Years ago, at a pub meetup of journalists working for Index on Censorship, I was introduced to a very nice journalist from Argentina, like me she was in her late twenties. for all else that we’d all been talking about, within minutes it was ‘Handball!’ and ‘The Malvinas!’ It was ridiculous, we were both children when the 1982 Falklands War happened, and still too young to even drive or vote when in 1986 Argentina beat England in the World Cup in part through Maradona’s infamous ‘hand of God’ goal.
Yet years down the road, there we are, fuming away with a fervour like frontpages from The Sun. I thought at the time it was both silly and odd that we’d found ourselves so triggered.
Then at the end of the most recent England-Argentina football clash, England losing 1-2 to Argentina’s very late (but for this World Cup, not unprecedented) brace of goals, upon victory, the Argentine players presented a handpainted cloth sign saying ‘Les Malvinas son Argentinas’, or ‘The Malvinas are Argentinian’.
But they’re not, as recognised under international law and whatever treaty you want to throw at it, and upheld by bloody military force and loss of young lives in 1982 – 44 years ago – they’re British.
Is this healthy?
They may be disciplined by FIFA for this, but whatever, is this healthy? I know that like many sports, and maybe for football this is the case over and above all other sports, football is seen by some as a healthier concentration and outlet for tribal and nationalist tendencies – if we can battle out this rivalry on the football field, we may avoid an actual battlefield (indeed, the temporary Christmas Day truce of World War One was most marked, so poignantly, by games of football).
So all the more jarring to see the inverse of that, to use football to reboot nationalist claims that last manifest in the loss of hundreds of young lives in a horrible war thousands of miles away from the home countries of all involved, all those decades ago. Young men mostly of an age to be playing on the football field, for the Argentine conscripts some may have been hauled off such fields, and not on the battlefield. Young men who’d by now be mostly retiring from work, and playing with their grandchildren.
‘We beat you again at football, ha ha, this scores yet another one back’ for that dictator-inspired conflict in which hundreds of young Argentinians and Brits, the former comprising many hapless conscripts dragooned into war by Galtieri, the latter British forces comprising soldiers from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Commonwealth, and not just England, were killed and injured. Per Scottish fans who in every other context I totally get they may support any team that beats England, what think they of this?
Does making such a statement at that point somehow ease the balm of Argentina losing the Falklands War? Is this healthy? It’s in the realm of ‘two world wars and one World Cup’ as some England fans love to chant at Germans, to which they reply, ‘one prolonged post-war period of prosperity and four world cups’, but is as equally as specious a conflation of things to celebrate and beat your rival with. Was this to provoke a riot at the stadium between rival fans, surely for a country like the US now overrun by ICE agents looking for any excuse to nail foreigners? Was this to capitalise on the victory to galvanise support for renewed efforts by Argentina to take the Falklands by whatever mean? Is such a statement at such a time and place sanctioned by both society and the state, a state that in 1982 was under the dictatorship of Galtieri and which was brought down by the loss of the conflict, and has been a democracy ever since, just one fronted by Donald Trump’s equally weird-haired ally, Milei? It’s so sad.
As a postscript to the World Cup, Spain slimly but very worthily beating Argentina in the final, the latter having played a dirty game and their players underscoring that by assaulting Spanish players afterwards, sore losers … the England-France game really captured the spirit of how it should be. Nobody wants this third place thing, people lamented, and I’ve said of France, they might not even turn up, they either do frighteningly well or they don’t play at all, and for the first half of the game they seemed to on a bent to combine the two, turn up but do nothing, while England, off the leash, absolutely ran amock in a way we could really marvel at. Then at half time did some English dude rap on the French dressing room window and goad the French into actually playing? ‘You gonna let us thrash you like this?’ Which they turned out to do, and possibly the most entertaining and energetic game of the tournament unfolded to deliver a staggering 6-4 score and players from both sides, long-standing rivals on so many fronts, hugging one another at the end. Maybe the French consoled the English, ‘no World Cup for you, too bad, but you got Bronze! You beat us! And wasn’t this one Hell of a game?’, even as I write I can hear the piano epilogue of Clacton’s Layla. That’s real football.
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