The redemption of Saint Palermo and Argentina

 

Roar Guru

By Geoff Lemon, 28 Jun 2010 The Crowd is a Roar Guru

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 2010 World Cup, Argentina, Carlos Tevez, diego maradona, football, Lionel Messi, Martín Palermo, World Cup

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You get the feeling that Diego Maradona’s coaching decisions are based far more on emotion than tactics. As Argentina’s greatest ever player, he ran purely on instinct. As coach he goes the same way.

He wants to see attacking. He wants to see goals. He’d spit on a six-man backline. When asked whether his players look for Messi too often, Maradona says ardently “Messi should have the ball. To take the ball away from Messi means that football isn’t beautiful anymore. To take the ball away from Messi, it’s like…” He pauses for a moment, regarding the half-eaten apple in his hand. “It’s like taking my apple away from me when I’m hungry.”

But never is Maradona’s hunch philosophy more apparent than in the 80th minute of the final group game against Greece, when the 36-year-old Martín Palermo is subbed onto the field. The hubbub at the ground goes up ten notches. In the Buenos Aires bar where I’m watching. This, you can tell from the reaction, is something special, another chapter in an extraordinary story.

In 1999, after several prolific years for Boca Juniors, Palermo made the national team only to miss three penalties in a Copa America match they lost 3-0. Those in power said he would never play for Argentina again. During a stint in Spain in 2002, he climbed into the fans to celebrate a goal, then broke both bones in his left leg when the concrete barrier collapsed on top of him. It seemed his career was over. But he returned to Boca and battled other injuries to finally make a comeback with the winning goal against arch-rivals River Plate.

There is, my friend Pancho slurs drunkenly, just something about Palermo. For all his ups and downs, he’s a lucky player, he brings luck with him. He’s awkward and gangly and doesn’t look dangerous, but he has an extraordinary knack for being in the right place at the right time. He’s a master of the last-minute score, and an incredible fluke-merchant. He scores goals that bounce off his back, his leg, the back of his head when he’s looking the other way. He has a swag of mid-pitch strikes to his name, including an extraordinary 40-yard header from a kick-in. He’s…Palermo.

But no matter his exploits, he remained the Unforgiven in national terms. Until after a decade of exile, that is, when a slight maverick by the name Diego Armando Maradona was put in charge. When Palermo was first called back for the tail-end of 2009’s World Cup qualifiers, people said Maradona was mad. Palermo was past it. Too old. Never good enough to begin with. A proven failure. But he was still the lucky player of Pancho’s imagination, and as Argentina faced the very real possibility of failing to qualify for a World Cup for the first time, locked at 1-1 with a resurgent Peru, it was Palermo who somehow found himself in the right spot in a mess of players and mud and rain.

It was Palermo who scrambled home a scruffy goal-mouth winner in the 93rd minute of the final qualifying game, and Palermo who stood at the corner flag, shirt off, arms spread wide, face upturned to the teeming rain in his own personal Shawshank Redemption.

And so here we are, with Palermo about to make his World Cup debut. However left-field the choice, the simple fact is that Maradona loves Palermo. And that’s all there is to it. No fitness trials, no computer modelling, no strategy planning. Maradona wants him to play, and so he plays.

Still and all. With a strikeforce comprising Messi, Tevez, Milito, Higuain, and Aguero, you get the feeling that this is a gesture by Maradona, a final few minutes of top level football for an old favourite now that Argentina’s passage through is assured. Palermo is a kind of Argentine Harry Kewell, a veteran and fine purveyor of his art whose service and skill deserve a send-off. But the Palermo story couldn’t be any more different to Kewell’s desperately unlucky return (and farewell) to World Cup football.

After a few confident passes through midfield, and a couple of good runs forward, he floats wide right as Messi’s blazing shot is parried away from goal, and is there to calmly sidefoot past the Greek keeper into the corner of the netting. Cue delirium from the fans. Cue delirium from his teammates. Cue the greatest look of childlike joy ever seen on the face of a footballer. As Maradona says after the game, “The film of Palermo has no ending.”

This is what makes this team stand out from the dullard professional automatons of Europe. Argentina runs on emotion. Maradona runs on emotion. Thing is, it works for him. Veron has been rolling back the years controlling midfield. Palermo has turned screenwriter yet again.

Messi has been given trust and free rein, and has so far turned in one of the most dominant singlehanded tournament displays in memory, with a hand (though not of God) in every Argentine goal so far. When Maradona has faith in his players, based on nothing but affection and instinct, they respond to it. Such is the power and charisma of the man, flawed genius though he so clearly is. After the game Palermo comes on screen, and the crowd lights up again like his beaming smile.

They are not so much celebrating the goal as celebrating the man, the story, the sense of completion.

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