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An Argentine passion: chronicle of how a soccer team changed the mood of a town

2022-12-18T19:46:44.851Z


The triumph of the team led by Leo Messi over France closes a cycle of collective reconstruction in the South American country


John is 11 years old.

He has seen all the World Cup matches in Qatar together with his schoolmates.

Before the match against Mexico, where the Argentine team, defeated by Saudi Arabia, was playing for permanence, he wrapped himself in a light blue and white flag, took a plastic World Cup and prayed with his eyes closed before a small altar.

There was no Christ among the lighted candles: just a little stamp designed for the occasion in which a sunny-looking Maradona held the golden trophy with both hands.

What followed is now history: Argentina won that game and all those that followed it, in an upward curve that ended this Sunday with the final victory.

(

with a stumble that barely alters the final effect

) Juan will now replace the Maradona stamp with one of Messi.

The ritual journey of that 11-year-old boy has also been social.

The Argentines have been collectively rebuilding for four weeks, seamlessly embracing football.

He has a new pagan god, Lionel Messi, his soul saved on the new altars that, there is no doubt about it, will multiply on walls, bars, dark neighborhood streets, schools.

"This country is shit" is a recurring phrase in conversations among Argentines.

But what politicians have painstakingly demolished for years has been rebuilt by football in just a month: there is now a renewed faith in the future after the relentless cycles of defeat and self-flagellation.

It is commonplace in Argentina to compare itself with Australia.

At the beginning of the last century, the similarities between the two countries were remarkable: an almost identical per capita, the same climate, the same fertile fields, the same success waiting on the horizon.

Today, the income in dollars of Australians is six times that of Argentines.

Depending on who speaks, Argentina was screwed by corruption, Peronism, the oligarchs, the lazy, the poor, the rich, US imperialism, populism, communism or neoliberalism.

It is difficult to find common ground and the polarization is an abyss.

This last selection of Messi was an unexpected cement.

The success in Qatar,

the defeat on the last rung of the stairway to heaven matters little,

He has surrounded the Argentines around a low profile star, Messi, and a helmsman, Lionel Scaloni, who does not call for individual success but for collective work.

And the passion of the fan gave color to that work thought out step by step, like a rowdy troupe that did not want to get lost in detail.

And therein lies the value of what has happened.

Lost passion recovered, Argentina experienced weeks of creativity and extreme actions.

Like that of Luciano Franco, 21, a butcher, who admits that he got into debt for life to go see the World Cup final.

He is not rich and his mother, he says, knows that he will break his heart in the family business to pay back the money.

In the early hours of last Friday, when an Aerolíneas Argentinas charter flight loaded with fans who had charged their credit cards the equivalent of 46 minimum wages was taking off, the photo of an entire country paraded through the Ezeiza airport.

Next to Franco there were families that had allocated the value of an apartment to the purchase of tickets,

Meanwhile, in Liniers, some 20 kilometers from the airport, a 76-year-old woman who celebrated goals in a corner of low-rise houses became "la la la la grandmother";

the lyrics composed by a catechist, added to the music of a hit from the nineties, became an anthem in the stands of Qatar;

the squares of Buenos Aires were filled with giant screens to follow this summer World Cup, in a region condemned by a European agenda to watch the matches with temperatures below zero;

Politicians, for once, were convinced that it was better not to talk about the World Cup so as not to be branded a "muff".

“I choose to believe”, said the memes that circulated like the plague through millions of cell phones.

The search for “coincidences” of that last Cup was fashionable, the one in 1986 with Maradona and his “hand of god”, 36 years ago, with this one from Qatar.

The most repeated: today, like yesterday, we have the best in the world.

In a country where the number of psychologists per inhabitant is a world record, there was someone who even dared to explain on television that the death of ten had taken away from Messi the weight of "exceeding his father" in the firmament of idols.

Soccer even managed to lower social tension in a month that is like the prelude to hell in Argentina.

It all started in December 2001, with the banking “corralito” crisis and the fall of Fernando de la Rúa.

Five presidents followed one another between the eve of Christmas that year and January 1, when Peronism was at the forefront of the debacle.

Today Peronism is once again responsible for managing the crisis and it is not doing well at all.

Poverty affects almost four out of ten Argentines and inflation will be around 90% this year.

The most influential leader in the country, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was sentenced on December 6 to six years in prison for corruption.

She then announced that she was getting off any ballot in the 2023 elections and produced a political earthquake.

Peronism is now looking in the desert for a name that will save it from a debacle at the polls;

The opposition, fragmented between moderates and right-wing extremists, has lost the common enemy that held it together.

All this happened while Messi and his teammates were making history in Qatar and Argentine passion was boiling.

The advance of the Albiceleste kept the miseries of politics and politicians in the background.

And it neutralized the massive protests of the piquetero groups that at this time of the year are asking for extraordinary aid to compensate for the income devastated by the CPI explosion.

Next week will be Christmas and next week will be New Years.

The country will enter the torpor of the high season of the summer holidays in January, and with some luck the ball and Messi will avoid shocks.

But then, in February, or March at the latest, when reality once again turns into a pumpkin, the problems, like the dinosaur in that fantastic micro-story by Augusto Monterroso, will still be there.

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Source: elparis

All sports articles on 2022-12-18

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