In the final Argentina faced the Dutch, their own people and the Junta.
"Argentina scrambled through the early matches, losing to Poland, drawing with Italy and surviving by beating Haiti. But the pretensions of the side were destroyed by the Dutch who beat them 4-0. Hard tackling and swift pressing brusquely pushed the Argentinians aside. In possession the Dutch attack seemed unstoppable, Cruyff's versatility and range highlighted by his dribbling around the keeper for his first goal and finding an impossible angle for his shot to score the fourth goal. After that Argentina failed to beat East Germany.
The responses of Latin America's footballing elite to this debacle [in the 1974 World Cup] differed. [...] The already significant physicality in the Argentine game, exemplified by Juan Carlos Lorenzo's Boca Juniors, twice winners of the Copa Libertadores in the late 1970s, was deemed sufficient. What the Dutch and the Germans had shown in 1974 was the importance of pace and tempo. The man who now injected a greater pace and tempo into the Argentinian game was César Luis Menotti. El Flaco -- the skinny one -- had been a cultured and bohemian midfielder at Rosario Central but had also played in Spain and the USA. Menotti came to prominence as a coach when he took the small Buenos Aires side Huracán to a completely unexpected national championship in 1973 and was then made national team coach in anticipation of the 1978 World Cup. Like a philosopher-prince, Menotti expounded a vision of Argentinian football that was true to its portero roots (kickabouts on waste ground), unwavering in its commitment to the game as a popular spectacle but updated and adapted to the fitness levels and more furious pace of the advanced industrial football of Northern Europe.
However, the liberties and luxuries of Menotti's personal and practical bohemianism always had their critics in Argentinian football, and after his failure in the 1982 World Cup campaign the post passed to his nemesis, Carlos Bilardo. Bilardo was schooled in the anti-fútbol of Zubeldia's Estudiantes and though he did not field teams of such unrestrained malice his commitment to winning over art, of the collective over the individual, was forcibly and starkly stated: "I like being first ... Because second is no good, being second is a failure ... for me it's good that if you lose you should feel bad." In the increasingly bitter conflict between the two men and between these two polar opposites in Argentina's football culture, the sporting and rhetorical record was inconclusive. Menotti, the lover of the spectacle and the flamboyant, could not find a place in his squad for Maradona and when he did could not get the best from him. Bilardo, the cynical collectivist, built teams around Maradona's individual brilliance. Bilardo's team at the 1990 World Cup may have sunk to the level of street fighting but Menotti's 1978 side were also capable of calculated spite and gamesmanship. And ironically, Menotti, a man of noted left-wing sympathies and the coded standard bearer for an older, freer Argentina, won the World Cup for the Junta; Bilardo, the ultra-authoritarian manager, won it under Argentina's new democracy. Menotti has argued subsequently that:
Many people could say that I have coached teams during the time of dictatorships, in an epoch when Argentina had governments with which I had nothing in common, and even more, they contradicted my way of life. And I ask what should I have done? Coach teams to play badly, to base everything on tricks, to betray the feelings of the people? No, of course not.
-- quoted from E. Menotti, "In Search of a National Identity" (1996).
[...]
In 1973 Perón returned from exile in Spain to Eziza airport in Buenos Aires, where cadres of the leftist Peronist Youth movement and gangs of right-wing ultra-nationalist Peronistas had gathered. Before his plane touched down the two wings of Peronism were locked in armed combat. His planed landed elsewhere. It made little difference wherever Perón had chosen to place himself; Argentina was a vortex of industrial and political conflict. His predecessor Campora had negotiated a fragile social pact between industrialists and labour. Soaring inflation and the oil-price hike unravelled it within a few months. Strikes proliferated and turned into mass factory occupations. The nation's oil fields fell to worker councils, syndicalist unions emerged and armed guerrilla groups in both town and country grew in support and boldness. The response of the army and police force was brutal but uncoordinated, and into the vacuum stepped an array of right-wing death squads protecting property and looking for students and radicals.
Perón's health deteriorated rapidly. He died in July 1974 and was succeeded by his widow and third wife Isabelita Perón, originally a nightclub dancer who had met Perón in Panama soon after he began his exile. Government descended into an unholy scramble for power and influence over the frightened and inexperienced La Presidenta who was utterly unequipped to negotiate the treacherous waters of Argentina's declining economy, incipient civil war and fracturing Peronista party. In the early months of the new government there was a desperate lurch to the Right, increasingly violent crackdowns on unions and dissidents and an inflation rate of over 300 per cent.
Argentina's football and its World Cup preparations were swept into this chaotic and ungovernable maw. The impossibility of exercising any authority in Argentina was painfully illustrated by the experience of referees and their assistants. In 1973 there had been a protracted officials' strike after a linesman had been heavily beaten on the touchline by fans at Huracán. In a game in Rosario in 1974 before Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys the score stood at 2-2. Referee Álvarez gave the visitors a disputed penalty in the final minute of the match. A riot ensued almost immediately, five police officers were hurt, and the referee was hit in the eye by a stone and needed an operation that afternoon. Worse was to come. Under an old and ambiguous 'Sports Fraud law' charges were brought against Álvarez by the police in Rosario for fraudulent refereeing of the game. We can assume that the police had plenty of support and advice from Newell's officials. Álvarez was subsequently held in jail until another referees' strike and the widespread threat of a players' strike saw him released. A Mendozan lawyer, Alfredo Goméz Chair, also brought charges of sports fraud against a referee after Gimnasia y Esgrima Mendoza had lost to Estudiantes. Goméz was not even in the stadium in Buenos Aires but at home in Mendoza listening to commentary on the radio. Violence in football games began to rise. When Boca Juniors played Central Norte in Salta the game was abandoned after tear-gas canisters were fired all round the stadium. The players and referees were corralled by a hail of stones into the centre circle where they remained for three hours as the riot took its course.
And all the time the books of every club were getting redder and redder. The belated attempt to create a national championship incorporating Buenos Aires and the teams of the small cities of the coast and the interior made matters worse, as crowds were often small and air tickets expensive. Successive governments initiated a series of price freezes to try and control inflation, and football tickets were included. Income and outgoings were just not matching up. And yet in this unstable climate Boca Juniors launched the most economically and architecturally quixotic plan in Argentine football in a long time. Trapped in the narrow confines of La Boca in central Buenos Aires, the club proposed building not merely a new stadium but a vast entertainment and multi-sport complex. More than that, they wanted to build it on an artificial island made of reclaimed land in the Río de la Plata. Documents were issued, designs presented and a massive bond issue was made to finance the development. But the stadium was never built. Less than a decade later, like most Argentine investments, the bonds were virtually worthless. Architects argued that the complex would have sunk through the soft reclaimed earth and back into the river.
It was not as if Argentina had not had a long time to prepare for hosting the World Cup. They had been awarded the hosting rights to the 1978 event in 1964 at FIFA's Tokyo congress. But by the time of Perón's death little had been achieved beyond deciding that the country would somehow find the money for three completely new stadiums in cities with minuscule football teams -- Mendoza, Mar del Plata and Córdoba; facelifts for other stadiums in Rosario and Buenos Aires; and a major upgrade of air, road and telecommunications links throughout the country. Money was meant to be coming in from the recently established football pools, but somehow it never quite managed to arrive. Organizing committees and executive offers came and went, at a speed that made mainstream politics look placid. By 1975 the fifth World Cup organizing committee had been formed, headed by the football authorities, but its precise remit and lines of authority were crossed by a parallel committee formed by the Ministry of Tourism. Almost nothing had been definitely decided, let alone done, apart from the award and receipt of some very exceptional committee expenses. FIFA's visits to review the preparations verged on the farcical; one trip to a park in Mendoza that would be cleared for a stadium that was not yet designed and no visit at all to Mar del Plata owing to transport problems. Then the generals, in a widely predicted and for some deeply appreciated move, took control.
Civilian government crumbled at the merest push from the military and in March 1976 General Jorge Videla convened the first meeting of the new executive power in the land, colloquially known as La Junta. Items for discussion included the prosecution of an all-out war against terrorists, subversives, guerrillas and radicals of all kinds. Plans for a more systematic and aggressive liberal economic policy were set out; then there was the small matter of the World Cup. The political implications of the event and the disastrous state of preparations were of such importance to the generals that they immediately announced the formation of Ente Autárquico Mundial (EAM) under General Omar Actis, charged with the preparations for the Mundial. On his way to his first press conference Actis was assassinated with a bullet from a rifle. The Junta blamed the Montoneros guerrilla groups, but Actis was succeeded by the man most likely to have ordered the execution, Admiral Carlos Alberto Lacoste. Lacoste, together with sidekick Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, ran the show and skimmed many millions of dollars off the top of every contract and deal the World Cup required.
The generals set about their tasks that they loftily entitled Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional -- the Process of National Reorganization -- but widely known by its more sinister diminutive El Proceso. Without regard to domestic or international opinion the Junta launched a systematic dirty war against what was left of the EPZ rural revolt in the north and the Montoneros urban guerrilla movement in the cities. The military then extended the war to include the eradication of all political opposition: radicals, students and workers. Suspects were identified, rounded up, often tortured and many were killed. The precise count will never be known but somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people disappeared. Simultaneously, a harsh economic programme was introduced, slashing public spending and restraining inflation at the cost of widespread industrial recession and unemployment. Nonetheless, money was found to execute the preparations for the World Cup. The roads, airports and stadiums were built or rebuilt, and Argentina acquired colour television though the World Cup itself would only be seen in colour outside the country. The total cost of the spectacular remains uncertain but it was at least $700 million -- considerably more than was spent in Spain four years later and far more than was prudently available from the Argentinian national budget.
Opposition to the Mundial at home and abroad was brushed aside. Exiles, human-rights organizations and leftist sympathizers in Europe tried to discredit the tournament and urge a boycott. The Junta responded by employing US public relations firm Buston-Marsteller to manage their public profile. FIFA were adamant: they would not take away the World Cup from Argentina. But could they win it? The military found themselves with a known left-wing sympathizer as coach of the national team. César Luis Menotti showed his independence of mind and distaste for the brutal side of Argentinian football by resisting the clamour to include in the squad the new hero of Argentina -- the seventeen-year-old Diego Maradona -- and refusing to pick players from the triumphant Boca Juniors team. Boca, who had won the Copa Libertadores in 1977 and 1978, were coached by Juan Carlos Lorenzo, the infamously tough-talking coach of the Argentinian national team at the 1962 and 1966 World Cup. His Boca team were a true rough house and, it had been persistently claimed, they were pumped up on a lot of drugs. Menotti by contrast picked and coached an Argentinian team of swift and direct passing who played at a tempo significantly faster than their predecessors -- though rumours of excessive drug use hung over the team's medical preparations, too.
General Videla, in full military regalia, held a reception for the national team on the eve of the World Cup at the presidential palace. His expectations were made clear: "Like the commander says to his troops before battle, you will be winners." The next day at the opening ceremony Videla addressed the crowd and the nation to stony, but attentive, silence. In the ESMA military school the desperate routines of torture and intimidation were broken for a moment. The World Cup, Videla said, would be "played under signs of peace." El Monumental was filled with the swirling showers of blue and white tickertape and the aching roars of the crowd. In the Plaza de Mayo the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared made their last plaintive protests and appeals to the eyes and ears of the international media. But the football had begun.
In the final Argentina faced the Dutch, their own people and the Junta. Menotti remembered it this way:
Each of us had an order when we entered the field the day of the final: to look at the stands. We are not going to look at the stage-box of the authorities people ... I said to the players, we are going to look at the terraces, to all the people, where perhaps sits the father of each of us, because there we will find the metalworkers, the butchers, the bakers and the taxi drivers.
Whatever Menotti's protestations that Argentina would play in the old way, the right way, the Dutch were still taken to the stadium by a long tedious route. Once there they were kept waiting on the pitch by Argentina for nearly ten minutes as the crowd howled them down. When they did arrive, the Argentinians made a massive protest over the protective arm cast worn by Dutch player Rene van de Kerkhof. Given that he had played in it for the last five games it was clear that the protest was designed to throw their opponents off balance. Playing on a carpet of shredded toilet rolls and newspaper, Argentina took the lead in the first half when Kempes burst through the Dutch defence to stab the ball home. Holland squandered chances until substitute Nanninga equalized with eight minutes to go. With a minute left to play Rensenbrink had the winner in his sights only to hit the post. In extra time Argentina had the edge and their attacks took on the aura of a cavalry charge. Kempes' long-legged stepover and dummy put him through for a second goal and then a third from Bertoni made sure of Argentina's victory.
People flooded on to the streets of Buenos Aires, of Rosario, Córdoba of every tiny town and dusty barrio. Ar-gen-tina, Ar-gen-tina, Campeón Mundial! Ar-gen-tina, Ar-gen-tina, Campeón Mundial! On Avenida Corrientes a car with darkened windows moved slowly, gingerly through the pressing, uncontrollable crowds. Inside military officers sat quietly with one of their few remaining living prisoners, a leading figure in the Montoneros: "You see we have won." They let her soak up the reality of the situation through the sun roof and treated her to a meal at a restaurant brimming with patriotic reverie. Asado never tasted so much of ash.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p.612-619.
(That last paragraph is absolutely chilling and perfect, isn't it?)