I only really got Diego Maradona’s attention when I told him about my visit to watch football in Buenos Aires and that, as an Englishman, it was not for the faint-hearted.
"You’ve been?” Maradona replied, intrigued. Oh yes. Four times and on each, at almost all the 15 stadiums visited, the song: “If you don’t dance you’re an Englishman” was sung loudly on the terraces.
“So what do you do, Englishman?” asked Maradona.
“I have a plan to pretend that I’m from Ireland. Dublin,” I replied.
He laughed, and I showed him photos on my phone which made him smile. Photos of San Lorenzo, where the structure of the terrace moves as fans bounce on it; from Boca Juniors, Banfield, Racing and River Plate.
I love Argentinians’ raucous and colourful support and the world-beating atmosphere inside their stadiums. Argentina’s fans are routinely the best at the World Cup and the cliches about fans selling their cars to attend became cliches because they’re true. I saw them in Brazil in 2014 and Russia four years later, easily the biggest number. For them, watching the national team on television wasn't enough; they had to be there.
England’s Premier League may rightly be considered as the top league in the world, but the football culture in Argentina is the best. They make the most original songs; they influence fan culture globally. It’s not even fair to compare the typical atmosphere at a Premier League game with an equivalent in Argentina. The latter is miles better.
On Wednesday, in one of the best stadiums in the world in Atlanta, Georgia, Argentina play England in the semi-finals of the 2006 World Cup. It’ll be only the sixth competitive game between the countries, with three England wins and two for Argentina. The most famous was a 1986 game decided by Maradona’s 'Hand of God' goal. None have been at such an advanced stage as the semi-finals.
It’s a huge game with so many questions. Can Lionel Messi, the greatest player of all time, lead his side to another World Cup win in his first competitive game against England? Can England reach only a second World Cup final and a first since 1966? How will Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, England’s own world-class talents, fare?
Far more than just a game of football, Argentines are still singing about the English in their tens of thousands at this World Cup. Last week, their players said that they would win the World Cup “for the Malvinas”, or what the English refer to as the Falkland Islands. Both countries went to war over this disputed South Atlantic territory in 1982, with the loss of 649 Argentine lives and 255 British. More than 2,300 more were injured.
The Falklands are rarely mentioned in Britain; in Argentina they’re part of the national psyche. There are stadiums and airports named after the Malvinas and the year before I met Maradona, in 2019, I’d been at the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium, home of Argentinos Juniors, Maradona’s first club, for a league game in the western suburbs of the sprawling Argentine capital.
Falklands’ veterans were greeted on the field at half-time to a roar as loud as the goals. Huge banners with Argentina’s flag superimposed on the islands were everywhere. The journalist in me wanted to go and speak to the veterans there and then. That would not have been wise. Men in their fifties, one in khaki combat pants, walked onto the pitch holding two Falklands Islands flags in the blue and white colours of Argentina. I’ve yet to meet an Argentine who doesn’t think the Falklands belong to them.
I’d love to write an article with the Argentinian veterans who were footballers as well as conscripts. Some survived the war and became top-flight footballers. Maradona had played with them, before and after he moved to Europe in 1982, the year of the war. The closest I’d come was talking to a taxi driver, a proud man who’d fought in the war and who cried as he said: "But those islands are ours."
In Manchester, my father’s friend had been a commando and attacked them at Mount Kent before the fall of the Falklands’ tiny capital, Stanley, not that he liked to speak about it. He’d seen too much, “and it’s still there somewhere deep in my mind”. Even then, he only said that to me on the day of my father’s funeral, maybe out of sympathy, since he knew of my interest. It simply wasn’t something he wanted to speak about.
In 2009, I visited the Falkland Islands. We travelled by ship from Ushuaia, Patagonia, first to Argentina’s Antarctic station where four Argentine sailors boarded and I was asked to be an interpreter. The sailors live on the frozen continent for four months a year. They asked where I was from and the word "Manchester" led to the usual conversations about football, which they loved and missed, being in a place where there was none.
I explained how Manchester United fans sang: ‘‘Arg-ent-ina!’!’ to players from their country such as Carlos Tevez, Juan Sebastian Veron and Gabriel Heinze. Not everyone appreciated that. Indeed, only a month earlier the song could be heard at Derby County vs Manchester United and Derby fans had responded by singing: “You should have died in The Falklands.”
The Falklands were my next stop and after three days at sea we arrived at Stanley, populated by a mere 2,000 souls. My memories of the Falklands go back to childhood, the 1982 conflict and the television pictures showing the British Task Force setting off for the South Atlantic. I was nine, so my dad formed my opinions. One night I asked him if we would win the war.
“Yes, because the Gurkhas and the Paras are there,” he replied. “The Gurkhas will fight with their bare hands if they need to.”
Then I visited Stanley and saw the names that made the news in 1982: Goose Green, Wireless Ridge, Two Sisters, Mount Tumbledown. Bleak, windswept hills where hundreds died in fierce battles between dug-in Argentinians and the attacking British – including those Paras and the Gurkhas. The war memorials, with names like ‘H Jones’, who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, were prominent. He died leading his men on an attack on a machine gunners’ nest.
At Stanley’s museum, which has an extensive section on the war, what struck me most was a handwritten note from a young Argentine soldier, which was given to one of the 500 islanders who stayed in Stanley while the Argentine forces were there for 74 days until surrendering to the British.
Many of the Argentinian soldiers were young and poorly trained. “We are sorry,” it started in handwritten English. “But we are hungry. Can we have some food?” It went on to explain that they would get in trouble with their superiors if they were seen talking to the islanders, but if they could possibly pass by and collect food later it would be much appreciated.
In later years, I dated an Argentinian girl who came from a military family.
“You know,” she said to me after a few weeks, “I feared the British when I was a child. We lived near a military base and we thought the British planes were going to bomb it. We had to practice climbing into the shelters when we heard the air raid siren at school. Friends of my parents lost their son. He was 19. Our leader was a military dictator who should not have started a war, but the Malvinas are ours.”
It’s still a sensitive subject in Argentina, while the Falkland Islanders are resolutely British. I’ve read multiple books on the conflict and visited the Argentina war memorial in Buenos Aires, which lists the names of nearly 700 dead. It’s a sobering, saddening experience. Ironically, the memorial stands opposite a clock given as a gift from the British government in earlier, happier years. And a train station engineered in Liverpool.
In Stanley, I got to speak to Don Bonner, who had been a driver to the island’s governor when the Argentine troops invaded. As we spoke to the 82-year-old, who died in 2014, two Tornados did a low-level fly past before shooting almost vertically upwards. You could feel the tremendous noise they made in your bones.
“That’s to remind any visiting Argies that we’re not asleep,” Don said. “Some of them come by ship and refuse to present their passports because they claim they are still in Argentina.”
Some of Argentina’s finest footballers are in England. While there’s a community spirit inside their stadiums, match tickets are cheap, everyone jumps around and has a party, their best players leave to seek their fortunes abroad. They go to Mexico or England, where they are deeply respected figures for their talents.
During a 2018 visit, I spent 12 days there in December and was asked about the Falklands all the time. After playing football with 12 very friendly lads (two wore Manchester City shirts because they were Independiente fans and loved Sergio Aguero, two regulars stayed away because two of us were British), they got straight to the point after buying us drinks and inviting us back to their house: "The Falklands are Argentinian, right?"
Or when we met some Ultras from Rosario Central the day before their derby against Newell’s Old Boys in the city which gave the world Messi and Che Guevara and a woman looked me in the eye and stated: "The Falklands are ours and I’ve never met a chivalrous Englishman."
Or at Talleres, a huge club in the second city of Cordoba, when a fan explained the story of an Argentine pilot later coming face to face with the English gunner who’d shot him out of the sky. They became friends, though they had differences of opinion.
In southern Buenos Aires lies the beautiful Constitution rail station. The British introduced trains (and polo and football) to Argentina. Constitution is a historic national monument designed by English architects on the site of the British-owned Buenos Aires Southern Railway. The foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales, during his official visit to Argentina in 1925. Government relations were often strong rather than strained as they are now.
In 2018, I found myself there, a tough part of Buenos Aires, ready to take a train to meet former footballer Juan Sebastian Veron in La Plata.
The trains were cancelled, with bus replacements and uncomfortable waits in the summer heat. A drug-addled woman asked me where I was from, then amplified my answer. I felt a dozen hostile stares.
“Is that witch Thatcher dead yet?” she asked of the prime minister in charge during the Falklands War.
My observation that Margaret Thatcher was probably more unpopular in Manchester than any Argentinian city was met with approval from the other passengers, one of whom asked if I supported United or City. Football is never far away in England or Argentina. It’ll be back to the fore in Atlanta on Wednesday.
