After it emerged that match 102, a World Cup semi-final, would pair England with Argentina, the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war came up during Lionel Scaloni’s media briefing. “No, no, no,” the Argentina head coach said with firm dismissal. “This is purely a football contest. Let’s not search for anything beyond that. It’s a game against a top side, led by a coach I genuinely admire. But it’s a football match. End of story.”
Argentina midfielder Rodrigo De Paul echoed that sentiment: “We recognise this is a fixture that carries extra weight; it stirs recollections of what Diego pulled off. We chant about our Malvinas heroes, above all to keep their memory alive, yet we have to accept that this is a sporting contest and the Malvinas must be discussed separately. What took place was a tragedy and we will always honour those who fell, but our aim is simply to win this game and book a place in the final.”
“What Diego pulled off” points, of course, to those few minutes in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England when Diego Maradona stunned the planet, first by punching the ball into the net and then by gliding past a string of opponents to produce what was instantly christened the goal of the century. A single man, inside a single event bracketed by two goals, laid bare everything football can be. The virtuous and the wicked, the hideous and the sublime, squeezed into a handful of moments that left a lasting imprint on everyone watching. A before-and-after marker in World Cup history.
After the final whistle Maradona quipped that he had not used his hand, suggesting perhaps it was “the hand of God”, and later still said it “felt good. Like picking the pocket of an Englishman.” The idea that this episode somehow paid tribute to those who died in the South Atlantic conflict four years earlier allowed a notion of wartime payback to linger. Yet a lesser-known remark arrived in 2014 when, during a World Cup assignment for Venezuelan television, Maradona described the war as senseless, orchestrated “by two murderous governments”.
At the 1986 tournament in Mexico a prearranged clash between Argentine barra bravas and English hooligans occurred. One of the barra bravas involved had also been a Malvinas veteran. I met him years later at a Boca Juniors v River Plate derby in Buenos Aires and asked if belonging to a firm bore any resemblance to military life. “Nobody loathes war more than a soldier,” he said, pointing towards the stands. “What you see here revolves around love, beauty and joy. This has absolutely nothing to do with hatred.”
Michael Owen sweeps home his breathtaking individual goal as England fall to Argentina at the 1998 World Cup. Photograph: Ted Blackbrow/Daily Mail/Shutterstock
The great Argentine novelist and sports journalist Juan Sasturain once remarked: “We have a huge debt to the English. They handed us Borges’s literature, and they handed us football.” Jorge Luis Borges’s writing was, naturally, soaked in his Anglophile erudition. He died barely a week before the 1986 quarter-final and, as the 40th anniversary of both his death and that match came and went, many attempted to fuse the two, as though Borges’s genius had somehow transformed into Maradona’s – one great artist steering another towards glory.
Borges famously branded the Falklands conflict “a fight between two bald men over a comb,” and while he had little affection for football, some have managed to discern a spectral significance in the fact that the deciding goal in Argentina’s round-of-32 fixture against Cape Verde was an own goal scored by a player called Diney Borges.
Encounters between the two nations carry an enduring impact that shapes the way football is played, absorbed and imagined. There are contrasts, but also plenty of common ground. “It’s the fixture where the Mexican wave doesn’t stand a chance,” Jorge Valdano, the former Argentina forward, said in 1998, when the sides met again on the World Cup stage. The game simply counts too much for both sets of supporters. That night in Saint-Étienne, an overheated media buildup anticipating gang clashes brought out a heavier police presence, but beyond a dim town square where voices rose inside a security cordon, nothing ugly unfolded. Atlanta has now also ramped up security to deter any potential violent incidents.
Lionel Scaloni (second from right) alongside his coaching staff (left to right) Roberto Ayala, Walter Samuel and Pablo Aimar. Photograph: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images
The fixture is drenched in footballing history. On the pitch in 1998 Michael Owen’s scything solo dash and finish left everyone breathless. Yet David Beckham’s red card for biting at a deliberate provocation from Diego Simeone grabbed the headlines. In 2002 Beckham obtained a measure of redemption for the calamity that had engulfed him four years earlier. Sven-Göran Eriksson had a psychologist on the staff who reportedly advised the players not to lock eyes with the Argentinians, so as Simeone approached him with a taunting handshake while he prepared to take a penalty, Beckham simply averted his gaze and slotted the ball home. It marked Argentina’s swiftest World Cup departure in decades, as they failed to advance from the group stage.
The most recent meeting between the two nations was a 2005 friendly in Geneva, which England won. Walter Samuel and Roberto Ayala were Argentina’s centre-backs that evening, but Diego Borinsky, Scaloni’s authorised biographer, recounts that it was during that game coach José Pékerman realised Javier Zanetti at right-back would eventually need to make way for Scaloni. Today, Scaloni leads a coaching unit that includes Samuel and Ayala as well as Pablo Aimar, with a strong emphasis on affability, close human ties and joy.
Looking ahead to 2026, the passion, resolve and resilience of both squads shines through, as does the emotional intensity that binds the players to their fans and to one another.
In the aftermath of their quarter-final triumphs, both Scaloni and Thomas Tuchel said pitch side that their teams had been fortunate and still had plenty of technical shortcomings to address, yet carried a mentality they could bottle and sell, to borrow Tuchel’s phrase.
War, mischief and venom are stitched into the shared narrative of these nations, but the lasting inheritance equally embraces friendship, poetry, rock and pop. Bring on match 102.
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