Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

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To one side it represented a gleeful revenge for a hoard of slights going back way beyond the Falklands to the looting of Buenos Aires in 1806 by British warships under the command of Sir Home Popham. An entertaining and thorough - if at times bloated - history of Argentinian football, blighted at times by Wilson’s insufferable I’m-smarter-than-you radical-centrist political analysis that patronises the entire populace of the country he’s documenting. Within a month, however, Maradona would be raising his hand above Peter Shilton to score a goal that reopened all the old wounds.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.p. 58: "He played at a time when soccer was played for the glory of love, and was also part of the time when soccer was played for the love of glory. Everyone already knows the fact that Argentinians (weather we like it or not), have given us the greatest soccer players of all times with the likes of Maradona, Batistuta, Kempes, Pasarella, Gallego, Ortega, Riquelme, Crespo, Delgado, and of course d10s Messi the G. From the freeway, the city’s suburbs struck me as rigid, seemingly infinite juts of concrete, like a Georges Braque piece dressed in orange neon. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel that Wilson is less enthused by this material, much of which will be familiar to modern readers and some of which, such as the tactical influence of Marcelo Bielsa, the author has covered extensively elsewhere. Wilson has several excellent books which I guess sit on the shelves of those whose interest in the game expands beyond ranting about the latest poor result etc.

Later chapters occasionally tend to run into lists of opponents, results and goalscorers, and the stories provided by the domestic game inevitably lose some of their sheen as we enter a time when – as Wilson acknowledges – the Argentinian league features a much lower standard of play than the top European leagues due to any decent players leaving early in their careers. Behind The Iron Curtain and Inverting The Pyramid are two I’d recommend to any of you who enjoy looking at the game through a different type of lens and likewise much of the work produced via his own enterprise The Blizzard, known for an intellectual view of the national game.

The Dutch, for instance, were explicitly linked with drugs, homosexuality, and excess and Scots with alcohol.

Parallels are often drawn between the political direction of Argentina and the fate of its football teams: for instance, the coup d'état which overthrew Juan Perón in 1955 and subsequent spiral into chaos is shown to mirror the rapid shift in dominant footballing ideologies from the freewheeling positivity of ‘la nuestra’ to a culture of cynicism, defensiveness and violence in the sixties. As the title suggests, Argentinian football has often been characterised by the spirit of the ‘Pibe’, which is a picaresque attitude to life (exemplified by a certain player above all).

p. 271: "It's probably fair to say that, since the back-four spread from Brazil in the late fifties and early sixties, no South American has had such an influence on how the world played as Bielsa did in the first decade of the twenty-first century. What’s great is that, the physical books ends in 2016, this one goes all the way to to 2021 with material I’d never heard before. Actually the most interesting stuff to me are the parts where sport and politics intersect — for example, the way how the right wing military junta attempted to use the national team to advance political propaganda and distract citizens from people the people they were disappearing. It is in these final lines of the book that his authoritative and convincing argument concludes: ‘Football is another Argentinian dream that slipped away.

The story Wilson tells from that point onwards is broadly one of a conflict between those two tendencies within the Argentinian game.

The contretemps between Diego Simeone and David Beckham in Saint-Étienne in 1998 seemed just one more example of an eternal conflict between Argentinian wiles and English naivety. And for this one, it begins with Watson Hutton circa 1880, and continues on Motti then Maradona then Messi.