Атлантад болох Англи-Аргентины тулаан: Түүхэн өрсөлдөөн ба “муу залуус”

The World Cup semi-final between England and Argentina in Atlanta will be the sixth time the two nations have met at the competition.

The first was in 1962, a relatively routine 3-1 group-stage England win. But the others have each been marked by some kind of controversy caused by the supposedly nefarious actions of an Argentina player.

This is why, from an English perspective, it is a rivalry that, for the most part, has been defined by individuals.

In their 1966 World Cup quarter-final, it was Antonio Rattin, the Argentina captain who refused to leave the pitch after being sent off in a 1-0 win for tournament hosts England. This was painted in England as a cheating foreigner who refused to respect the authority of the referee, but the reality might have been a bit more nuanced.

Rattin had been told that if anything was lost in translation between him and the German referee Rudolf Kreitlein, he could ask for an interpreter, but when he was given his marching orders for slightly unclear/spurious reasons, no interpreter was forthcoming, hence his protest. Still, that did not stop England manager Alf Ramsey calling the Argentina players “animals” in a TV interview, and a spiteful on-pitch rivalry was born.

Two decades later, the villain was Diego Maradona following his ‘Hand of God’ goal, viewed in England as the lowest form of cheating (even after his sensational second goal in their 1986 World Cup quarter-final 2-1 victory). In Argentina, and by Maradona, it was celebrated for its cunning.

“I am not sorry for scoring with my hand,” he wrote in his book Touched By God, about that game at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. “Not sorry at all! With all due respect to the fans, the players, the management, I am not the least bit sorry.”

To emphasise the point, Maradona claimed he had sued an English newspaper for falsely suggesting that he had apologised: he did, after all, have a reputation to maintain back home.

In 1998, it was Diego Simeone, who supposedly needled David Beckham into the fairly weak kick that earned him a red card in the 47th minute of a World Cup last-16 epic, which Argentina won on penalties following a 2-2 draw.

“Let’s just say the referee fell into the trap,” Simeone said a year later, before facing Beckham again when his Inter side played Manchester United in the Champions League.

The pair reached a detente after that match, exchanging shirts (Beckham had Simeone’s jersey framed and hung in his snooker room).

But Simeone’s villain status in the wider English consciousness continued into the 2002 World Cup, when England and Argentina faced each other in the group stage. By that time, he was thoroughly sick of hearing about it, saying in a pre-match interview with the Guardian: “Can we speak about something else? I don’t like media games, and I really don’t want to be anybody’s monkey.”

For Argentina, the rivalry has never been so personalised, and the villain has rarely been an individual. One minor exception was England’s midfield hard man Nobby Stiles, who was singled out for opprobrium after his robust performance against Argentina in 1966, a reputation burnished when he was sent off during the 1968 Intercontinental Cup (a forerunner to the Club World Cup) final first leg in Buenos Aires between Manchester United and Estudiantes.

“Stiles had been goaded all game,” wrote Jonathan Wilson in Angels With Dirty Faces, his history of Argentinian football. “Suffering a cut eye from a headbutt, and with 11 minutes remaining, he finally snapped, flicking a V-sign at the linesman. Having already been booked for a foul on Carlos Bilardo, he was duly sent off.”

For Argentina, the ‘villain’ has been the concept of England, a national enemy rather than a personal one, an enmity which has taken a few different forms.

Maradona is synonymous with the England-Argentina rivalry (Louisa Buller/AFP via Getty Images)

One was the idea that England were part of an establishment who tried to screw them over in 1966. FIFA was, at the time, headed by the Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, and there were various complaints about Argentina’s training arrangements and the appointment of referees.

Another is the constant moaning from England about the individual Argentinian players mentioned above. But most significantly, it’s been about the Falkland Islands, and the war which was fought in 1982 when Argentina attempted to ‘reclaim’ the territory, which is around 300 miles from their coast but had been part of the United Kingdom since the 1800s.

So while the Argentinian players still sing songs about the Falklands (or Las Islas Malvinas, as they call them) and focus their attention on the wider idea of England, history suggests the English will still look for a pantomime villain at whom to direct their ire.

There are a few candidates in this Argentina side. Often in these cases the focus is on the opposition’s best player, but aliens cannot be cartoon baddies, so that rules out Lionel Messi. But there are plenty of other possibilities.

There’s Manchester United’s Lisandro Martinez, on the basis that anyone nicknamed ‘The Butcher’ is likely to ruffle a few feathers. Enzo Fernandez is not the most popular player in England — among Chelsea fans because he constantly seems to have one foot out the door, among non-Chelsea fans because he plays for Chelsea — and could take on the role.

Cristian Romero is a live candidate too. He’s an agent of chaos, the football equivalent of those balloons that fly in every direction when you let go of them. Only in his case, the balloon is stuffed with firecrackers.

Since making his Spurs debut in August 2021, Romero has been sent off six times in all competitions — more than any other Premier League player during that time (Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)

The Tottenham Hotspur centre-back is just as likely to score the winning goal as he is to cut Jude Bellingham in half with a ludicrous foul. At the moment, anyone who so much as harms a hair on Bellingham’s head will face the anger of a nation, and while Romero has been relatively quiet on that front during this tournament, there’s always a sense that his next outburst is just around the corner.

But let’s be honest: if we’re looking for a pantomime villain in the Argentina team, someone who could join the ranks of Rattin and Maradona and Simeone as players who have wronged the English in some way, there’s only one name.

Emiliano Martinez has made being a performative rotter his unique selling point. He’s part goalkeeper, part alpha dog, part troll, using whatever means he can to throw you off your game.

Martinez was an Argentina hero in the 2022 World Cup final penalty shootout against France (David Ramos/Getty Images)

The Aston Villa No 1 can be a menace to opponents at any stage of a match, a wind-up merchant extraordinaire, but he really comes into his own during penalty shootouts. His approach to these situations is to impose himself on them before a ball has been kicked, whether that’s through insults, crude psychological warfare, trying to convince the taker he knows where they are going, making a funny face — whatever works, whatever helps him gain mental control of the situation.

And it often does work, most famously four years ago at the World Cup in Qatar, when he psyched out France in the final.

For the most part, neutrals enjoy the brazenness of Martinez’s antics or are slightly irritated by them. He’s almost too cartoonish to properly dislike, a man whose intentions and tactics are so naked that hating him almost seems pointless.

But let’s say the game on Wednesday goes to penalties, he pulls his usual stunts — insulting Harry Kane, throwing the ball away from Bellingham, pulling Bukayo Saka’s shorts down — and Argentina win. He will become even more of a hero than he is in his homeland, and public enemy No 1 where he works, in England. There’s been a sense for some time that Martinez has an eye on the exit door at Villa: if he becomes a figure of hate by doing something… well… ‘Martinez-y’, he’ll be charging towards that door headfirst.

Perhaps this game, whatever the result, will come and go relatively peacefully, with no incidents to speak of and no new Argentinian ‘villains’ in the collective English consciousness.

But history tells us there’s a good chance the opposite will be true.