Once again, that match – or, as it’s stylised here, “The Match” – is the subject of popular art, a documentary that itself is based upon the book El partido by Argentinian journalist Andrés Burgo. It’s the 1986 FIFA World Cup quarter-final, in Mexico City, between England and Argentina.
We’ve heard plenty about that game this year, not least because its 40th anniversary almost perfectly coincided with the semi-final encounter between the same two countries at this year’s World Cup. The result was the same – a 2-1 victory for La Albiceleste.
The Match assumes the 1986 game to be the culmination of an intense bitterness between the two countries – a culmination, but not its conclusion. Today, the rivalry is still deliciously spicy and distinctive for it surviving the geographic distance of its participants. Typically, football’s classicos are born from more intimate contempt.
Zooming in and out from time, The Match, which is currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, stitches together the cultural and political context for the quarter-final. Its ambition is laudable but its execution often perfunctory.
Finding the largest source of heat for the rivalry did not require a long trip into the past: it was the brief but intense Falklands War begun and finished just four years earlier. While the sovereignty of the remote South Atlantic islands has been disputed for centuries, this war was over in 74 days.
Military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri underestimated Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to aggressively reclaim the islands when Argentina invaded in April 1982. When Argentina surrendered 10 weeks later, they’d lost 649 lives and Galtieri his job. Invasion, he thought, might better improve the waning popularity of the murderous military junta – instead, its failure signalled the beginning of the end of Argentina’s rule by military dictators.
A brief war but very bloody: Britain lost 255 lives, several warships and two dozen helicopters. But it found for Thatcher the domestic popularity that was once Galtieri’s objective.
In the days preceding the 1986 match between England and Argentina, many reporters asked many players what significance the war might have for them. To a man, both Argentinian and English players – including the frequently provocative Diego Maradona – denied any significance whatsoever. The recurring, studiously uncontroversial reply was a variation of the following: we are athletes, not politicians, and we are interested only in playing well and winning.
This might have been true for the English team, but it wasn’t for the Argentinians. In Maradona’s 2000 autobiography, he wrote: “It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team. Although we had said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas [Falklands] War, we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.”
Roberto Perfumo, a former Argentinian captain who had played against England in the 1966 World Cup and was a commentator come ’86, told The Observer in 2002 that winning The Match was enough. “Winning the World Cup that year was secondary for us,” he said. “Beating England was our real aim.”
The bad blood, as The Match shows, well precedes the Falklands War. On the pitch, at least, its origins can be found 20 years earlier when the Argentinians roughed up the English and their captain was sent off but required police officers to enforce his departure. On his way to the changing rooms, Antonio Rattín scrunched one of the corner flags like you might a used tissue: that flag bore the image of the British Crown. After the match, England manager Alf Ramsey prohibited his players from swapping shirts with their opponents and he called the Argentinians “animals” – a comment long and bitterly remembered.
Shorn of this context, The Match would have still been memorable. It is remarkable for containing the two most famous goals in World Cup history – a distinction made more incredible by the fact both were scored by the same man in the same half and just four minutes apart.
The first was the “Hand of God”, a piece of bastardry or brilliant street magic, depending on who you speak to. An unfortunate defensive lunge by England midfielder Steve Hodge lobbed the ball towards his goal, where it hung briefly in the air between Maradona and the England goalkeeper, Peter Shilton. As has become folklore, Maradona jumped, feigned a header, but with his left fist – which he’d cleverly kept close to his head – punched the ball over Shilton and into the net.
What seemed unclear on television, and still fairly unclear on the relatively primitive video replays, the England players saw clearly: a deliberate handball. You can see several of them gesture to the referee, grabbing their raised arms in incredulity or using their fist to mimic the subterfuge, but the referee saw nothing, the linesman kept his flag down and the goal was awarded. (When the thousands of shots taken by the various photographers were later developed, there was no doubt.) Less than four minutes later, Maradona took the ball well inside the Argentinian half and began his 55 metre, 10 second slalom past four English defenders, then sold Shilton a dummy before stroking the ball into the goal.
The Uruguayan journalist, Victor Hugo Morales, provided one of the most famous passages of sporting commentary. Deliriously praising Maradona’s genius, and thanking God for the sport, Morales asked: “Cosmic kite! What planet are you from?”
Here, inside five minutes, was the ultimate presentation of Maradona’s duality: the urchin trickster and the divine talent. The gaucho and the demigod. In his autobiography, Maradona said he almost preferred the first goal because it was “like stealing the wallet of the English”.
This idea recurs throughout the history of Argentinian football: that naivety is a kind of sloth, but for the gaucho it’s an opportunity to exploit.
The late Martin Amis, in a piece for The Guardian in 2004, wrote there was an arguably slanderous generalisation that the “Argie macho” thought “foul means … incomparably more satisfying than fair” and especially when committed against an old enemy. “By this logic, the second goal against England was a languid, erotic epiphany; the first was a knee-trembler in a back alley; and each has its points. More broadly, there is in this culture a humiliation, an abjectness, in always playing by the rules.”
Little is made of this culture in the documentary, even if the Argentinians have been telling us for years. “When the English companies first brought this sport here the local people couldn’t play with them,” Perfumo said in the 2002 interview with The Observer. “So the way we see it, they have this typical English superiority, but they know they have to play very hard to win against Argentina. Winning against England is like schoolkids beating the teachers.”
Almost literally: the founder of the Argentinian football association was a Scottish schoolteacher and the five oldest clubs in that country were all founded by Brits. They were also, for a good time, made up exclusively of Brits too.
In 1998, England and Argentina met once more in a World Cup quarter-final. And once more, it was dramatic. Argentina won on penalties, after the teams were drawn 2-2 at the conclusion of extra time, and after David Beckham had been sent off for an undisciplined, but very slight, flick of his leg against his offending tackler.
That man was Diego Simeone, and with near-perfect candour, he told John Carlin in that same 2002 piece that of course he had exaggerated the contact.
“As I was trying to stand up, that was when [Beckham] kicked me from behind,” he said. “And I took advantage of that … you take advantage of all the opportunities you find in your life. If you don’t take advantage of a chance that comes your way, you are lost.”
Perfumo went further: “Simeone did an act and got Beckham sent off,” he said.
“This is not the kind of thing that could have been done by one of your naive, honest English players.”
This idea recurs throughout the history of Argentinian football: that naivety is a kind of sloth, but for the gaucho it’s an opportunity to exploit. The glory of victory is too great to sacrifice to lame conceptions of nobility. The gaucho creed is an equal mix of skill, toughness and shameless wiles.
We hear this in The Match, but little is made of it. Jorge Valdano, one of Maradona’s teammates that day in 1986, described the “Hand of God” as an act of “cleverness” and then gives the film its most memorable line: “It should be noted that, for us, cleverness is a value, and a value that sometimes we put above honesty,” he said.
“Diego, being fully Argentine, well, all that was integrated into his personality.”
I don’t want to litigate some dull moral line here – I’m just fascinated by Valdano’s words and how much they resonate with others who’ve played for La Selección. But the filmmakers let it go.
Strangely, for a genuinely distinctive rivalry, the film’s makers somehow contrive to dampen it. Typically, it’s the other way around: those in the business of sports docs are usually guilty of breathless exaggeration.
Some of Shilton’s resentment about Maradona’s “cleverness” shows, but largely any sense of the rivalry is soon buried beneath the bonhomie of the talking heads – no longer antagonists but retired warriors united now in their mellowness and shared war stories. The implication in watching them play table football together – in obviously contrived scenes that are, like their interviews, unnecessarily and pompously shot in black and white – is as boring as it is sickly sweet: that soccer, eventually, at least, unifies all.
For a film about blood and guts, there’s oddly very little of it. It’s a dispassionate film about passion and one curiously indifferent to some of its sources. But when Argentina beat England in the World Cup semi-final last month – in yet another dramatic match between the two countries – its players were later fined for unfurling a banner declaring: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (The Falklands are Argentine).
This week, the Argentine Football Association (AFA) declared that July 15, in perpetuity, would now be celebrated as “National Football Teams Day” in commemoration of their defeat of England in that semi-final. “I know that for Argentinians, we won the World Cup the moment we beat England, because that’s really what everyone wanted,” the AFA’s president said.
History was repeating.
