SPECIAL TRIBUTE
Tim Vickery reflects on the life and career of Cesar Luis Menotti, Argentina’s first World Cup-winning coach
There is a Cesar Luis Menotti phrase so good that it should be emblazoned on every dressing room around the world. “To be a footballer,” he said, “is to be a privileged interpreter of the dreams of many people.”
It is a vintage example of Menotti, an icon of Argentine and global football, who died on May 5 at the age of 85. The phrase is a lyrically constructed defence of the values that Menotti saw in the sport, and which he constantly saw as coming under attack from nefarious forces. The lanky coach (he was “el flaco” – the thin man) brooded on the essence of the game while he puffed away on yet another cigarette. “Our football,” he once wrote, “belongs to the working class, and possesses the amplitude, nobility and generosity to allow everyone to enjoy it as a spectacle.” One of his former players with a similar taste for philosophising, Jorge Valdano, described Menotti as “Don Quixote de la cancha” (in Argentine Spanish “cancha” is the pitch). But there is a key difference. The hero of the Cervantes novel was a ridiculous figure in the grip of a romantic delusion. Menotti, in contrast, was entirely grounded and capable of pragmatism. He did not only conquer his Dulcinea – he also took her home, in the form of the trophy for winning the 1978 World Cup.
This is where Menotti is most important. If Lionel Messi is a world champion today, then he owes at least part of his title to Menotti, a fellow son of Rosario. After all, in order for Argentina to win the tournament for the third time, they had to win it for the first. And that looked a long way off when a young Cesar Luis Menotti took charge of the national team in 1974.
Two thumping defeats are crucial to the context. The first was in 1958. The previous decade had been the golden age of Argentine football. Had there been World Cups in the 1940s, they would have been the favourites. They were top dogs in South America and considered themselves a major power. But, after sitting out the tournaments of 1950 and 1954, they received a brutal shock on their return in Sweden. Football had moved on, and they were brushed aside 6-1 by Czechoslovakia.
It was a cruel blow, and Argentine football responded by turning away from its free-flowing tradition and taking refuge in ultra-defensive dark arts. Menotti despised all of this. He played through the 1960s as a languid striker, even spending a year in Brazil with Santos (he was one of the few Argentines to rate his ex-team-mate Pele as better than Maradona).
Going into the 1970s as a coach, he was keen to build a side that was the antithesis of the snarling cynicism that had become the norm. His Huracan side that won the championship in 1973 is one of those teams that stick in the coll
