Lessons from the Argentinians

Speaking as someone who has never played football and almost never watches it, here are 10,000 words explaining exactly where England went wrong against Argentina …

I’m kidding. I didn’t even watch the game. 

But I was interested in a Telegraph piece compiling alleged “dirty tricks” that Argentina “unleashed” against England. Argentina did not outplay England, the piece appears to suggest, but won a game “dominated by … attempts to get under the skin of Thomas Tuchel’s side”. 

This may or may not have been true. (Again, I didn’t watch the match.) But it seems like a shallow thing to dwell on. Obviously, people should play fair. The rules are the rules. But I think one’s opponents’ “dirty tricks” — whether or not they actually exist — are almost never a valid excuse for losing. 

One of the first rugby matches I remember watching was England against South Africa in 2002. The South Africans came into the match intent on wielding “dirty tricks” — brutally, often illegitimately targeting the smaller English players. They still lost in a crushing 53-3 defeat because the English were simply far better players. My point is that while cheating is bad, you should always try to be good enough that cheating is irrelevant.

I take a similar lesson from the Argentinian antics after the whistle. Several players started waving a banner that read “Las Malvinas Son Argentinas” — “The Falklands are Argentinian”. This was crass and opportunistic — and FIFA should absolutely penalise those players. 

Still, I regret reacting with a post that sneered that the Argentinians’ superior football couldn’t make up for how “bad” a previous generation of Argentinians had been at fighting a war. I regret it firstly because I think it was ignoble — not least as the most civilian-y of civilians — to implicitly insult the common Argentine soldier. It wasn’t deliberate — I was thinking of their leadership — but it did and that was wrong. The average Juan or Mateo displayed more courage than I’ve ever had to show.

Secondly, I regret it because this kind of taunt doesn’t have much weight in the 21st century. Sure, it’s not entirely wrong. I don’t think Argentina has a moral claim to the Falkland Islands — which have never been under consistent or effective Argentine or even Spanish sovereignty — but it also literally doesn’t belong to them.

That said, who is confident that this is going to continue? The British government has been desperately trying to give away overseas territories for no obvious practical or moral reason. The British Army and the Royal Navy have been neglected for decades. Granted, the Argentine Armed Forces is not in a good state either, with some commentators saying that the Argentine Navy is in a state of “total defenselessness”. (There’s a reason they are waving signs about the Falkland Islands rather than doing anything about them.) But it is hard to be fully optimistic that if hostilities broke out again, Britain would have the material means or the political will to prevail.

Of course, one hopes that there will not be hostilities. Argentines have no sustained history of settlement on the Falkland Islands. They — or their European ancestors — did not discover them. That they loom in the popular imagination so vividly that football triumph becomes an opportunity for sloganeering is absurd. We should all have better things to be talking about.

But the word “should” has little weight in world affairs. A moral claim has no fundamental practical importance if it isn’t backed up by the means of enforcing it. Plaintive British complaints about how FIFA should be punishing the Argentines conjures up the thought of future handwringing appeals to the UN. Again, I’m not saying that we should not be moral. This is not an argument for “might makes right”. But without power, righteousness can be of no practical relevance.

So, as much as I think the Argentine players behaved disgracefully, there is a slight hollowness to our complaints about them. They believe that history is on their side. If the British had the same optimism, I suspect the response would have evinced more amused contempt than scandalised offence. The English team has to be better if it is ever going to win the World Cup, and Britain has to be stronger if it is going to defend its interests.