Argentina: Veron leads charge
December 3, 2001
The World Cup favourites pose the toughest possible threat to Sven-Göran Eriksson’s hopes of glory next summer, writes Ian Hawkey
The Sunday Times
Argentina stopped being World Cup favourites in the early hours of yesterday morning, Buenos Aires time. Or at least in the plans of some bookmakers they did. Group F presents a ferocious challenge from any vantage point and although the South Americans are clearly the most fancied team to go through, there are three others next to them accustomed to reaching the last 16. Argentina would have preferred to avoid England, Sweden and for that matter Nigeria, the team who beat them in the Olympic final five years ago.
The England match is the stand-out fixture for Argentinians, not only for the football but everything else that goes with it. They will ready themselves for much rehashing of the Malvinas crises and for the certainty that Diego Simeone’s recovery from an operation will be monitored closely by the English. Simeone was the man involved in David Beckham’s sending-off during the dramatic meeting of the countries at the last World Cup, a contest Argentina won on penalties.
The rematch promises more theatre. It is as if Argentina-England games are chemically designed for combustion. “So we’ve drawn England,” said Roberto Ayala, the Argentina captain. “It’s a classic match in world football. Apart from the problems we’ve had with them, we always see football against them as some sort of revenge.”
It’s a fixture with a whole load of history. Wind back to 1986, and the Hand of God. Wind back to 1966, and the dismissal of Antonio Rattin, the Argentina captain during a foul-tempered World Cup encounter after which Alf Ramsey, the England manager, muttered into a reporter’s microphone the word: “Animals.” In the latter half of last century, England’s football rivalry with Argentina was as intense and vivid as with Germany or Scotland. Argentinians would name Brazil as their chief foe, but England are not far behind.
As football teams, they are some distance apart: Argentina are widely rated, with France, as the best national XI in the world. They towered over the rest of their continent during qualifying. Just consider the statistics: Argentina played 18 matches in the elongated system in South America, and lost only one of them. They scored 42 goals and recorded 13 victories. Despite the weakness of some of their opponents, it is a formidable record.
Consensus has it that this Argentina squad is a grade higher in quality than the one which, having knocked out England, perished against Holland in the quarter-finals at France 98. The coach then, Daniel Passarella, stepped down and gave way to Marcelo Bielsa, a diffident manager in public, but a respected one, and above all a loyalist. He has kept faith with most of the individuals who made up Passarella’s first team and that is not through a shortage of alternatives. Argentina have some outstanding youngsters at the moment.
Among those knocking heavily at the door to the last five or six places in Bielsa’s World Cup squad are the remarkable Javier Saviola, the 19-year-old striker at Barcelona; the leonine defender, Fabrizio Coloccini, and the man some pundits think would be a better organiser of the midfield than Juan Sebastian Veron, Juan Roman Riquelme of Boca Juniors.
Manchester United’s Veron will be the centrepiece of Argentina’s World Cup plans and Simeone, recovery permitting, will police the midfield with him.
Beckham’s nemesis hopes to be back in action in March. His country will certainly want his toughness in Japan.
Lazio’s Simeone would be one of several Serie A players in Bielsa’s side, which is drawn almost entirely from those who work in Europe. One notable exception is the waspish Ariel Ortega, who, after trying out Italy and Spain, has found his best form at home. Either side of Veron and Ortega, Argentina play with a lot of width, thanks to Valencia’s Kily Gonzalez on their left flank and Internazionale’s Javier Zanetti on the right of a midfield five.
Two of the back three select themselves: Ayala, a prodigious leaper, and Roma’s Walter Samuel. For the other position, Coloccini is having a marvellous season for Alaves in Spain and has entered the reckoning, as will Ayala’s partner at Valencia, Mauricio Pellegrino. The favoured choice in recent months, however, has been Nelson Vivas of Inter. That may surprise Arsenal fans and encourage England supporters. Vivas spent two seasons at Highbury, with all the presence of Lord Lucan (except for the moment he may have lost Arsenal the 1999 league title by failing to mark the back post adequately in a tense end-of-season defeat against Leeds).
In goal, meanwhile, a rich tradition of Argentinian eccentrics looks likely to end. Carlos Roa, focus of the penalty shoot-out against England in St Etienne, is no longer in contention, not least because he missed an entire season “for religious reasons,” before returning to play mostly for Real Mallorca’s reserves. Roberto Bonano, the unfussy Barcelona keeper, is the man in favour.
Up front, a variety of riches. There will be no sentimental return to national duty for Claudio Caniggia, however well he plays for Glasgow Rangers, and even Saviola will have to wait in the queue. Hernan Crespo, of Lazio, was the leading goalscorer in qualifying and his club colleague, the quick Claudio Lopez, seems his preferred partner. All of which leaves nowhere except the substitute’s bench for Gabriel Batistuta. But his record — more than two goals for every three internationals he has played — argues that Batistuta should start.
Argentinians like a good debate and the Crespo v Batistuta one will rumble along. Not that it is an especially merry time to be Argentinian. A deep recession has taken grip on the economy and it reaches across oceans to Europe’s large South American diaspora, even to its wealthy footballers. “There is a bad situation in our country,” Pellegrino told this reporter in an interview last month. “You get 10 pieces of bad news for every piece of good news. I feel for people at home.”
Pellegrino also described vividly the nation’s appetite for a World Cup. “In Argentina football is the biggest thing there is,” he said. “It’s the only sport. In Europe you have other sports of fairly equal status. In Argentina nothing touches football. But, specifically, we Argentinians all feel passionately for our football, and the pros for their job as a footballer. Veron is a good example; there are no half measures. He hates losing and plays with a lot of heart. He suffers when things are going against him.”
Back home, expectations are high and, while Bielsa has done his best to keep optimism sober, the potential of his squad is hard to conceal. And the precedents are burdensome. Argentina won the World Cup at the end of the 1970s, Diego Maradona won it for them again in the mid-1980s and they were finalists at the beginning of the 1990s. At the beginning of a new millennium, the Veron generation should be at their peak.