Top Scorer Crespo Will Be Kept In Wembley Wings
Football 365 Special Report by Gavin Willacy in London and Tim Vickery in Rio de Janiero
ARGENTINA will leave their most in-form striker on the bench at Wembley on Wednesday night. Hernan Crespo of Parma, who has scored 14 Serie A goals this season and is on course to break the club's season scoring record, will have to play second fiddle to Italy's highest scoring foreign player of all time – Gabriel Batistuta. Just like England's Alan Shearer, nobody in Argentina would dare drop Batigol even when he is not having the greatest of seasons.
"It's been hard for Batistuta at Fiorentina this season," Tottenham's Argentinian full-back Mauricio Taricco told Football365. "But he's like Shearer: do you put him on the bench? I don't think so. I haven't spoken to Crespo yet but I know he will be desperate to play at least some part of this game. But you cannot argue with Batistuta - he is world class."
The fact that Crespo will be waiting in the wings means that even if England can keep 'Batigol' quiet, an explosive striker in the same mode but on red hot form will be waiting in the wings. Crespo and Batistuta are seen as too similar to play together and that is why Crespo has had to make do with regular appearances off the bench.
But new Argentina boss Marcelo Bielsa will use almost exactly the same players as predecessor Daniel Passarella did at France 98, with ten of the team who drew 2-2 with ten-man England in St Etienne likely to feature at Wembley. But in a different formation.
"These are the same players but in a different style," said Taricco. "Bielsa believes mainly in tactics. He makes players do what he wants and sometimes that confuses players, but that's his way."
Bielsa's ideas have little in common with those of Passarella. Argentinian football is full of contradictions, and the national team is the natural place for the conflicts to be played out. On the way to winning the 1978 World Cup, coach Cesar Menotti refused to pick anyone from Boca Juniors, who at the time were South America's outstanding side. They were a negative, win-at-all costs team, and Menotti disdained their style.
With his flirtation with radical politics and his love of café society, the chain-smoking Menotti was an idealist. When he eventually stood down, the change was brutal. In came the arch-pragmatist Bilardo and his brand of gangster football. After him there was a return to romanticism with Basile, and then came Passarella, captain of Menotti's World Cup winning team of 1978. As a coach he was every bit as commanding as he had been on the field. Long hair, earrings and homosexuality were out, said the man they called 'El Kaiser'.
Bielsa was also a centre back, who was capped at Under-23 level but his early retirement through injury was not seen as a great loss to football. Born into the middle class, he had been expected to follow a career in the liberal professions. Like Minotti he is from Rosario, a city with a bohemian reputation. When the mood takes him, there is much of the café philosopher about Bielsa, who can talk at great length and eloquence about such themes as the relationship between order and creativity.
In the World Cup, Passarella deployed his line of defence very deep, the idea being to create space on the field to be used by the likes of Veron and Ortega. Obviously, the space was there for the other team, too. Michael Owen owes much of his global reputation to the fact that Passarella's defence gave him acres of space in which to turn and run with the ball.
Bielsa's team will not allow such luxury. His defence will play much further up the field, pressing England in their own half whenever possible, but retaining a sweeper. Keeping the team compact could even enable Argentina to play three up front, making it difficult for the England defenders to play their way out of defence.
"As far as I know, Bielsa will play four at the back with the left-back more as a winger," explained Taricco. "He'll have three more in midfield with Simeone probably sitting in front of defence and (Javier) Zanetti and (Juan) Veron ahead of him, with three forwards; Batistuta in the middle, (Ariel) Ortega on the right and Claudio Lopez on the left."
This was the way that Argentina took on Brazil in two friendlies last September. The first, in Buenos Aires, was a thorough vindication of Bielsa's tactics. Rivaldo never saw the ball, and Argentina's 2-0 win was comprehensive. A few days later in Porto Alegre it was a different story. Brazil had worked out how to pierce Argentina's blockade, and Rivaldo ran riot in a 4-2 victory.
"If England attack a lot then Ortega will find himself playing virtually right-back and Lopez left-back," explains Taricco. "Against Brazil, Ortega was out wide, playing right-back, running after Roberto Carlos! No-one in Argentina understood that. They must get him involved more, get the ball to him."
Passarella did it one way, Bielsa does it another; only time will tell whose methods are more effective.
