Maradona yes, Galtieri no!

By : Osvaldo Soriano

“I have never understood why no Argentine newspaper had the idea of sending a reporter to cover the Argentina-England match from Puerto Argentino (Puerto Argentino, or Port Stanley for the English, is the capital of the Malvinas). They don’t allow “criollos” there, but that’s not a sufficient excuse: they could have chosen a correspondent of another nationality. Nowadays many Argentines have more passports than a CIA or K.G.B. agent”.

When Diego Maradona jumped in front of goalkeeper Shilton and flicked the ball with hand over his head, city councilor Louis Clifton felt his first faint in the Malvinas.

The second, longer one, came when Diego dribbled past half a dozen Englishmen and scored Argentina’s second goal. Outside, a freezing wind swept through the deserted streets of Port Stanley and British troops in barracks listened, disturbed, as the little devil from Napoli was ruining the party celebrating the fourth anniversary of the reconquest of what they call the Falklands.

On Saturday, Clifton had summoned the only journalist condemned to live in that place to announce that all the inhabitants of the archipelago wanted a British triumph “like in 1982”. That year, England had not only won the war but also the World Cup match, in Spain. This time it was different because Maradona was inspired in both hands and feet and the Tunisian referee Ali Bennacoeur was one from the Third Worl who didn’t make much of a distinction between a lower and an upper limb of the human body.

So the city councilor Clifton suspected the conspiracy and tried to contact the Foreign Office in London while I, from my house in the Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires, tried to call him to explain that when we were children, goals scored after a series of dribbles counted double, and therefore Diego’s second goal was also worth the one he had scored with his fist.

But it is not easy to get in touch with the Malvinas from Buenos Aires. The switchboard operators were very surprised when I explained that I wanted to call Clifton, and they gave me a number to which, after half an hour of waiting, they told me that the only way was to speak by radio, through short waves. Since the Malvinas are an overseas territory, the service is the same as that which puts you in touch with a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.

It was more or less like this: if I was willing to wait, the radio would send out a more or less desperate and long signal until the sleeping chief of the Port Stanley service would pick it up, recover from his stupor and, if the snow was not too deep, run off to find Mister Louis Clifton, who had by this time fainted from fright.

All this was happening while Belgium and Spain were battling over who would face Argentina in the semi-final the following day. When the penalty shootout came, I gave up trying to speak to City Councilman Clifton for fear of provoking an international incident.

In the streets of Buenos Aires, hundreds of cars paraded, decked out with flags, demanding the restitution of the Malvinas lost by General Galtieri in 1982. In the trucks full of young men coming down from the suburbs, the name of Maradona was chanted, and the radios regained the chauvinistic tones that they had set aside after the capitulation of Puerto Argentino.

– We are among the four best in the world, – shouted José Maria Núñoz, the most famous of sports commentators, the same one who in 1979 harangued the crowd, who were celebrating the World Youth Championship, to repel the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visiting Buenos Aires.

Don Salvatore, my neighbor, had fallen from his chair at Maradona’s second goal and had not wanted anyone to pick him up until the game was over. Don Salvatore had not touched food since Italy’s elimination and the cats from the entire neighborhood gathered around him to eat what he left.

On Saturday, with the vertigo of France-Brazil, they had to take him away three times from the doorstep because the French of Boca could not tolerate him singing the “Marseillaise” with the words of the Peronist march. When Platini kicked the penalty into the stands, Don Salvatore spat on the television and shouted who the imbecile was who could compare such a dunce to the great Maradona.

The imbecile he was referring to was me, who had written an article for «il manifesto» in which I dared to question Diego’s genius. At sunset we were finally able to lift him up and convince him to drink some mate and eat some biscuits, because he was now so thin that he looked like a ghost. Don Salvatore had definitively chosen the Argentine team as his, and he was not interested in knowing whether our opponents tomorrow the Belgians or the Spanish would be.

He already felt like a world champion and the only thing he asked was that for the final we put a color television in front of him instead of the black and white shack that his sons-in-law had left him.

The only one in the neighborhood who stood by his prediction was Luis, the head of the Peronist Committee, who dusted off the photos of Maradona and Evita and planted the flag of the “Giustizialista” Party at the door.

For a month he had been repeating that the final would be between Argentina and France, and now everyone was starting to believe him, even though my wife, who is from Strasbourg, feared the neighborhood would be repudiated if Platini beat Maradona.

Luis, on Sunday, complained that Carlos Bilardo, while the players on the pitch were celebrating the second goal, had risen from the bench to order them to cool down the game and go on the defensive, when the English seemed resigned to the goleada. Don Salvatore, hallucinating with hunger, argued that the Duce should sign a decree ordering the return to the World Cup of Denmark and Brazil instead of Belgium and Germany.

The barber, who is a party pooper, ventured into a reflection that left us all uneasy: – It is almost certain that in the semi-finals there will be another surprise, – and asked:

– Which of these corpses, Germany or Belgium, will rise from the grave to ruin the lives of those who already feel they are in the final?

– We immediately silenced him with a volley of whistles and Don Salvatore, who continued to rave, asked why, having a player like Maradona, we had not yet managed to pay the debt to the International Monetary Fund.

Taken from Osvaldo Soriano’s book “Football Stories”
(Cuentos de fútbol).

Translated in English by: Pjerin Bj
New York 02-17-2025
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Sports Vision + Plus / Champions Hour in activity since 2013

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