Commentary: Argentina vs. England is going to be glorious chaos
Clear your schedule and forget about any thoughts of sitting down to watch the beautiful game.
Argentina against England is much more than a football match. It’s a ferocious and deep-rooted rivalry that’s full of enmity and transcends the sport.
Inevitably, the Falkland Islands will be part of the discourse in the days that follow, even if England and Argentina have more than enough history on the pitch to prevent a 74-day conflict that took place 44 years ago from being a big talking point.
“This is a football game,” Lionel Scaloni, the Argentina coach, replied when asked if he had a message for the country’s supporters about playing England. “They have an excellent coach, and this is a football game, and that’s all.”
The underlying meaning behind Scaloni’s answer was loud and clear, much like the chant that was reverberating around Arrowhead Stadium after Argentina’s latest dramatic victory – a 3-1 victory over Switzerland, courtesy of two goals in the second half of extra time.
“El que no salta es un ingles” – “He who doesn’t jump is an Englishman” – was the soundtrack of the night in Kansas City. It’s a song that Argentina supporters don’t need an excuse to sing at any time, but the words, and the strength of feeling behind them, resonated even more with Wednesday’s meeting in Atlanta on the horizon.
England and Argentina are familiar foes in one way but not in another. It’s 21 years since they last met, going back to November 2005, in a friendly (a curious word in this respect) that was played in Switzerland.
Aged 18, Lionel Messi was suspended, after being sent off on his international debut against Hungary three months earlier. England, in other words, will be new territory for a man whose international career spans 21 years and 205 matches.
Absence certainly doesn’t make the heart grow fonder with England and Argentina, even if the image of David Beckham and Diego Simeone posing for a photograph alongside one another in Miami a couple of weeks ago suggests that some of the bad blood has been forgotten.
Beckham, in case anyone needs a reminder, was sent off for kicking out at Simeone during an epic 1998 last-16 tie in France that Argentina won on penalties. Four years later, Beckham scored the winning goal against Argentina in a group game in Japan.
Naturally, minds will drift back further, to the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, to Diego Maradona and all that – the goal of the century and, notoriously, a moment of blatant cheating that went unpunished in a quarterfinal at the Azteca that Argentina won 2-1.
“I sometimes think I preferred the one with my hand,” Maradona wrote in his autobiography, referring to the ball he punched over the head of the England goalkeeper Peter Shilton to give Argentina the lead. “Why? It was a bit like stealing the wallet of the English.”
You get the picture by now.
That said, Argentina didn’t need a match against England at this World Cup to stir the senses and to get the adrenaline flowing. Emotion has already carried them a long way – well, that and a genius named Messi.
The world champions are a flawed team in many ways, playing with little semblance of control – Scaloni acknowledged how hard it was for them to string five or six passes together against Switzerland – easily exposed defensively, and relying on individual moments, rather than team cohesion, to navigate their way to the semifinals.
“The truth is luck was on our side today, that’s the reality, because they had a player sent off and that’s when the team pushed forward,” Scaloni said, referring to the second yellow card that the Switzerland striker Breel Embolo received in the 72nd minute of a game that had been slipping away from Argentina just before that decision.
In the previous round, Argentina was facing elimination with 11 minutes of normal time remaining until a Messi-inspired act of escapology against Egypt. As for the last 32, Cape Verde scored twice against Argentina on an evening when an own goal was required in extra time to triumph.
In that sense, the knockout stage has clearly been a struggle, and yet there’s also something to admire about the way that Argentina always manage to find a way to win and, more than anything, the visceral energy that connects a football team with a nation.
It’s there on the pitch, it’s there in the stands, and it’s there in the voice of 10-year-old Nacho, the boy who strayed beautifully off-script during an independence day speech in Argentina at his school a few days ago.
“Come on, Argentina. Long live the national team. Long live Messi, let’s go for the fourth one!” he shouted, after deciding that the audience had heard enough about freedom from Spanish rule.