Argentinos Juniors 1 Arsenal 1
No, obviously not THAT Arsenal. This is the Argentine Arsenal from the Buenos Aires suburb of Sarandi. They play in blue and red, are not managed by a Frenchman, have passionate support and have achieved very little since their foundation in 1957. There’s not even any evidence that their foundation was inspired by the London Arsenal.
But for the purposes of this article, I like to think that it was. And even if it wasn’t, there’s plenty of evidence of the British influence on the foundation and establishment of football in Argentina. So, how do they thank us for it? With the Hand of God! That’s how!
That evidence is first of all in the English words in the club names – Boca Juniors, River Plate, Newell’s Old Boys and my own personal favourite, Chaco For Ever, from the northern city of Resistencia and currently top of the regional third division.
Then across the river in Uruguay you’ve got Liverpool and in Bolivia another corker, The Strongest. Bolivia also boasts Blooming but I’m not sure whether that derives from ‘Blooming Marvellous’ or ‘Blooming Crap.’
The man credited with introducing the Argentines to football was a Glasgow-born schoolteacher, Alexander Watson Hutton, who arrived in 1882 and set up the Buenos Aires English High School. It was and still is part of a network of schools modelled on the British public school system with all the elitism, snobbery and croquet and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn that comes with it.
The school was represented by the Alumni Football Team and would play the likes of Rosario Cricket Club and the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded by Yorkshireman, Don Thomas Hogg in 1867.
Other clubs sprouted up like a rash of handballs in the French team, but it was still very much a ‘gentleman’s’ sport and awfully British.
Many years ago I worked on the English-language newspaper, The Buenos Aires Herald. Asked to call the estate of an Anglo-Argentine family to get the bridge results, or something, a woman answered the phone in the kind of posh English accent that only the Queen uses these days. She was probably one of the last members of a remote corner of the British Empire.
There is a British cemetery in Buenos Aires, tea-houses with frightfully English sounding names and a now semi-derelict department store downtown called Harrods, which bears no relation to the Knightsbridge original.
Southampton - taught us everything we know.
The other great thing the British brought the Argentines was the railways. A stroll around the Retiro station in Buenos Aires reveals buffers cast in Ipswich, steel girders produced in Liverpool and clocks made in London, which stopped about the time Argentinos Juniors last won a trophy.
There are still quaint railway stations in the Buenos Aires suburbs which look like they’ve been plucked straight out of the Suffolk countryside. And place names such as Coghlan, Hurlingham, City Bell and Open Door, which are pronounced in strong Spanish accents, making them unintelligible to English speakers.
There is still a strong British influence in agriculture here but what caused and still causes the most discomfort for what’s left of the Anglo-Argentine community was the 1982 invasion of the Falkland or Malvinas Islands. In the aftermath of Argentina’s eventual defeat some of the Johns and Georges started calling themselves Juan and Jorge. The English tower, a major Buenos Aires landmark donated by the British government, was renamed.
But the British influence on the foundation of football in Argentina remains. Its initial introduction by the toffs was consolidated by the British railway workers who played during their breaks in front of their bemused Argentine colleagues. The first reported game of football in Argentina was between two teams of railway workers, the White Caps and the Red Caps. I don’t know the result. I imagine the local workers, many of them Spanish and Italian immigrants, then realised: “Hey, we can do that! And probably better than this bunch of muppets.”
The truth is it took the Argentines a while to get the hang of football. With their own clubs now up and running, they invited some of England’s finest over to demonstrate how the game should be played. First off the steamboat in 1904 was Southampton who played five games in Argentina and one in Uruguay, winning them all by the kind of scores the club could only dream about now. And most were in front of crowds of more than 10,000. They beat Combinados de Argentinos 8-0 and Belgrano Athletic 6-1.
A year later Nottingham Forest came with their baggy shorts and slicked-back hair to again give the local chaps a footballing lesson. They beat Belgrano 7-0 and la Liga Argentina 9-1. It’s remarkable, with hindsight, that the Argentines didn’t ditch football at that point in favour of something like water-polo or badminton.
From the days before lung cancer...
Everton and Tottenham both arrived in 1909 and played each other in a couple of exhibition matches, before clocking up some more rugby scores against the best that Argentina and Uruguay had to offer.
But the real turning point came with the visit in 1912 of Swindon Town. A local journalist wrote: “Argentine fans will be able to applaud undoubtedly one of the best teams in the world.” Another said: “The arrival of the famous Swindon Town marks another era in the history of Association Football in the Argentine.”
The Robins won six and drew two in front of crowds of up to 20,000. But the local teams were no longer being embarrassed against “undoubtedly one of the best teams in the world” The stabilizers were off. Argentine football was flying.
English words and phrases such as ‘referee’, ‘corner’, ‘manager’,‘offside’ and ‘that was quite clearly handball you stupid bastard’ are still used in Argentine football. I made that last one up but you get the drift.
The ball was kicked back in the opposite direction after Argentina won the 1978 World Cup with the arrival at Tottenham of Ossie Ardiles and Ricardo Villa — pioneers of a trail followed by Alberto Tarantini, Julio Arca, Fabricio Coloccini, Javier Mascherano, Carlos Tevez and even Nestor Lorenzo, repaying Swindon Town for their early guidance.
Argentinos Juniors appear to have lost the art of winning, having drawn four and lost two of the last six. They took an early lead in this one when Gabriel Hauche was gifted the ball in the visitor’s penalty area. Arsenal then bungled a sackful of chances and the home side were lucky to go in at half-time with the lead. It was reversed in the second half with Argentinos playing the better football but fluffing one opportunity after another and then giving away a late goal.
It’s a case of Argentinos Juniors playing out the last four games of the season from a comfortable but none too inspiring spot in the middle of the table. The race for the title is now between unfashionable but unbeaten Banfield, who are two points clear of Newell’s Old Boys. Neither of the big boys, Boca or River, are in the running.