Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

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Angels with Dirty Faces is a superbly written, shocking, sensuous, sometimes sadistic and even scandalous binding of biographies struggling with the question: What does redemption actually mean? This book offers a great deal of insight into the development of Argentinian domestic football, which was originally started off by English and Italians, as well as that of the national side. Ten years later there was a truce when Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa, two members of the squad who had just won the World Cup on home ground, arrived in London. From the pioneering Scotsman, Alexander Watson Hutton, who gets the ball rolling in this football-obsessed land through to the totemic ‘pibe’ figures of Diego and Leo, an enriching and educational read. The best parts are when he puts himself into the stories, when he details his time in Argentina, meeting and chatting with the legendary figures.

In Wilson’s words, Manchester United’s two meetings with Estudiantes “picked up where Racing’s clash with Celtic had left off”. p. 36: " oriundi": used especially in Spain to refer to a series of athletes, born in Latin America, whose ancestors were Spanish emigrants. Even the supply of talent seemed to have dried up: the youth team won the FIFA Under-20 World Cup five times between 1995 and 2007 but had failed to translate this into success at senior level, with six major finals lost between 2004 and 2016. I did notice Wilson’s tendency to over-describe the physical features of certain characters within the book.Unlike Inverting the Pyramid, which has a dialectical structure and an arc described right in its title, this history is relatively shapeless. He came to any new club as a hero and leave like a president who just got toppled by yet another military coup in the country. Coaches such as Osvaldo Zubeldia developed 'anti-futbol', eschewing La Nuestra and putting greater emphasis on physicality, pace and tactics as per the European model; his Estudiantes side was such a byword for violence and cynicism that after their success against Manchester United in the Intercontinental Cup the inimitable Brian Glanville despaired that the prevalence of such tactics would destroy football as a spectator sport.

p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice. Although dense, certain sections of the book are compelling, namely the more contemporary chapters; the fury of Argentina‘s World Cup victory on home soil in 1978, the enigma and addiction of El Diego, the journey of Marcelo Bielsa, and of course, the rise of Leo Messi and his seismic impact on modern football from the mid-2000s.This was perhaps an even greater achievement than the 1986 victory, given the huge pressure (Menotti chain smoked throughout the whole of every match, famously). 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. Within the context of post-imperialism from which this young country sprung, Peronism and the military juntas, we can put in context phenomena such as Maradona (especially Maradona) and to a lesser degree Messi – but also the cultural thinking about the game veering from European pragmatism, occasionally brutalism and the gaucho spirit which is deep in the soul of Argentine football. This is the kind of book you don't see too often, an attempt to use a broad canvas and to include detail far beyond team sheets and scorelines . While this might have seemed over-ambitious were he writing about any other country, Argentina has seen such an inter-mingling of football and politics that it would perhaps be impossible to fully tell the story of one without the other.

And perhaps that’s Argentina in a nutshell, a wonderful mix of chaos, highs and lows, perfectly reflected in its football.Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The referee Rudolf Kreitlin is escorted off the pitch by police at the end of a volatile World Cup quarter-final at Wembley after Argentina’s captain Antonio Rattín had been sent off in the defeat by England. Books which per force make reference to lots of different players can be heavy going, but here the emphasis on contrasts in style and philosophy get over that, especially the eternal debate - in various forms between -pragmatism and romanticism. Imarisha pushes us to give up easy distinctions between innocence and guilt, good and evil, and to experience punishment and imprisonment as the messy, complex systems they are. But this is what happened in Argentina, and Jonathan Wilson did one heck of a good job in illustrating the ups and downs of the national team in each era alongside the context of the country’s environment. The reality of violence in the US is so pervasive that the state has all the mirrors in the house covered up.

This is a huge, magisterial study of Argentinian football and the culture and violence that informs it . By 2012 it was only sixtieth, the result of recurrent military rule, political dysfunction and economic crises; in 1978 as the country staged its first and only World Cup to date under the shadow cast by its ruling Junta the New Statesman magazine described its failure as a nation as the greatest political mystery of the 20th century. That famous confrontation between Antonio Rattín and Rudolf Kreitlein – which held up the match for several minutes, depriving one team of their charismatic leader while giving their opponents a helping hand towards a moment of destiny – was among the most prominent of several incidents that have shaped the footballing relationship between England and Argentina. Wilson describes the Argentine national character, which like many is built upon its own myths and legends and how this is manifested within the development of the national game. His eagerness to gain the full context of the eras of the Argentinian game is also shown with regular digressions into the history of the country’s politics, economy and culture.Desde aquellos aficionados del Rosario Central que recrean el gol de palomita de Poy cada año hasta los excesos de Diego Armando Maradona y la tensión entre el pragmatismo de Bilardo con la estética de Menotti, que a su vez se contrapone con la corrupta dictadura de Videla, Wilson demuestra la riqueza temática que conlleva hablar de fútbol.