The criollo agitator
Introduced to Buenos Aires in the 1870s by English immigrants, Argentinian football was dominated until the turn of the century by amateur clubs of British expats who played a rough and physical, disciplined and mechanical football. In contrast to this ‘Britishness’, an authentically ‘Argentinian’ style of play emerged, called the criollo – literally ‘creole’ – style, in the lower-class districts of the capital, influenced by the waves of working-class immigration from Italy and Spain. Individualist, lively and creative, the criollo style affirmed its place on the pitches when in 1913 a team without any British players, Racing Club de Avellaneda, won the national championship for the first time.
In a cosmopolitan metropolis like Buenos Aires, where over 60 per cent of inhabitants were immigrants in 1914, criollo football became a social cement and a means of cultural distinction from both Europeans and rival neighbour Uruguay. The Argentinian criollo style was honed on the potreros, those urban gap sites that had survived the industrial rationalisation of the city undertaken under the guidance of the British. Like the tango, which reflected the lifestyle of those who survived by scavenging in the streets of the slums of Buenos Aires, feinting and cunning, victory not by force but by deception, became characteristic features of Argentinian football – la nuestra (‘ours’), as the fans called it.
The game’s power of attraction was phenomenal: in 1930, the best clubs would draw up to 40,000 fans to their grounds each weekend. Passionately supporting one’s team from the stands became one of the rare shared experiences in a country of fragmented identities and cultures. Football gradually became a catalyst of social unity, crystallising a new imaginary for all Argentinians. In 1948, at the height of the Peronist regime, the film Pelota de trapo (‘Rag Ball’) by Leopoldo Torres Ríos was an enormous popular success. In this production, a working-class Argentinian football star by the name of Comeuñas discovers after falling ill on the pitch that he has a serious heart condition. In his final match, a Copa America fixture against Brazil, one of his teammates pleads with him not to continue the game, but the hero refuses: ‘There are many ways to give your life for your country, this is one of them,’ he says. After scoring a decisive goal, Comeuñas is rewarded for his service to the nation.
Both inventive and unpredictable, the criollo game played by Diego Maradona swiftly turned the young virtuoso into the very embodiment of Argentinian football. Similarly, his modest origins, his small size – he was barely 5ft 4½” (165cm) tall – and his enthusiasm on the pitch were interpreted by fans as distinctive features of the pibe, a popular cultural figure in the country that evokes a child raised on the streets, outside of social conventions.
Footballing divinity
After this second honourable season in Naples, Maradona was named captain of Argentina’s national squad on the eve of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Carried by the fiery play of the inspired Pibe de Oro, the team had little trouble qualifying for the quarter-finals, where they faced England. But on the eve of the match, the international media fanned the flames of rivalry by comparing it to the 1982 Falklands conflict between Great Britain and Argentina. The Spanish daily El País ran the headline: ‘The Falklands War in football terms.’ ‘Don’t miss the re-run of the Falklands War,’ suggested the Mexican newspaper of reference Excélsior. The British tabloid The Sun was as subtle as ever: ‘It’s war!’
Four years earlier, Argentina’s military junta, whose power was beginning to waver, had ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, occupied by the British since 1833. Despite attempts at conciliation on the part of the international community, Margaret Thatcher launched a vast military operation to recapture the Falklands, which ended on 14 June 1982 with the death of nearly 650 Argentinian soldiers and 250 British soldiers. Although the armed dictatorship did not recover from this humiliating defeat, the Falklands War remains synonymous with trauma for Argentinians.
On 22 June 1986, the day of the quarter-final match with England, Argentina fielded a generation of players most of whom had narrowly escaped recruitment to the 1982 armed conflict thanks to their status as international footballers. It was therefore with a great deal of media pressure and a fierce desire to erase the humiliation of the Falklands that the Argentinian eleven took to the pitch at the Azteca stadium in Mexico City in front of over 110,000 spectators. Under the hot Mexican sun, the first half ended 0–0. But six minutes into the second half, Maradona, wearing the number 10 shirt as always, suddenly broke through the English defence to make an impromptu pass to striker Jorge Valdano. As the ball clumsily bounced away from his team-mate’s foot, England defender Steve Hodge, overwhelmed by the speed of the exchange, knocked the ball back to his keeper. Then the diminutive Maradona leapt to the height of the giant Peter Shilton’s gloves and, with his left arm outstretched, knocked the ball into the back of the British net. The stands erupted and, despite the loud protests of the English players, the Tunisian referee Ali Bennaceur, not having seen the Argentinian’s hand, validated the first goal.[1]
Exactly three minutes later, like a ‘cosmic kite’, in the words of Uruguayan sports commentator Victor Hugo Morales, Maradona embarked on a wild run from the middle of the pitch and dribbled dazzlingly past half a dozen outflanked and panicked English players, to score a magnificent second goal, ensuring Argentina’s advancement to the semi-finals. To this date, it is celebrated as one of the most beautiful goals ever scored. ‘It all happened in four minutes’, reported the Spanish daily El Mundo. ‘The scoundrel and the genius, God and the devil, a high-flying crook and a footballing divinity, the best football player that a mortal mother has given birth to in the twentieth century.’
At the post-match press conference, the Argentinian forward stirred the controversy by proudly accepting he had scored ‘a little with the head of Maradona, and a little with the hand of God’. By assigning a divine dimension to this ‘Hand of God’ that passed into posterity, the captain of the Albiceleste avenged, in the eyes of Argentina, the wound of the Falkland Islands by breaking the rules of football. And if the irregularity of the Hand of God made the defeat even more bitter for the English, it was all the more appreciated by the Argentinian people because it was such a criollo gesture. In the face of England’s physical domination, illustrated by the size of the English keeper (over six feet), little Diego had turned to the art of trickery to defeat the British Goliath. As he later claimed, ‘It came from the deepest part of me. It was something I’d done before in the potrero, in Fiorito.’
To counter the powerful and rational system of play of the English, Maradona deployed an astute creativity typical of the inhabitants of poor neighbourhoods. ‘In Fiorito, the pitch where Diego played was bumpy and strewn with rubbish and weeds. It was there that he developed his extraordinary physical abilities and his technique based on evasion,’ says Fernando Signorini, Maradona’s physical trainer from 1984 to 1994. ‘In this shanty town abandoned by the state, you had to be resourceful to get by. As a child, Diego was full of mischief when it came to taking the train or stealing an apple. This was reflected in his game.’ The second goal, meanwhile, recalls another characteristic of criollo football. ‘He showed that dribbling is the essence of our style of play,’ says Juanjo, an Argentinian fan. ‘He dribbled and dribbled some more, and those few seconds are engraved in my memory as if they were suspended forever in time.’
In Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture, published in 1938, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga already pointed out: ‘To our way of thinking, cheating as a means of winning a game robs the action of its play-character and spoils it altogether […] Archaic culture, however, gives the lie to our moral judgement in this respect, as also does the spirit of popular lore.’ This ‘popular lore’, which sees in the Hand of God the very expression of Argentinian identity through the transgression of the law, has been, and still is, regularly probed by Argentinian intellectuals. ‘We don’t know if we are capable of maintaining a semblance of order and stability in our country,’ said the Argentinian journalist and writer Jorge Lanata in 1994. ‘Can we really be a modern society that plays by the rules of modern countries, or are we just that boy from the slums who still thinks he can play by other rules as long as he is not caught red-handed?’
With his Hand of God, Maradona laid out a founding social dichotomy of his nation. Since the mid-19th century, Argentina had asserted itself as a victory of ‘civilisation’, symbolised by the industrial metropolis of Buenos Aires, against the ‘barbarism’ represented by the pampa, the wild space where the gaucho roams, obeying only his own rules. The Pibe de Oro and his fraudulent gesture thus reflect this indomitable part of Argentinian society that is furiously resistant to authority. An ambiguous relationship with Western modernity was noted as early as 1946 by the author Jorge Luis Borges in his essay Our Poor Individualism, in which he wrote that ‘the Argentinian, unlike the North American and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the State […] The Argentinian is an individual and not a citizen.’
[1] On 17 August 2015, while passing through Tunisia, Maradona paid a visit to Ali Bennaceur to gift him an Argentina jersey he dedicated with the words: ‘For Ali, my eternal friend’.
Mickaël Correia is a journalist at Mediapart. He is the author of several books, and his work focuses on social and ecological struggles as well as working-class culture. He has written for Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Canard Enchaîné and La Revue du Crieur. His passion for football began when he was 4, with kickabouts on the streets of Roubaix.
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator from Spanish, French and Italian. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish. Twitter: @elusiveword
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