In the darkness, he was the promise of light. For Argentina, 5 September 1993 was a night of the deepest humiliation. They had won the previous two Copas América. They had stuttered a little in World Cup qualifying but nobody really doubted they would make it to the USA in 1994. And then they lost 5-0 at home to Colombia. As fans tried to process the horror, they called on their messiah, Diego Maradona, who was raging in his VIP box at El Monumental.
Argentina is the utopian dream that never quite came to pass. In Radiografía de la pampa, written in 1933 in response to the first of the coups, the poet and essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote of the pain of being an exile, depicting an Argentina that was forever European but not Europe. That sense of dislocation has become a common theme: after the massacres of its indigenous population throughout the 19th century, Argentina became, for theorists at least, a tabula rasa.
That encouraged a utopianism, a sense that this was a land in which a new, better society could be created, unhindered by pre-existing structures and traditions. Argentina is a land of myth, where messiahs have always had their place. The first Europeans who went there were dreaming of El Dorado. Juan Perón, the arch-populist, all things to all men, and Evita perhaps even more so, inspired a faith far beyond what was justified.
By the 1920s, there was a wave of nostalgia for an idealised version of the life of the gaucho, whose unflinching self-reliance, alone on the pampas, was seen as embodying the soul of Argentina. In the pages of El Gráfico, the hugely influential sports magazine, it was argued that in a rapidly urbanising world that spirit was best represented in the pibe, the kid from the streets. Everything was in opposition to the British, whose wire fencing had undermined the political power of the gaúchos, leading for a time to a quasi-colonial relationship.
Football had come to Argentina through the British, through sailors and merchants, propagated through the British schools that catered to the elite. Their game, played on wide grassy pitches, was based on running and power; the Argentinian game grew from mass games on the uneven ground of the potreras, the vacant lots of the burgeoning city, where close control and streetwiseness were essential
In 1928, Borocotó, the great editor of El Gráfico, described a putative statue to the soul of Argentinian football. It would depict, he wrote, a mischievous urchin, tough and skilful, with a mass of untamed hair, who had learned the game on the streets. Half a century before the fact, he describes Maradona.
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