The Roar
The Roar

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Argentina celebrate football as a way of life

2nd July, 2010
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2nd July, 2010
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It is four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and for the fourth time in a fortnight, the entire city of Salta is deserted. The footpaths either side of the long boulevards run away until they fuse together, with not one flicker of movement to distract the eye from their vanishing point.

Weak winter sunshine lights up vacant bitumen. The usually bustling streets are silent. No taxis pass, no horns are honked, no buses cough fumes into the air. Traffic lights blink at empty intersections.

The reason for this desolation is simple. On the distant shores of South Africa, Argentina’s national football team is playing.

Salta’s half-million inhabitants have not vanished, of course. It’s just that every single one of them is inside, occluded, somewhere with a television.

For the previous game against Greece, I counted nineteen people crammed into a locksmith’s. Walking these post-apocalyptic streets has an eerie thrill, but the bars down off the main plaza are where you really want to be. There the fans are packed ten-deep, and every touch, every tackle, every shiver of Lionel Messi’s quicksilver feet, draws murmurs and cries and the hiss of indrawn breath from the crowd.

The bond between each set of eyes and the screen is titanium.

Today the fans relax a little once they reach 3-0. So do the players, and Mexico promptly pulls a goal back. Resume the biting of lips in a reverential semi-silence until the final whistle is met with a mighty cheer.

Afterwards the tension is dispersed with an impromptu street party the likes of which buttoned-down Australia has never seen. People hang out of buildings, draping banners from the sills.

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Every car is honking its horn in rhythm, half a dozen shouting blue-and-white figures bursting out its open windows.

Within minutes literally thousands of people converge on the city centre in pulsing sea of sky-blue and white. Everyone is there: seedy-looking drunks, well-dressed women, a host of small children weaving between the forest of legs, tinier ones riding on shoulders.

They mash together into a kind of mobile mosh-pit that starts an undulating circuit of the plaza. Dozens of flags are hauled back and forth through the air. Trumpets and drums provide the rhythm they need as they jump and dance and sing. And I mean really dance, and really sing.

There is no hint of self-consciousness or reservation. They don’t know each other, but in this moment everyone belongs to the same tribe.

Australians like to think we’re big on sport. We love it, we fund it, and most of us don’t buy the paper for anything else. Initiatives like the Australian Institute of Sport have helped us punch far above our demographic weight, especially in the Olympics. But Australia is a lothario as far as sport is concerned.

We’ll follow anything with an Aussie in it.

We’ll cheer a win, swear at a loss, but we’re only ever superficially enamoured. We’ll forget it as soon as it’s done, and chase whatever attractive option pops up next. If Australia is a sporting Don Juan, then Argentina and football are a tragic romance, singularly obsessed to the point of heartbreak.

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Perhaps like so many doomed couples from mythology, the intensity of the obsession helps perpetuate its own sad end. No doubt it puts more pressure on Argentine footballers than more relaxed supporters place on their own.

Here nothing is bigger than football.

Even before the World Cup it dominated conversation. There was no shortage of talking points, what with Maradona’s controversial appointment as coach. Every twist of the team’s skin-of-the-teeth qualification campaign ignited fresh debate between those who regarded Maradona as a drug-addled liability, and those who still refer to the little number ten as Dios – God – and spell it ‘D10S’. Since the Cup started, there is quite simply nothing else to talk about. People don’t ask if you’re going to watch the game, they ask where you’re going to watch the game.

No player has more than one name. Key moments of the matches are spoken about without introduction, because of course you saw them. Nor is the enthusiasm dominated by Argentina’s famed machismo. Every woman I’ve spoken to is just as involved. Their opinions on the squad, on tactics, on results, are just as informed and fierce as the men’s.

So why the obsession?

One answer comes succinctly and unprompted from a chance conversation with Nicolas San Cristóbal, a homeless man who lives in Salta’s city square. “Porque nos falta la alegria en otras cosas, ponemos toda la alegria en futbol,” he says simply. (“Because we’re short of joy in other things, we put all our joy in football.”) It’s a credible explanation.

Life in Argentina is tough for everybody bar the few obscenely rich.

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One routinely hears the claim that Argentina has no middle class. Savings were wiped out in the financial crisis of2001, and many no longer trust the banks to help them. Finding money to put aside is tough as earnings barely outstrip expenditure. Credit starts at punishing rates of 30 to 40 percent. Inflation continues to push up sharply. “Even a few years ago,” says textile worker Federico Vargas, “a hundred pesos could last me a week. Now I spend that going once to the supermarket.”

Pancho Siciliano runs a trekking and tour agency, which by all appearances seems to be going well. He’s about to get married and has a block of land where he wants to build a house.

For him the lack of affordable credit is the crucial issue. “Here, for everything you have to pay cash. If you have a wedding, even a small one could be ten thousand pesos, cash. A trip to Australia [where some of his fiancée’s family live], that’s ten thousand US dollars, that’s maybe forty or fifty thousand pesos, cash.

To start building the house is at least four hundred thousand. Cash. If we move out there I need to buy my wife a car. This piece of shit,” he says, gesturing to a little plastic-shelled hatchback parked on the street, “seventy thousand. Cash. You could buy it on credit, but then you might as well buy a Rolls-Royce.”

In this context, San Cristóbal’s contention makes a whole lot of sense.

There really is an intensity to sport, a joy, an ability to lose yourself in the contest and forget about everything else. Losing oneself is an understatement for what happened in the plaza today, thousands of delirious fans hurling themselves into each other while singing the words to “Vamos Argentina.”

Given the potency of their joy, I’m afraid to see what might happen should they lose. San Cristóbal confirms that his country’s emotional approach to football goes both ways. “When we lost [at the last World Cup] I cried,” he says matter-of-factly. “A lot of people cried. They gather in the streets then as well, not to celebrate, but just to be around other people who are sad.”

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As yet, the fans of 2010 are yet to experience that side of the equation.

It is now nine pm, four hours after the game finished, and there are still a substantial number singing and chanting in the plaza.

Cars are still honking, many flying the flag. The boom of fireworks sporadically echoes off the base of the San Bernado mountain that looms over the city like a disapproving schoolmaster.

And walking home through the cold winter streets, from the odd pocket of parkland or the odd open window, you can still hear voices singing the same song: “Vamos, vamos Argentina, vamos, vamos a ganar. Que la barra quilombera, no te deja, no te deja alentar!”

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