How ostriches, barbecues and baggy pants saved Diego Maradona and Argentina from an identity crisis

Argentina have the ball, but when will the goal come? Come on, señores! The ball goes to Maradona! Maradona can pass to Enrique, but Maradona keeps dribbling! He goes past three! Always Maradona! Good, good, good! Passes to Valdano! He jumps with Shilton! He heads… handball!... Gooooooool! Gol from Diego Armando Maradona! I’m being told from the Central Studio in Buenos Aires that the goal was not with his hand but with his head! If he did do it with his hand, go to Great Britain and cry! What a mixture of cockiness and Argentinian cunning! “

- Legendary commentator, Victor Morales, England vs Argentina, World Cup Quarter-final, Azteca Mexico, June 22nd, 1986.

“I’m not a marvel, Raquel Welch is,” corrected Diego Maradona, to the bellowing laughter of the giddy Argentinian press. He was being asked what he was, at the post-match press conference, in the wake of football’s ultimate humbling at high noon. The sun itself, the emblem of the Argentinian flag, provided the limelight when El Diego pickpocketed the pride of the gringos. In the minds of the 114, 580 in The Azteca, and millions around the world, now and forever, spooled backwards and forwards on highlight reels and amateur YouTube edits, Maradona remains suspended in time between the backdrop of blue sky and England’s goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, just as the losses of the Falkland War still loom over Argentina. Maradona was the Zorro of the Argentinian cause, football’s premier antagonist. Christ the Redeemer was forgotten for a brief period – on 22nd June, 1986, Roman Catholic Argentina’s redeemer was a rascal.

The British in the Dark Ages deemed those born left-handed to have a tendency for the sinister. Fitting then, that it was the scoundrel left fist of a southpaw that sent England’s football team to the Dark Ages, struggling to keep pace on the world stage since - such was the blow. If football had an artistic representation of Evelyn De Morgan’s painting of the Judeo-Christian angel, Azrael (in Hebrew, the name translates to ‘Help from God’), that moment was it.

The definitive answer to what Diego Maradona is made of lies not in collective exclamations, superlatives or expletives – mills upon churning mills of printing presses of the world’s collective sentience have tried and failed. The answer lies closer to his tin-roofed shed and the hard-soil potreros (paddocks), and uneven vacant lots of Argentina. The answer, it seems, lies in a book.

Critically-acclaimed football historian, Jonathan Wilson’s new literary escapade, Angels with Dirty Faces is more than an ordinary book – it’s an expedition into the flesh of Argentinian football, and consequently, as I found, of the nation as a whole. The winner of Italy’s Premio Antonio Ghirelli Prize, NSC Football Book of the Year, and the prestigious Football Supporters Federation Award for his book Inverting the Pyramid – History of Football Tactics; the scholar from Sunderland has since turned to anatomise Diego Maradona’s Argentina, clinically, yet with unexpected and colourfully eclectic examinations.

In the first part of the two-part interview, Jonathan Wilson speaks to Scroll.in about his new book and how inconceivable factors such as ostriches, barbecues and baggy pants saved Maradona’s Argentina from a crisis of identity – preserving the swagger and spirit of Argentinidad Maradona went on to embolden and embody.

Angels with Dirty Faces, in terms of scale and comprehension, is up there with the best football culture books ever written. What made you write it?

There have been a lot of books in English looking at influential football cultures – you have David Winner’s book Brilliant Orange, which is a fantastic book about Dutch football; you have Alex Bellos’ book Futebol about Brazil; you have John Foot’s book Calcio on Italy, Uli Hesse’s Tor! about Germany – but hadn’t been a book done on Argentina; of all the major footballing superpowers, it was the last one to be done. It had to be written.

What I wanted to do with the book and the reason why it became this comprehensive - and this is in no way a criticism of those book I’ve mentioned – Futebol is very much about the culture and the socio-economic parameters of Brazil and consequently, its football – but what I wanted to do is also tell who won the league in 1936 and why did they win it – Okay, River Plate won the league, but, why? Why were they better than anybody else? So, I wanted to merge the two and have something that’s factual, but also places Argentinian football origins and evolution in the cultural and socio-economic context.

You stress on socio-economic settings being important to chart the origins of football styles – not just in Argentina but also in general?

Well, nothing comes from nothing. For instance, you and I are having this conversation today, it’s come about because of socio-economic situations – I’ve written the book, you’ve read the book, you’re writing a piece centred around the book, and the outlets that enable us to do that is due to our socio-economic environment.

I believe, unless you understand the background of people, it’s difficult to understand why they do what they do, their motivation… It also works the other way around – you look at, let’s take, Argentinian football as a case study – in between the coming of professionalism in 1931 to 1958, why did they have this demand for aestheticism, why did they have this propensity for leading a Bohemian lifestyle? Why was their football based strictly on skill, and nobody believed in running around – and fitness work was seen as somehow beneath them? Well, it’s because that’s how Argentine society was like in the 1930s, in light of their economic boom (in 1928 its GNP per capita was 8th highest in the world- by 2012 it was 60th), they became quite decadent (that was until the sobering reality of recession and savagery of military rule grounded the people and the fans, at the helm of the tyranny of General Videla and Captain Carlos Lacoste, respectively).

You accentuate vividly in the book on the differences between Anglo (English) and the Criollo (South American) – the yin and yang of footballing styles. Could you comment on their relationship?

What’s interesting, and I still haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of this, is – this term, criollo, just means, someone who is born in Argentina to South American parents. Yet, if you’re British, or your parents are British and you’re born in Argentina, nobody called you criollo. You’re a criollo only if you’re Spanish or Italian, or even Jewish or Arab. A Brit can never be a criollo, there was for some reason a distinction that was made, and that distinction makes things slightly blurry.

It makes you wonder what would have happened if the first World War hadn’t happened. The Anglo clubs were totally dominant but until 1910, then the Argentinian clubs did their bit of growing up.

Essentially, the British put in the structure of the league, and obviously took football there – then the local form of it grew up. Racing win their first title in 1912 and then go onto win seven in a row, thereby becoming the first distinctly Criollo team. I guess, you needed the British to implant the game and provide the structures of the game, but then what you find in football all over the world, every society, every culture then takes on its basics and interrogates it in their own way, coming up their own version of the game.

It’s sort of amazing that you still see that now – even in a world where 30% of the players in the Premier League are English, and it’s very common for a team to have a starting 11 of non-British players, and yet stylistically, the football is still English.

If you turn on a game on TV, and if you put the teams in generic kits, blank out the names on the scoreboard, and you’d still know within two or three minutes who is England or Spain, Italy or Germany. There are still these markers that are almost instantly identifiable. The indigenous culture somehow is still so powerful, it infects everybody who arrives there.“

What of Argentina’s identity before being Westernised?

El Grafico, in the 1920 and the 1930s, perhaps the greatest football magazine ever published, addresses this subject head on. It follows an investigative cultural undertaking which concludes that the totem of Argentinian culture is that the Gaucho (the horseman who looked after the cattle) importance was wiped out by the British when they imported barbed wire! It changed the way of containing farmlands, and consequently lessened the importance of the gaucho.

The first great work of Argentinian literature was Martín Fierro, a 2,316-line epic poem by Jose Hernandez - which tells the story of an impoverished yet overly masculine gaucho, riding through the pampas, dealing with problems through grit and pride, but not necessarily poise. It was a celebration of the gaucho culture, written right at the end of it - the poem was a lament for a way of life that was made redundant by the cultural boom. Even the famous Jorge Luis Borges published a magazine in honour of Fierro, while immigrants dressed up in bombachos (baggy trousers meant for horse-riding), set up gaucho revival clubs, had asados – large barbecue gatherings - to try and acclimatise themselves to the true feeling of Argentinidad.

The barbecue feats remain a huge part of being Argentinian, and they still drink their mate - the bitter tea - which is again deeply-rooted in the gaucho culture. You see Sergio Aguero drinking it on the team bus, and they have these parties where they dress as the gaucho. It is a real phenomenon. These exciting, skilful, lone horsemen riding across the vast grasslands of the Pampas with extravagance, colour and abandon were the figureheads of Argentine culture and narratives.

So, how does Argentina as a nation cope with this sudden vacuum of Argentinidad (the spirit of Argentina)?

Football! Eventually, Argentina was industrialised, becoming an urban culture, so where does one find the reflection of the gaucho? You find it in the Pibé (the street urchin), the directionless kids of the slums, who learned football not playing in the schools set up by the British settlers, not in beautiful, vast, grassed pitches, where you have space to run into and kick the ball a long way – no, they grow up playing on hard, uneven surfaces, without the cushion of the soft earth beneath them, without an instructor or the reprieve of a referee’s whistle. So, you’ve got to be tough as tacks, and got be able to look after yourself, and the skills to turn in tight areas of littered alleyways of the slum, and uneven pitches. (Ball control, dribbling, grit, cunning and craft were the difference between you getting a goal or going home with a bad limp.)

The editor of the El Grafico, Borocotó, wrote a famous piece at the end of the 1920s, saying “..if we erected a statue to inventor of dribbling, the soul of Argentine football, he would be this Pibé. This kid with mass of dark hair, with his teeth worn down by eating yesterday’s breads.” He describes essentially, Omar Sívori, Diego Maradona, Carlos Tevez – all gauchos in their own right. Footballers thus take over from the image of the gaucho.

The Argentinian word for dribbling is ‘gambeta’, which is a gaucho word, meaning running with the motion of an ostrich. So, you can see how the transference between the gaucho and the pibé was an evolution of the Argentine way of life. The way football is played in Argentina is self-consciously a projection of the nation…

(Continued in Part 2: La Machina, Menotti and a Hungarian Butcher-turned-manager: Busting Argentina’s Biggest Football Myths)

Jonathan Wilson is one of the most venerated historians of the beautiful game, and the author of eight critically-acclaimed books. He tweets @jonawils

Srijandeep Das is the chief editor of Football Paradise which has been bestowed the prestigious Judges’ Choice Award at the International Football Blogging Awards 2016, at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium. He tweets @srijandeep