From that age you can start with some individual concepts to improve
your technique, which continues to have absolute priority with respect to
your tactical training.
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From 14-15 years old, we could consider a second stage and the moment to
instill the collective sense that the game has. It is when the first basic guidelines
on tactics or systems must be offered, so that they begin to order themselves on
the field, and so that they know the game in greater depth.

The most important thing at this stage is to teach him to think, to take
responsibility for his role. Not to be obedient, but to be aware of his obligations
to the team.
That's why you have to know the game, its foundations and principles, its
proper functioning, because that way you'll learn to make decisions within the game.
countryside.

In the third and last formative stage, 16-17 years old, we must help the
soccer player, giving him a comprehensive preparation. That is, initiate him in
professional obligations from all points of view. You have to learn the meaning of
this game, its importance as a representation of popular sentiments. He has to
meet the great footballers and great teams in history, to understand that his role
will be to try to continue a path that has already begun.

That football is important because those players and those teams made it
important, with this enormous calling power. This way you will learn who you
represent when you wear a jersey and who you are playing for. You will know
what it means to betray that feeling and why the points at stake will never be
more important than the values it represents.
He will have to have the sensitivity prepared to appreciate in all its dimension the
enthusiasm and joy of himself and of all the people who vibrate with football.

That's why I say that if we take advantage of current social needs we can
help create a better football. We will also have to think about adequate facilities,
in the dimensions of the playing fields so that they are in accordance with the
ages of the children, and in the size of the ball. In encouraging the competitiveness
of small players, but giving it the playful sense it has, so that they never fall into
temptation
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of confusing football with a job to earn money, as it will be presented to you

a thousand times.
The future of football has no other way than to return to its past, to be
essentially fulbo , incorporating the benefits of all the technical and scientific
advances, but never to distort it...
The football of the future cannot be other than the football of the past,
with more dynamics, with better organization, with all the advantages of the
21st century, minus the utilitarian ideology that will surely be imposed on us
as the truth.
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To Menotti, with love

It is an act of strict justice. It is not about praising the friend, or just raising
a flag. It is an obligation, if only out of honesty, to say that Menotti is a
teacher, a creator, and an example, in this complicated job.

There are so many virtues that set it apart from all the rest, it's hard to
pick one to start with.
Possibly the most notable, the first that jumps out at you is his ability to
seduce. Even by physical presence. He is one of those types that one is
willing to follow wherever, convinced of whatever. Yes, the first thing to say
is that César is a seducer by profession.
Seducing, for him, is a permanent challenge, which he accepts with surprising
enthusiasm.
I have seen him propose, in dozens of meetings, the most insane things
and defend those proposals passionately, tirelessly, until he was completely
sure that none of those present remained without being absolutely convinced.

When finally the enthusiasm was general and contagious and everyone
asked him to get to work, ready to abandon their current lives without
scruples, he postponed the start-up until the next day. So yes, he was going
to rest easy.
With the sunrise he has no memory of his nocturnal passion and he
doesn't know how to escape from those who still maintain the illusions that
he himself lights up. You have to understand it. So are the seducers. The
most important thing for him had already happened: the seduction. The rest
of the question is of little interest.
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Some players are coaches when they stop playing, because they can't
play anymore, just because they don't get away from what they like the most.
Others, like Skinny, have been coaches since they played. Menotti lived
watching when he was a player. He sharpened each play, always looking for
perfection. I was never completely satisfied with anything. He put a name to
everything he observed, that is, he invented concepts.
From that famous Santos that Pelé led, he stole so many concepts that
not even the protagonists imagined. I think he only played one year with them,
but he still draws conclusions even from the training they did. As a player he
ran little, but he always thought. Therefore, when he debuted in the trade, he
was not new. Almost everyone else begins to discover football when they stop
playing.
Renato Cesarini, another of the greats, even confesses it. Speaking of
Seoane, who for him was the best of all the cracks he saw, he says: «...I
discovered it years later, when I learned to watch football, when I began to
analyze the players. Because what do you think? In those days I played like a
gilly... The only thing I had was the skill. And what he felt. Two lungs, a
barbaric strength and soul to run the entire field, to fight them all... What did
he know about soccer? Any".
César, on the other hand, never played like a gilt.... He always analyzed
to exhaustion every move he made or his teammates made. That is why El
Flaco was 20 years ahead of everyone, and he continues to lead them.
Rattín tells, that when they played together in Boca one afternoon he
asked for more effort, because things were not going very well. "The only
thing missing," Menotti replied in the middle of the game, "is that now, to play
soccer, I have to run."
That nonconformity of a footballer who was always looking for the best,
and that denial of physical effort as a solution to things, no matter how bad
they come, keeps them intact.
Owner of a football ideology full of arguments and respect for talent,
sacred respect for talent, I would say, he is the coach with the strongest
convictions one can imagine.
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Once in Barcelona, after a couple of unfavorable results, a controversy

arose about the need to include Quini, a formidable scorer, although already in
the last stage of his brilliant career, as a striker. Actually, that Barcelona played
almost without leading forwards, because Marcos, Maradona and Carrasco did
it and the three started from behind. For a whole week all the sports press in
Barcelona insisted and pressed for Quini to take the place of the classic center
forward.

Menotti, as always in these cases, did not even comment on the matter. In
the midst of the general demands, a Copa del Rey match is played in Barcelona.
The rival was Osasuna. César rests one of the players, I don't remember exactly
who, and Quini starts. Barcelona wins 4-0 and Quini doesn't score a goal, he
scores all 4.
At the end of the game we went to dinner with a group of friends, as we
always did. I, who was just starting out, was nervous about the events and
confused. What should be done next Sunday?
Did Quini have to play, or not?
We talked about the game, we commented on the plays and I couldn't take it anymore:
—César, what a mess, right?

-Why? Menotti asks me.

—And... the Quini thing... he scored the 4 goals...
"No problem, Angel, on Sunday Marcos, Maradona and Carrasco will play,"
he told me without any hint of doubt and without taking into account at all the
tremendous pressure that he was going to suffer from that moment and that he
did suffer.
I heard him give talks in the midst of terrible battles, at half-times of
tremendous games, aimed at not losing sight of the obligation to play, to throw
down the best walls, to make the best passes, not to forget the commitment to
the illusion of the people, to defend with hierarchy the pride of being soccer
players.
If to be a good football coach you need ten qualities, the
Flaco has twenty and in each of them the highest score, but what
Machine Translated by Google

What surprises me the most is the quality of analysis he has, which allows him to define
the players with indisputable precision, and find in the teams the just cause of their virtues
and their defects.
To see him train César is to attend a creativity function. Single
Prepare essential training guidelines. Think about what you want to improve or correct and
improvise on that, invent. He guides the players through words, encourages them, points
out the rhythms, highlights their successes, modifies their incorrect attitudes. Play. Actually
the best word that defines his training is that: game. They play soccer, sometimes with
rivals, sometimes without rivals. The efforts go unnoticed by the soccer players. They are
so attentive to what they are doing, so attentive to what César says, that they do not realize
how tired they are.

Also because they train enthusiastically, seduced if we want to be precise when talking
about Menotti. From one exercise to another, from one action to another, from one concept
to another concept, all while playing.
The requirement is maximum, without anyone explicitly demanding anything.
I remember a very particular training session he did at Barcelona. He put the eleven
starters, without the ball, all over the field. He talked to them for a few minutes to tell them
that he was going to recount situations from a game, and they all had to make the
movements that this would require. Within ten minutes they looked like eleven crazy people
playing a soccer game against no one, without a ball, and with all intensity. El Flaco in the
middle of them, recounting the plays: "And now the ball is on the right, it belongs to Víctor,
it goes backwards, Migueli has it...", César said and the players moved to the beat of that
story, they jumped, they ran, they bailed, they attacked. They were like this for more than
half an hour. They ended up exhausted. They had played to play and had worked the
system.

In this way, Menotti had avoided giving an extensive talk to talk about tactics and
almost playing, almost unintentionally, the players had assimilated the same thing, but
practically, on the field and in action.
If it is convincing speaking for the group, it is even more so if the suggestion is
individual. To a side that he had in one of his teams, very
Machine Translated by Google

Temperamental, a little rushed to play, with a great will and little precision, he took him
aside to make him understand some things about his function.
—You dress well, you care about matching your clothes, about being presentable,
you are an intelligent guy, you read, you talk about any subject, you are long in speaking...

"Yes... that's what I try to..." said the player, a little confused.
"Then why does he play differently?" Why is he careless with the ball, the raffle, he
throws it anywhere? why is it thrown on the floor so often, it gets messy? why don't you
think about playing?
—Well… I… stammered the player.
—Your game has to be in accordance with your personality, think about it and you
will see that it will be another player.
In a short time the surprise was general. Without losing vigor, that side
it had improved all the aspects that made it turbulent and unclear.
Another day he encountered a defender who did not understand the area well, and
it messed up the entire bottom line operation.
He invites him to have a coffee and tells
him: —You. Do you know the difference between a guard dog and a ferocious dog?

—No —answers the player, not really understanding where things were going.
"Look," Cesar continued, "you put a ferocious dog in front of the door of your house
and two thieves come." The first one who approaches, the ferocious dog barks and
jumps on him. The thief runs, the dog goes after him and away from the door. The other
thief comes in and robs him. Instead, the guard dog barks at the first thief, but returns to
guard the door, not abandoning it. Do you get me? The guard dog is the one that marks
the zone, the other dog prefers the mark to the man.

Here Caesar, despite the clever and revealing metaphor, had no

luck. The player kept making the same chasing mistakes.
Cesar calls him again and asks: "Tell me, do
you remember the difference between the guard dog and the ferocious dog?"

"Yes," says the player.

Machine Translated by Google

-Which was? Cesar insists.

"In which one is bad and the other is good," said the player to his
unfortunately, because, of course, after that answer he was no longer a starter.
Menottismo in Argentina is a way of being. I mean, we were Menottistas
before Menotti and that was, I think, his capital success. Menotti gave a
name and surname to the feeling of an entire town. He organized it and
gave him self-confidence, to be able to compete as equals against anyone.
It is true what Valdano once said, in Argentina there are no confrontations
between menottistas and fulanistas or menganistas, what really exists is
menottismo and anti-menottismo, because there have always been those
who wanted to contradict the Argentine football style, believing that they
would find efficacy in speculative models, less attractive.
Some even won, but all ultimately failed, because
none was able to represent that feeling that is one's own style.
I once said, and now I think it is appropriate to repeat, that whoever
wants to really know football cannot ignore Menotti's thoughts.
In any case, it lends itself to discussion, but it is never indifferent. It is a
fundamental part of the same football history.
He taught us many things, practical and theoretical, but the most
important thing is that we were able to understand with him the meaning
of football for the people where it originates, and why we should never
betray that feeling for any reason.
Thanks, teacher.
Machine Translated by Google

Just in case

...the glory of a chimerical failure

is worth more and is more beautiful
than the utilitarian and mean
triumph of the pragmatists.
louis landero

In case there are any doubts, in case I didn't explain myself well and because I
like to repeat it a thousand times, I want to say, finally, what does football mean to
me?
In my neighborhood I learned that soccer is a ball that comes out well played
from behind, clean as we said, that runs from side to side caressed by the whole
team, looking for the play mischievously, with elegance, with skill, with intelligence,
even that reaches the opposite area and makes itself available to anyone who wants
to push it to the goal, slowly if possible.

I learned that if during a game I don't feel a special tingling in the

stomach and fingertips, it doesn't work for me.
That the result is the most important thing, but it is also the least important thing
if my team has the ball and everyone wants it, they play it short like that and the rivals
cannot catch it.
Machine Translated by Google

They taught me that you have to laugh at everything that is usually

considered important and that it seems to us that we dramatically put it into
play, if the central marker stops it with his chest, feints inside and goes out
playing with class and sufficiency, or the lateral shoots a pipe when they press
it against the line and it has no way out.
I like goals that barely cross the line, with the goalkeeper sprawled at the
other post. I liked Bochini because he almost never needed to hit him hard, he
just pushed the ball to give it an unexpected destination that always surprised
the opponents.
I like the hats, the pipes, the gambetas on a tile, the guys who look to one
side and pass it to the other. I liked Armando Gallucci, from my neighborhood,
because he used to say “take it, kid” and it was a lie, he was still with the ball.
And Federico Sacchi because he always guessed and anticipated what the
strikers would think a little later, and Pereira because it seemed like he was
joking and always won and never threw himself at their feet and had fun
defending like crazy, and Maradona because he dribbled them everyone when
he felt like it, and crazy Gatti because he kept cheating the strikers and took
away the solemnity of the game and the drama of the result.
Football is useless to me if it doesn't excite me.
One of the goals that I enjoyed the most was the one made by Molina, in
Bánfield, in 1986, after Benítez and García threw 30 walls, made 50 taquitos,
brakes, starts, passed from behind, from one end of the field to the other. with
the people delirious with madness, and when they reached the opposite area,
Pampa Orte appeared to receive the pass, but no, he opened his legs and left
Molina alone with the goalkeeper, who dribbled it as if it were a chair and then
pushed it so softly that I don't know if it reached the network.
I couldn't yell it. The emotion left me speechless, stunned, stunned,
although at that very moment I knew it was one of the most beautiful things I
was going to see in my life.
What is there to win? Of course you have to win, but if they tell me that
I have to do without all this to win, what do I care if I win!
We have to win, surely we have to win, to defend all this, to protect the
emotion produced by football played in this way, so that
Machine Translated by Google

those who want to trample on our souls with what is useful screw themselves and learn if
they want.
For that alone it is worth winning and always. And also because it is played like this,
precisely to win.
And we also have to win so that more crazy Houseman appear, more De la Peña,
more Guardiolas, more Ibagazas, more Redondos, more Maradonas, more Raúles, more
Latorres, and we can live with hope from Sunday to Sunday. For that you have to win.

So that those who know can play and those who run accompany, and not the other
way around, as the current trend indicates.
You have to beat those who just want to win, to be able to enjoy this game that is ours
and not theirs... That was born that way, as we feel it and that later, a long time later, they
made him sick with importance, with tactics repressive, of tensions, of urgencies and of so
many stupid and useless things.

You have to win to be happy, because football is just that, an excuse to be happy.

You have to win to defend joy and defeat the scientists, the tacticians and above all
the speculators who live by killing emotions.

Football is that for me, for all of us, that we were meant to be for others. Of course we
want to win, but never giving up our identity...
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Brief fulbo dictionary

Tramp. It comes from A. Torrent, name that had huge pipes that were formerly used
in Buenos Aires for sanitary works and that served as a home for those who had nowhere
to go. They are the guys who survive on the street based on tricks. Friendly and
respectful of the neighborhood codes.

Beat the fair Not only tell the truth, but tell the truth that serves,
precise and not any other.
Bowling. neighborhood pub.
merry-go-round In Spain it is called roundabout. In Argentina, soccer, calesitero is
the player who goes from here to there with the ball, with some skill but no knowledge.
That goes around without much sense, that dribbles and doesn't know why or what for.

Centrojás. Owner of the team, the ball and the match. Pattern. Axis. It's the one
that tells you "give it to me, damn it" and you give it to him happily. It is now called a
central midfielder or central midfielder.
Cholulism. Cholulo is the one who always goes after the famous, who
worships, that melts for him.
Pile. Pilcha is clothing; empilcha: he dresses, but the meaning
cultural is to dress elegantly.
Shrimp. Maneuver that allows some privileged to circumvent the
opponent and continue with the ball. Quality that comes from the factory. Dodge.
Gilada. Nonsense unbecoming of the neighborhood.

Giles. Silly, but also outsiders to the neighborhood.

Goalkeeper. That's what they say in Uruguay to the goalkeeper who they call goalkeeper in
Spain and that radio announcers also call goalkeeper.
Machine Translated by Google

Handsome. Brave. On the court the one who always asks for the ball despite any
circumstance.
Chopped. Informal matches in the paddock. They played to 12 goals and the rematch to
6, and the rematch to 6 and the rematch...
Paddock. Wasteland where we all started to play. An improvised field. For us something
like the womb.
Russian. We told everyone whose surname ended in iski or broski or something like that,
generally a Jew, that he came from Poland, Hungary or another Eastern country. Almost never
from Russia.
You strip. Camouflaged policemen who could be seen coming five hundred meters away at
less, and some even smelled each other.
Turkish. Guy from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Armenia, whose surname sounded Turkish to us
without ever having heard a Turkish surname, and who hardly ever came from Turkey.

Watchers. Just like the strips, but in uniform.

Machine Translated by Google

CAPPA ANGEL. I was born in Bahía Blanca, so many years ago that it is
incredible even for me, so it is better to forget it. It was at my grandmother's
house in the Villa Miter neighborhood, in front of a prestigious paddock from
that time. I remember that the day after I was born, I was already playing
soccer, at least in my father's imagination, who took me to the field when I
was three years old. The truth is that I started playing shortly before I knew
how to walk. I wore a t-shirt when I was 10 years old. The Villa Miter at 11.
First at 18. At 20 in the Bahía Blanca team, to learn against Carrizo
everything he had to know and didn't know. In Olympus, the most powerful team, at 24.
Shortly after, it would be at 26 or 27, I had to leave due to the excuse of
knee injuries and the reality of my poor future. While studying philosophy
and psychopedagogy. I finished playing and almost at the same time they
certified my ignorance in those disciplines. I gave classes, however, and I
understood things about reality that were unfair to me, but I didn't understand
why. I knew that the situation of my family, my friends, my neighborhood,
had a social cause. Militate politically. Ideological militancy, which was very
dangerous at the time of the most bloodthirsty military of the time
Machine Translated by Google

Argentina. I landed in Madrid. I did everything to survive. I met my wife, Carmen. Shortly
after we shared dinners and dreams. I found myself at the starting point again and with
30 years. I resolved to go back to the sources. I did the coaching course. I got in touch
with Menotti through a mutual friend who was in Buenos Aires. I became a national
coach in 1983 in Seville, where the final course was held. I collaborated with Menotti in
1981-82 for the Argentine national team. With him in Barcelona. Then alone in Bánfield
in Argentina, in Huracán in Argentina with him in Boca Jrs. Only at the Bánfield again.
With him at Peñarol in Montevideo. Sharing driving with Valdano in Tenerife and at Real
Madrid. In other words, I was able to work in Spain in 1992, 16 years after I arrived.
That's why I went to Cibeles when we were champions with Real Madrid, 19 years after
constantly bumping into closed doors, to see what the world was like from there, even if
it was just to see it once. And that's all (how fast life goes by, damn it).

I have a son in Buenos Aires, Bernardo, from a previous union, and two from the
current one: Jorge and María.
And I also continue with the same dreams that my wife and I began to weave at that
time, and even before. My luck is that I am always starting. I thought that was a defect.
It took me a long time to understand it.