In Argentina it was seen as ugly but necessary.
WAAAAAY TOO MANY WORDS.
To the man who has known how to give Argentinian sport the content and vitality with which it finds itself at the moment, with international repercussions which have given him acknowledgement as first sportsman of the world.
So spoke Alberto J. Armando, president of Boca Juniors, dedicating the team's 1954 championship victory to President Perón. It was the year in which Argentine football recorded its highest attendances. The working classes that packed the stands of Buenos Aires and Rosario in such numbers were at the peak of their collective powers. Perón's government was drifting closer and closer to the trade unions, wages were rising at unfeasible rates and the streets were becoming more bold and raucous. The previous year a Peronista mob had burnt the Buenos Aires Jockey Club -- the centre of the Argentine aristocracy's social scene -- to the ground. In the year that Boca won the title, Perón and his most radical acolytes had taken on the power of the Catholic Church. Divorce had been legalized, church schools taken into state control and in the ensuing conflicts, cathedrals had been set alight. The Pope excommunicated the whole cabinet, but no one blinked an eye. The sense of power and invulnerability of the moment was sufficient to tempt the cautious Peronista football establishment into risking a series of international matches. They were rewarded as Argentina went to Ireland, Spain and Portugal and won. They were beaten, but only just, on a trip to England in 1951 where they played a game as part of the Festival of Britain; the return game in Buenos Aires in 1953 was eagerly anticipated. In fact there were two games. In the first the English fielded their reserves and recorded the game as an English FA XI playing, but Argentina played their full-strength side and treated the game as the real thing. Argentina won 3-1 and in the delirious atmosphere of triumph and celebration that followed, Perón declared that 14 May, the day of the game, would henceforth be an annual holiday -- 'Footballers' Day.' England's first team turned out a few days later for the second game only for it to be abandoned as the pitch was flooded. Such slights of hand can generate a false sense of security. By late 1954 Perón's attack on the Church and the soaring rise of inflation had sufficiently alienated the conservative core of the officer class and leading industrialists that a coup was planned. The generals sent their ultimatum to Perón in mid-1955: resign or face a bloodbath. Perón had no stomach for the fight; unlike Evita he had never been able to contemplate arming the unions in such a situation. He fled to Paraguay and a long exile.
Under General Lonardi and then the more conservative General Aramburu Argentina entered a period of transitional military dictatorship. The Peronista Party was banned and a de-Peronization of sporting institutions and sports policy was initiated. Along with a certain amount of musical chairs at the top of the game's bureaucracy, one clear sign of the demise of Peronism was Argentina's unambiguous return to international football competitions beginning with a victory in the 1955 Copa América in Santiago. In 1957 Argentina went to the Copa América in Lima and dazzled. They put eight goals past Colombia and beat Chile, Uruguay and Brazil by six, four and three respectively. The team's young forward line of Maschio, Angelillo, Sívori -- known as Los ángeles con cara sucia -- 'The angels with dirty faces' -- suggested that Argentina's capacity to nurture talent was undimmed. The Italian scouts who made the journey to Peru were convinced. Within a year all three had gone, to Bologna, Internazionale and Juventus respectively, and all three would play for the Italian national team. Argentina's subordinate and exposed position in the international football economy was, despite the autarchic pretensions of Peronism, unaltered. Consequently Argentina went to the 1958 World Cup -- its first since 1934 -- without its leading players. Indeed so desperate was the search for forwards that Angelo Labruna, the last of La Máquina, still playing at nearly forty, was drafted in.
It was a national calamity. In the opening game against the defending champions West Germany, Argentina scored after two minutes, but the stamina and organization of the Germans systematically ground down the Argentinians. It finished 3-1. Though they got an early goal, the Northern Irish offered less stern opposition and left enough space on the pitch for Argentina to assert their superiority and run out 3-1 winners. Argentina could still go through to the quarter-finals if they beat the Czechs. They met in Hälsingborg. Slow and clearly unable to keep pace with the Europeans, Argentina were not ground down, they were overwhelmed and conceded six goals. The team were pelted with rubbish on their return to Buenos Aires and the guts of the disastrous defeat by Czechoslovakia were laid out, dissected and divined for their meaning. The almost universal conclusion of the political press and the football world was that Hälsingborg was a failure of Peronista modernization. The Aramburu military government prepared to hand power back to the civilian political parties in late 1958 hoping that the short interlude of authoritarian rule had broken the back of Peronism, working-class power, trade-union militancy and inflation.
The Argentina that emerged from this brief interlude of de-Peronization was divided. In the 1958 general election the Peronista vote abstained or spoilt its ballot papers, the Socialists split in two, the Conservatives into three and the centre-ground Radicals in half. Arturo Frondizi of the Unión Cívica Radical became president with the most precarious of mandates. But there was a vast deception at the heart of the Argentine polity. Perón, supposedly exorcized by the Aramburu interlude and the subsequent defenestration of Peronista power in state and parastatal organizations, retained a spectral presence. The trade-union movement became a surrogate Peronista party, contesting elections openly as Organizaciones 62. The military, supposedly withdrawn from politics, increasingly acted as an armed and politicized police force, implacably opposed to the return of Perón himself and the reformation of the popular coalition that had sustained him. Frondizi, deemed ineffective and too close to the trade unions, was deposed by the army in 1962 and replaced the following year by Arturo Illia. Like his predecessor, Illia attempted to tread a narrow path between the simulacrum of Peronism on the Left and the increasingly disgruntled coalition of industrialists and generals on the Right. The path would shrink to nothing in 1966, but in the decade after Perón just enough middle ground was made available by continued economic growth. Argentinian football of the era was shaped by both the social consequences of this short-lived boom and its high politics of mirrors and duplicity.
Economic growth, which had always been unevenly distributed in Argentina, was once again focused on Buenos Aires. Under Perón it had been a more openly working-class city. The material legacy of his era were the giant multi-tower public hospitals and housing complexes that sprang up in the city's backyard and the vast subsidized stadiums of the inner barrios. The intangible legacy of Peronism in the city's memory was made from the tumultuous occupation of the main city squares and avenues by his supporters in innumerable rallies, and by the ingrained cultural significance and popularity of football. With the fall and then exile of Perón the economic good fortunes and cultural presence of the working class in Buenos Aires diminished. In its place a new urban middle class arose -- many working in the emerging service and cultural sectors of the economy -- whose newfound buying power and changing patterns of consumption set the cultural tone for the city in the early 1960s. The most discernible shift in the habits of porteños was the relocation of free time from the streets to the living room, as middle-class Argentina, like everywhere else, began to choose the TV over the cinema; and from the mid-1960s when football was first broadcast live, the armchair over the bleachers.
In the early 1960s the average crowd in the Argentine first division had dropped by 40 per cent from its Peronista peak in 1954 and state aid was decidedly thin on the ground. In the aftermath of Hälsingborg and Aramburu, Argentine football and Argentine business lost their state subsidies and were more fully exposed to global competition. Boca Juniors and River Plate in particular decided to respond to the new competition for people's time and money by upping the ante and offering football more explicitly as a spectacular, supported by a chorus of hype from the popular press. Presidents Alberto J. Armando at Boca and Antonio Vespucci at River started buying foreign exotica to draw the crowds -- Uruguayans, Peruvians and Brazilians. But for all the promise of flamboyance their teams and coaches learned zonal marking and flat back fours.
This was the dominant key in which Argentine football modernized: a new emphasis on defence and organization and a new language of professionalism and discipline. It was a mood that found its highest expression in Helenio Herrera, the itinerant Argentine coach who perfected catenaccio defence (that is, four man-markers and a sweeper) and spring-load counterattack at Internazionale in Milan. In Argentina Manuel Giúdice, coach at Independiente in the early 1960s, had his team play much the same and with considerable success. Independiente won the league twice in 1960 and 1963 before going on to win two Copa Libertadores, but they were more than a Latino Inter. They took to the field in formation, signalling a V to the crowd with their arms, they played on the mystique of the alcohol massages evaporating through their shirts and their confidence was unshakeable; they won their first Libertadores by deposing the champions Santos, coming back from 2-0 down in the Maracanã to win 3-2. Argentina's new defensive football was given a muscular twist by Juan Carlos Lorenzo who coached the national team at the World Cup finals in Chile and England. In 1962 the new Argentina were certainly a fitter and more coordinated unit than in 1958 but they still played with an old-style centre-half and were beaten soundly by England before being knocked out of the first stage. The team that went to England in 1966 were better, tough and organized, increasingly adapted to modern tactics, but with plenty of traditional short passing too. Argentina drew with the fancied West Germans and beat the Swiss and the Spanish. Then in the defining game of the era for Argentina's national team they met England in the quarter-finals.
At home the progress of the team was briefly interrupted by the last gasp of Argentina's puny democracy. President Arturo Illia was deposed in a neat coup by General Juan Carlos Onganía. Congress was shut down, the universities were suppressed and the regime planned the further restriction of the trade-union movement. The nation, unruffled, sat back to watch the quarter-finals. Across Latin America the tournament had already attracted some suspicion. The harsh and unpunished fouling of Pelé, the early exit of the Brazilians and a perception of refereeing bias by Europeans against Latin Americans all suggested an unspoken plot to defeat Argentina. The game was predictably bad-tempered and foul-ridden, made worse, as Brian Glanville described it, by the German referee Herr Kreitlein, who '... ran hither and thither, an exacerbating rather than calming influence, inscribing names in his notebook with the zeal of a schoolboy collecting engine numbers.' Argentina's captain, Antonio Rattín, who had already been booked for what in the scheme of things was an innocuous foul on Bobby Charlton, was also making his considerable lanky presence felt every time Herr Kreitlein made a decision. When he objected to another booking, Kreitlein snapped and sent him off.
In the immediate aftermath of the game England manager Alf Ramsey said, "Our best football will come against the right type of opposition -- a team who come to play football, and not act as animals." This comment stoked the already mile-high pyre of righteous indignation and wounded pride burning on the Río de la Plata. The team returned home to Buenos Aires to a presidential reception and the glow of moral victors. In a political system where no government, civil or military, could be sure of its tenure in office, where plot and counter-plot were increasingly becoming the normal instruments of political life, paranoia was the new common sense and foreign conspiracies were to be expected. The normally more restrained Crónica responded with the headline, 'First they steal the Malvinas from us, now they steal the World Cup.' The newspaper would even dispatch a small plane to land on an outlying rock of the island group and plant an Argentine flag.
Onganía appointed his own man, Valentín Suárez, as head of the Argentine FA. Suárez began his term of office by announcing, "The government never closed its doors on football clubs and never will close its doors on football clubs." What this meant in practice was that a certain amount of money was made available to cancel historical debts, especially unpaid taxes, in return for instituting a reformed national championship. The single league, dominated by Buenos Aires clubs for thirty years, was to be opened up. In the new dispensation two shorter leagues would be played -- the Nacional and the Metropolitano -- with more access for the small city teams from Córdoba, Santa Fe and Tucumán. If breaking the old monopoly was the intention, it certainly worked; over the next decade titles went outside of Buenos Aires to Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys, and to small teams in the capital like Huracán, Vélez Sarsfield and Chacarita Juniors. The small team that rose highest was Estudiantes de La Plata who won the 1967 Metropolitano before going on to contest four and win three Copa Libertadores finals in a row. Estudiantes rose that high because they were the evolutionary end-point of the defensive, muscular hyper-professionalism that had been developing in Argentine football. Estudiantes played anti-fútbol.
Estudiantes were not a chance mutation. In fact they were the leading edge of the main lines of football development in Argentina, an interpretation confirmed by the prelude to their rise, the 1967 Intercontinental Club Cup played between Racing Club and Glasgow Celtic. The first leg had been played in Scotland and, true to form, Celtic had attacked and won 1-0, Racing wasted time and there was a lot of rough play. The return match was, despite the Irish republican affiliations of the opposition, treated as a rerun of the 1966 World Cup quarter-final -- Irish, Scottish, English were considered synonymous. A crowd of over 80,000 emitted a wall of shrill whistles and explosions as Celtic walked out in Avellaneda. The Scots were not allowed a ball to warm up with and the Celtic goalkeeper Simpson was struck by a stone from the crowd and replaced by a substitute. The assailant went unidentified. Celtic played it straight, flooded forward and could have had three early penalties but for the hesitation of the clearly cowed Uruguayan referee. Finally a penalty did come their way and Celtic went 1-0 up only for Raffo to equalize for Racing from what was, according to most of the Argentine press, a clearly offside position. Racing lost no opportunity to garner an advantage: at half-time there was no water in the Celtic dressing room. Then a few minutes into the second half they snatched a lead and closed the game down with a repertoire of trickery and rule-bending. Many minutes trickled away when the crowd took the ball and refused to return it. The ends more than justified the means.
At one game all, a decider was scheduled for the Centenario in Montevideo. Celtic, despite some doubts within the camp, accepted the fixture asking only for security guarantees and a new referee. Twenty thousand Argentines crossed the Río de la Plata to see another game in which the referee completely lost control. This time Celtic were fighting back and trading elbows, but Racing were more subtle in their brutality, more artful with their spite. Celtic lost three players; Racing lost two and then, in the midst of the mêlée, filched a single goal. When it was over the Argentines ran a lap of honour and were showered by objects thrown from the Uruguayan sections of the crowd. The Racing players and officials hid in their dressing rooms as angry Montivideans massed outside, only dispersed by repeated police baton charges. Celtic fined their players. Racing, it is reputed, bought theirs new cars.
While Racing were engaged in intercontinental warfare, Estudiantes, a small team from the polite beach resort of La Plata, were grinding out results. As the press reported they played:
A football that is elaborated over a hard week of laboratory work, and explodes on the seventh day with an effectiveness that consecrates the table of positions. Because Estudiantes continue to manufacture points just as it manufactures its football: with more work than talent ... Estudiantes keep winning.
-- El Gráfico, 3 May 1967.
Under coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, the team without stars and with the most spartan of training facilities won the Metropolitano in 1967. There was, even at this stage, a hint of something darker to their game, but it was surfacing only as a rumour to be suppressed. Critics rejected the label of anti-fútbol, preferring to think of Estudiantes as 'more solid than beautiful.' El Gráfico's leading columnist, Juvenal, went as far as to suggest that they were 'young, strong, disciplined, vigorous, spiritual and physically upright people.' Just the kind of role models that General Onganía and his colleagues wished Argentine youth to look up to.
Estudiantes won their first Copa Libertadores in 1968 after a bruising and plainly violent semi-final marathon against Racing, and a mixture of pugnaciousness and skill against Palmeiras in the final. Zubeldía's team were capable of playing it any number of ways but the core of their game was personified on the field and subsequently captured by the ferric Carlos Bilardo. Bilardo recalls Zubeldía's football as first and foremost one of technical and instrumental rationality: "All the possibilities afforded by the game were forseen and practised. The corners, the free-kicks, throw-ins were used to the best of advantage and we also had secret signs and language which we used to make our rivals fall into the trap." Such attention to detail reaped rewards as Estudiantes scored half of their goals in the Libertadores from set pieces and consistently broke up the attacks of the more open and skilful teams. When they had to defend they played a tough man-marking system and kept their shape across the width of the pitch: a contemporary commonplace but a rare instance of discipline in Argentina.
Where tactical acumen was insufficient, Estudiantes had other methods. Midfielder Juan Ramón Verón described it: "We tried to find out everything possible about our rivals individually, their habits, their characters, their weaknesses, and even about their private lives, so that we could goad them on the field, get them to react and risk being sent off." Nacional's Cococho Álvarez was watched before the 1969 Libertadores final and his penchant for contesting refereeing decisions by marching on the official was spotted. Estudiantes players would get between him and the referee, goading him into striking them. Álvarez was one of many Estudiantes victims who was out-thought and sent off. When play restarted Estudiantes were the masters of destruction. They knew how to play a foul rough enough to stop the game in its tracks, but just short of a booking. With a single back pass or shift of direction they would change the pace of a game, invariably slowing it down, drawing its sting. When the pace was still not slow enough they would just waste time.
As South American champions, Estudiantes travelled to England to play Manchester United in the second leg of the 1968 Intercontinental Cup. They had already beaten United 1-0 in Argentina, in the presence of President Onganía. Estudiantes edged a match marked by endless tactical fouling and no little spitting. The return match was the first encounter between the two nations in England since the 1966 World Cup quarter-final and ended a 1-1 draw making Estudiantes world champions. In Argentina it was seen as ugly but necessary; sweet revenge on England and Sir Alf.
If national honour required Argentina to embrace both violence and the cynicism of anti-fútbol there were limits. The unspoken tolerance of much of middle-class Argentina for crudely instrumental projects was diminishing. Estudiantes' cynicism was becoming hard to justify, like Onganía's military regime which offered bureaucratic authoritarianism without stability or prosperity. When Estudiantes squeezed out a desperately narrow victory over Peñarol in the 1970 Libertadores final, mustering all their meanness and mischief, the press admitted that they could do no better than to grin and bear it.
The economic and political failures of the Onganía presidency were exposed and deepened at the end of 1969 when the intersecting and mutually supporting student and workers' groups of the rapidly industrializing city of Córdoba began a series of protests that within weeks were tantamount to an insurrection -- El Cordobazo. The occupations, strikes and sit-downs were violently suppressed and when a similar but smaller uprising in Rosario followed it was given the same treatment. The army were still in power but at the cost of greater violence and greater resentment. Their minimalist defensive programme of economic retrenchment and trade-union suppression was being swamped by social forces and movements beyond their control. When in August 1969 Argentina were beaten by Peru, fatally undermining their chances of qualifying for the 1970 World Cup, Estudiantes and the style of play that they epitomized were made the scapegoats for this national disaster. Under a cloud of opprobrium they went to Milan to play the first leg of the Intercontinental Club Cup and lost 3-0.
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22 October 1969
Estudiantes de La Plata 2 AC Milan 1
La Bombonera, Buenos Aires
Late May 1969, the provincial industrial city of Córdoba. A spontaneous popular protest erupts against the harsh economic austerity and political repressiveness of President Onganía's regime. Trade unions, students, the whole city, pour onto the streets, occupying the centre. The President orders in the army, including an armoured column. Left-wing radicals take to the rooftops and snipe at the soldiers. The army replies in kind and with more. By the time Córdoba has been occupied over sixty civilians are dead.
Late October, the federal capital, Buenos Aires. A night of increasingly desperate and wilful violence by Estudiantes. Aguirre Suárez elbows Milan's Combin in the face and breaks his cheekbone. Goalkeeper Poletti strikes Milan's Rivera. Manera kicks him to the ground. By the time Estudiantes have lost the tie, they are down to nine men.
President Onganía was horrified: "Such shameful behaviour has compromised and sullied Argentina's international reputation and provoked the revulsion of a nation." Poletti, Suárez and Manera are sent to prison for thirty days. Suárez and Manera are banned from football for a year, Poletti for life. The soldiers who killed civilians in the Cordobaza are getting medals.
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El Gráfico, shocked by the match, cast Estudiantes as the enemy rather than a representative of the nation. 'Television took the deformed image of a match and transformed it into urban guerrilla warfare all over the world.' The once physically upright, serious role models of the mid-1960s had degenerated into the most insidious youths of all -- left-wing armed activists. Hidden in the texts of El Gráfico and the mainstream press is a metaphorical record of the deep social changes transforming Argentine youth. Old generational hierarchies, conservative forms of etiquette and cultural tastes had begun to dissolve the moment they encountered the egalitarian hedonism of the new pop cultures But Argentina's youth, once psychically liberated, did not all follow a path of individualist bacchanalia and sartorial statement. Rallying to the cries of the Cuban revolution and the Cordobazo, implacably opposed to the authoritarianism of Argentina's government and military, they had formed the Montoneros guerrilla movement in 1970. Estudiantes won their last Copa Libertadores, the Montoneros kidnapped and executed General Aramburu and Argentina was heading for political meltdown.
The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 381-391.
To the man who has known how to give Argentinian sport the content and vitality with which it finds itself at the moment, with international repercussions which have given him acknowledgement as first sportsman of the world.
So spoke Alberto J. Armando, president of Boca Juniors, dedicating the team's 1954 championship victory to President Perón. It was the year in which Argentine football recorded its highest attendances. The working classes that packed the stands of Buenos Aires and Rosario in such numbers were at the peak of their collective powers. Perón's government was drifting closer and closer to the trade unions, wages were rising at unfeasible rates and the streets were becoming more bold and raucous. The previous year a Peronista mob had burnt the Buenos Aires Jockey Club -- the centre of the Argentine aristocracy's social scene -- to the ground. In the year that Boca won the title, Perón and his most radical acolytes had taken on the power of the Catholic Church. Divorce had been legalized, church schools taken into state control and in the ensuing conflicts, cathedrals had been set alight. The Pope excommunicated the whole cabinet, but no one blinked an eye. The sense of power and invulnerability of the moment was sufficient to tempt the cautious Peronista football establishment into risking a series of international matches. They were rewarded as Argentina went to Ireland, Spain and Portugal and won. They were beaten, but only just, on a trip to England in 1951 where they played a game as part of the Festival of Britain; the return game in Buenos Aires in 1953 was eagerly anticipated. In fact there were two games. In the first the English fielded their reserves and recorded the game as an English FA XI playing, but Argentina played their full-strength side and treated the game as the real thing. Argentina won 3-1 and in the delirious atmosphere of triumph and celebration that followed, Perón declared that 14 May, the day of the game, would henceforth be an annual holiday -- 'Footballers' Day.' England's first team turned out a few days later for the second game only for it to be abandoned as the pitch was flooded. Such slights of hand can generate a false sense of security. By late 1954 Perón's attack on the Church and the soaring rise of inflation had sufficiently alienated the conservative core of the officer class and leading industrialists that a coup was planned. The generals sent their ultimatum to Perón in mid-1955: resign or face a bloodbath. Perón had no stomach for the fight; unlike Evita he had never been able to contemplate arming the unions in such a situation. He fled to Paraguay and a long exile.
Under General Lonardi and then the more conservative General Aramburu Argentina entered a period of transitional military dictatorship. The Peronista Party was banned and a de-Peronization of sporting institutions and sports policy was initiated. Along with a certain amount of musical chairs at the top of the game's bureaucracy, one clear sign of the demise of Peronism was Argentina's unambiguous return to international football competitions beginning with a victory in the 1955 Copa América in Santiago. In 1957 Argentina went to the Copa América in Lima and dazzled. They put eight goals past Colombia and beat Chile, Uruguay and Brazil by six, four and three respectively. The team's young forward line of Maschio, Angelillo, Sívori -- known as Los ángeles con cara sucia -- 'The angels with dirty faces' -- suggested that Argentina's capacity to nurture talent was undimmed. The Italian scouts who made the journey to Peru were convinced. Within a year all three had gone, to Bologna, Internazionale and Juventus respectively, and all three would play for the Italian national team. Argentina's subordinate and exposed position in the international football economy was, despite the autarchic pretensions of Peronism, unaltered. Consequently Argentina went to the 1958 World Cup -- its first since 1934 -- without its leading players. Indeed so desperate was the search for forwards that Angelo Labruna, the last of La Máquina, still playing at nearly forty, was drafted in.
It was a national calamity. In the opening game against the defending champions West Germany, Argentina scored after two minutes, but the stamina and organization of the Germans systematically ground down the Argentinians. It finished 3-1. Though they got an early goal, the Northern Irish offered less stern opposition and left enough space on the pitch for Argentina to assert their superiority and run out 3-1 winners. Argentina could still go through to the quarter-finals if they beat the Czechs. They met in Hälsingborg. Slow and clearly unable to keep pace with the Europeans, Argentina were not ground down, they were overwhelmed and conceded six goals. The team were pelted with rubbish on their return to Buenos Aires and the guts of the disastrous defeat by Czechoslovakia were laid out, dissected and divined for their meaning. The almost universal conclusion of the political press and the football world was that Hälsingborg was a failure of Peronista modernization. The Aramburu military government prepared to hand power back to the civilian political parties in late 1958 hoping that the short interlude of authoritarian rule had broken the back of Peronism, working-class power, trade-union militancy and inflation.
The Argentina that emerged from this brief interlude of de-Peronization was divided. In the 1958 general election the Peronista vote abstained or spoilt its ballot papers, the Socialists split in two, the Conservatives into three and the centre-ground Radicals in half. Arturo Frondizi of the Unión Cívica Radical became president with the most precarious of mandates. But there was a vast deception at the heart of the Argentine polity. Perón, supposedly exorcized by the Aramburu interlude and the subsequent defenestration of Peronista power in state and parastatal organizations, retained a spectral presence. The trade-union movement became a surrogate Peronista party, contesting elections openly as Organizaciones 62. The military, supposedly withdrawn from politics, increasingly acted as an armed and politicized police force, implacably opposed to the return of Perón himself and the reformation of the popular coalition that had sustained him. Frondizi, deemed ineffective and too close to the trade unions, was deposed by the army in 1962 and replaced the following year by Arturo Illia. Like his predecessor, Illia attempted to tread a narrow path between the simulacrum of Peronism on the Left and the increasingly disgruntled coalition of industrialists and generals on the Right. The path would shrink to nothing in 1966, but in the decade after Perón just enough middle ground was made available by continued economic growth. Argentinian football of the era was shaped by both the social consequences of this short-lived boom and its high politics of mirrors and duplicity.
Economic growth, which had always been unevenly distributed in Argentina, was once again focused on Buenos Aires. Under Perón it had been a more openly working-class city. The material legacy of his era were the giant multi-tower public hospitals and housing complexes that sprang up in the city's backyard and the vast subsidized stadiums of the inner barrios. The intangible legacy of Peronism in the city's memory was made from the tumultuous occupation of the main city squares and avenues by his supporters in innumerable rallies, and by the ingrained cultural significance and popularity of football. With the fall and then exile of Perón the economic good fortunes and cultural presence of the working class in Buenos Aires diminished. In its place a new urban middle class arose -- many working in the emerging service and cultural sectors of the economy -- whose newfound buying power and changing patterns of consumption set the cultural tone for the city in the early 1960s. The most discernible shift in the habits of porteños was the relocation of free time from the streets to the living room, as middle-class Argentina, like everywhere else, began to choose the TV over the cinema; and from the mid-1960s when football was first broadcast live, the armchair over the bleachers.
In the early 1960s the average crowd in the Argentine first division had dropped by 40 per cent from its Peronista peak in 1954 and state aid was decidedly thin on the ground. In the aftermath of Hälsingborg and Aramburu, Argentine football and Argentine business lost their state subsidies and were more fully exposed to global competition. Boca Juniors and River Plate in particular decided to respond to the new competition for people's time and money by upping the ante and offering football more explicitly as a spectacular, supported by a chorus of hype from the popular press. Presidents Alberto J. Armando at Boca and Antonio Vespucci at River started buying foreign exotica to draw the crowds -- Uruguayans, Peruvians and Brazilians. But for all the promise of flamboyance their teams and coaches learned zonal marking and flat back fours.
This was the dominant key in which Argentine football modernized: a new emphasis on defence and organization and a new language of professionalism and discipline. It was a mood that found its highest expression in Helenio Herrera, the itinerant Argentine coach who perfected catenaccio defence (that is, four man-markers and a sweeper) and spring-load counterattack at Internazionale in Milan. In Argentina Manuel Giúdice, coach at Independiente in the early 1960s, had his team play much the same and with considerable success. Independiente won the league twice in 1960 and 1963 before going on to win two Copa Libertadores, but they were more than a Latino Inter. They took to the field in formation, signalling a V to the crowd with their arms, they played on the mystique of the alcohol massages evaporating through their shirts and their confidence was unshakeable; they won their first Libertadores by deposing the champions Santos, coming back from 2-0 down in the Maracanã to win 3-2. Argentina's new defensive football was given a muscular twist by Juan Carlos Lorenzo who coached the national team at the World Cup finals in Chile and England. In 1962 the new Argentina were certainly a fitter and more coordinated unit than in 1958 but they still played with an old-style centre-half and were beaten soundly by England before being knocked out of the first stage. The team that went to England in 1966 were better, tough and organized, increasingly adapted to modern tactics, but with plenty of traditional short passing too. Argentina drew with the fancied West Germans and beat the Swiss and the Spanish. Then in the defining game of the era for Argentina's national team they met England in the quarter-finals.
At home the progress of the team was briefly interrupted by the last gasp of Argentina's puny democracy. President Arturo Illia was deposed in a neat coup by General Juan Carlos Onganía. Congress was shut down, the universities were suppressed and the regime planned the further restriction of the trade-union movement. The nation, unruffled, sat back to watch the quarter-finals. Across Latin America the tournament had already attracted some suspicion. The harsh and unpunished fouling of Pelé, the early exit of the Brazilians and a perception of refereeing bias by Europeans against Latin Americans all suggested an unspoken plot to defeat Argentina. The game was predictably bad-tempered and foul-ridden, made worse, as Brian Glanville described it, by the German referee Herr Kreitlein, who '... ran hither and thither, an exacerbating rather than calming influence, inscribing names in his notebook with the zeal of a schoolboy collecting engine numbers.' Argentina's captain, Antonio Rattín, who had already been booked for what in the scheme of things was an innocuous foul on Bobby Charlton, was also making his considerable lanky presence felt every time Herr Kreitlein made a decision. When he objected to another booking, Kreitlein snapped and sent him off.
In the immediate aftermath of the game England manager Alf Ramsey said, "Our best football will come against the right type of opposition -- a team who come to play football, and not act as animals." This comment stoked the already mile-high pyre of righteous indignation and wounded pride burning on the Río de la Plata. The team returned home to Buenos Aires to a presidential reception and the glow of moral victors. In a political system where no government, civil or military, could be sure of its tenure in office, where plot and counter-plot were increasingly becoming the normal instruments of political life, paranoia was the new common sense and foreign conspiracies were to be expected. The normally more restrained Crónica responded with the headline, 'First they steal the Malvinas from us, now they steal the World Cup.' The newspaper would even dispatch a small plane to land on an outlying rock of the island group and plant an Argentine flag.
Onganía appointed his own man, Valentín Suárez, as head of the Argentine FA. Suárez began his term of office by announcing, "The government never closed its doors on football clubs and never will close its doors on football clubs." What this meant in practice was that a certain amount of money was made available to cancel historical debts, especially unpaid taxes, in return for instituting a reformed national championship. The single league, dominated by Buenos Aires clubs for thirty years, was to be opened up. In the new dispensation two shorter leagues would be played -- the Nacional and the Metropolitano -- with more access for the small city teams from Córdoba, Santa Fe and Tucumán. If breaking the old monopoly was the intention, it certainly worked; over the next decade titles went outside of Buenos Aires to Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys, and to small teams in the capital like Huracán, Vélez Sarsfield and Chacarita Juniors. The small team that rose highest was Estudiantes de La Plata who won the 1967 Metropolitano before going on to contest four and win three Copa Libertadores finals in a row. Estudiantes rose that high because they were the evolutionary end-point of the defensive, muscular hyper-professionalism that had been developing in Argentine football. Estudiantes played anti-fútbol.
Estudiantes were not a chance mutation. In fact they were the leading edge of the main lines of football development in Argentina, an interpretation confirmed by the prelude to their rise, the 1967 Intercontinental Club Cup played between Racing Club and Glasgow Celtic. The first leg had been played in Scotland and, true to form, Celtic had attacked and won 1-0, Racing wasted time and there was a lot of rough play. The return match was, despite the Irish republican affiliations of the opposition, treated as a rerun of the 1966 World Cup quarter-final -- Irish, Scottish, English were considered synonymous. A crowd of over 80,000 emitted a wall of shrill whistles and explosions as Celtic walked out in Avellaneda. The Scots were not allowed a ball to warm up with and the Celtic goalkeeper Simpson was struck by a stone from the crowd and replaced by a substitute. The assailant went unidentified. Celtic played it straight, flooded forward and could have had three early penalties but for the hesitation of the clearly cowed Uruguayan referee. Finally a penalty did come their way and Celtic went 1-0 up only for Raffo to equalize for Racing from what was, according to most of the Argentine press, a clearly offside position. Racing lost no opportunity to garner an advantage: at half-time there was no water in the Celtic dressing room. Then a few minutes into the second half they snatched a lead and closed the game down with a repertoire of trickery and rule-bending. Many minutes trickled away when the crowd took the ball and refused to return it. The ends more than justified the means.
At one game all, a decider was scheduled for the Centenario in Montevideo. Celtic, despite some doubts within the camp, accepted the fixture asking only for security guarantees and a new referee. Twenty thousand Argentines crossed the Río de la Plata to see another game in which the referee completely lost control. This time Celtic were fighting back and trading elbows, but Racing were more subtle in their brutality, more artful with their spite. Celtic lost three players; Racing lost two and then, in the midst of the mêlée, filched a single goal. When it was over the Argentines ran a lap of honour and were showered by objects thrown from the Uruguayan sections of the crowd. The Racing players and officials hid in their dressing rooms as angry Montivideans massed outside, only dispersed by repeated police baton charges. Celtic fined their players. Racing, it is reputed, bought theirs new cars.
While Racing were engaged in intercontinental warfare, Estudiantes, a small team from the polite beach resort of La Plata, were grinding out results. As the press reported they played:
A football that is elaborated over a hard week of laboratory work, and explodes on the seventh day with an effectiveness that consecrates the table of positions. Because Estudiantes continue to manufacture points just as it manufactures its football: with more work than talent ... Estudiantes keep winning.
-- El Gráfico, 3 May 1967.
Under coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, the team without stars and with the most spartan of training facilities won the Metropolitano in 1967. There was, even at this stage, a hint of something darker to their game, but it was surfacing only as a rumour to be suppressed. Critics rejected the label of anti-fútbol, preferring to think of Estudiantes as 'more solid than beautiful.' El Gráfico's leading columnist, Juvenal, went as far as to suggest that they were 'young, strong, disciplined, vigorous, spiritual and physically upright people.' Just the kind of role models that General Onganía and his colleagues wished Argentine youth to look up to.
Estudiantes won their first Copa Libertadores in 1968 after a bruising and plainly violent semi-final marathon against Racing, and a mixture of pugnaciousness and skill against Palmeiras in the final. Zubeldía's team were capable of playing it any number of ways but the core of their game was personified on the field and subsequently captured by the ferric Carlos Bilardo. Bilardo recalls Zubeldía's football as first and foremost one of technical and instrumental rationality: "All the possibilities afforded by the game were forseen and practised. The corners, the free-kicks, throw-ins were used to the best of advantage and we also had secret signs and language which we used to make our rivals fall into the trap." Such attention to detail reaped rewards as Estudiantes scored half of their goals in the Libertadores from set pieces and consistently broke up the attacks of the more open and skilful teams. When they had to defend they played a tough man-marking system and kept their shape across the width of the pitch: a contemporary commonplace but a rare instance of discipline in Argentina.
Where tactical acumen was insufficient, Estudiantes had other methods. Midfielder Juan Ramón Verón described it: "We tried to find out everything possible about our rivals individually, their habits, their characters, their weaknesses, and even about their private lives, so that we could goad them on the field, get them to react and risk being sent off." Nacional's Cococho Álvarez was watched before the 1969 Libertadores final and his penchant for contesting refereeing decisions by marching on the official was spotted. Estudiantes players would get between him and the referee, goading him into striking them. Álvarez was one of many Estudiantes victims who was out-thought and sent off. When play restarted Estudiantes were the masters of destruction. They knew how to play a foul rough enough to stop the game in its tracks, but just short of a booking. With a single back pass or shift of direction they would change the pace of a game, invariably slowing it down, drawing its sting. When the pace was still not slow enough they would just waste time.
As South American champions, Estudiantes travelled to England to play Manchester United in the second leg of the 1968 Intercontinental Cup. They had already beaten United 1-0 in Argentina, in the presence of President Onganía. Estudiantes edged a match marked by endless tactical fouling and no little spitting. The return match was the first encounter between the two nations in England since the 1966 World Cup quarter-final and ended a 1-1 draw making Estudiantes world champions. In Argentina it was seen as ugly but necessary; sweet revenge on England and Sir Alf.
If national honour required Argentina to embrace both violence and the cynicism of anti-fútbol there were limits. The unspoken tolerance of much of middle-class Argentina for crudely instrumental projects was diminishing. Estudiantes' cynicism was becoming hard to justify, like Onganía's military regime which offered bureaucratic authoritarianism without stability or prosperity. When Estudiantes squeezed out a desperately narrow victory over Peñarol in the 1970 Libertadores final, mustering all their meanness and mischief, the press admitted that they could do no better than to grin and bear it.
The economic and political failures of the Onganía presidency were exposed and deepened at the end of 1969 when the intersecting and mutually supporting student and workers' groups of the rapidly industrializing city of Córdoba began a series of protests that within weeks were tantamount to an insurrection -- El Cordobazo. The occupations, strikes and sit-downs were violently suppressed and when a similar but smaller uprising in Rosario followed it was given the same treatment. The army were still in power but at the cost of greater violence and greater resentment. Their minimalist defensive programme of economic retrenchment and trade-union suppression was being swamped by social forces and movements beyond their control. When in August 1969 Argentina were beaten by Peru, fatally undermining their chances of qualifying for the 1970 World Cup, Estudiantes and the style of play that they epitomized were made the scapegoats for this national disaster. Under a cloud of opprobrium they went to Milan to play the first leg of the Intercontinental Club Cup and lost 3-0.
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22 October 1969
Estudiantes de La Plata 2 AC Milan 1
La Bombonera, Buenos Aires
Late May 1969, the provincial industrial city of Córdoba. A spontaneous popular protest erupts against the harsh economic austerity and political repressiveness of President Onganía's regime. Trade unions, students, the whole city, pour onto the streets, occupying the centre. The President orders in the army, including an armoured column. Left-wing radicals take to the rooftops and snipe at the soldiers. The army replies in kind and with more. By the time Córdoba has been occupied over sixty civilians are dead.
Late October, the federal capital, Buenos Aires. A night of increasingly desperate and wilful violence by Estudiantes. Aguirre Suárez elbows Milan's Combin in the face and breaks his cheekbone. Goalkeeper Poletti strikes Milan's Rivera. Manera kicks him to the ground. By the time Estudiantes have lost the tie, they are down to nine men.
President Onganía was horrified: "Such shameful behaviour has compromised and sullied Argentina's international reputation and provoked the revulsion of a nation." Poletti, Suárez and Manera are sent to prison for thirty days. Suárez and Manera are banned from football for a year, Poletti for life. The soldiers who killed civilians in the Cordobaza are getting medals.
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El Gráfico, shocked by the match, cast Estudiantes as the enemy rather than a representative of the nation. 'Television took the deformed image of a match and transformed it into urban guerrilla warfare all over the world.' The once physically upright, serious role models of the mid-1960s had degenerated into the most insidious youths of all -- left-wing armed activists. Hidden in the texts of El Gráfico and the mainstream press is a metaphorical record of the deep social changes transforming Argentine youth. Old generational hierarchies, conservative forms of etiquette and cultural tastes had begun to dissolve the moment they encountered the egalitarian hedonism of the new pop cultures But Argentina's youth, once psychically liberated, did not all follow a path of individualist bacchanalia and sartorial statement. Rallying to the cries of the Cuban revolution and the Cordobazo, implacably opposed to the authoritarianism of Argentina's government and military, they had formed the Montoneros guerrilla movement in 1970. Estudiantes won their last Copa Libertadores, the Montoneros kidnapped and executed General Aramburu and Argentina was heading for political meltdown.
The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 381-391.