The Ultimate Kick

By John Skow

Argentina and Holland clash for soccer's World Cup

It was the largest, if not indisputably the greatest, sporting event in the world. Two years ago 104 national teams, with the best talent each home country could assemble and train, be gan to play elimination rounds all over the globe. This month the 14 survivors and the West German team, the defending champions, moved to Argentina to join the host country in an exhausting series of round-robin matches for the World Cup, which is held every four years to decide who rules soccer. The play was only fit fully brilliant, and it produced no wonder team, no commanding individual star of the magnitude of Holland's Johan Cruyff and Germany's Franz Beckenbauer in 1974. But when all but two of the national teams had limped off to apply diathermy and beer to their wounds, anyone not given to xenophobic sulking could agree that justice had been done. The teams that had been eliminated, for the most part, had not deserved to win, and the two sides that faced each other in Sunday's final deserved every cheer they heard.

One finalist, much to its own surprise, was Holland, an erratic but courageous crew much faded from its splendor of 1974, when the Dutch lit up the World Cup before losing valorously, 2-1, to the Germans in the final at Munich. The other was, and had to be, the wonderfully likable Argentine team, absent-minded on defense (as the Dutch themselves were), rough and rowdy at both ends of the field and a raging if sometimes patternless force on offense.

Each finalist faced its own certain victory (no other prospect being thinkable) in its own way. Holland, where the Argentine military regime is much despised for its violations of human rights, declined to send any officials to watch the final, though the Dutch ambassador, who had been criticized severely in his parliament for speaking up mildly for the Argentines, was to be a spectator. The Argentines, a wounded nation recovering from an undeclared civil war of hideous brutality between extreme left and extreme right, needed a celebration, and had turned the World Cup into one with a joyousness that went far beyond even the fanatical emotional overload customarily expected of soccer.

An unofficial holiday declared itself after the Argentines qualified for the final, and in fact horn honking, paper throwing and impromptu parades through the streets had gone on more or less constantly for most of the month. The ecstasy had reached heights of unexpected loftiness --soccer is a workingman's game, not an intellectual's austere passion. At the beginning of the World Cup uproar, the revered and renowned Argentine Author Jorge Luis Borges, 78, had announced irritably that he was going to leave Buenos Aires until the nonsense was finished. He stayed, and toward the end was telling friends that it would be terrible, utterly unacceptable, if Argentina did not win.

The regime and the people invested an enormous amount of pride in the preparations for the huge and complicated tournament (games were played at two sites in Buenos Aires and in four provincial cities). Somewhat to the surprise of some European journalists, who came expecting blood in the streets and confusion and incompetence in the arrangements, the great soccer carnival was run with efficiency, and the prevailing mood was one of warm hospitality. A foreigner walking through the swarming center of Buenos Aires was in danger of being danced with, and no visitor could escape being asked by young schoolgirls or dignified businessmen to predict Argentina's victory in the final.

Because of the complexities of the round-robin play, the Dutch needed a tie with Italy to get a chance at the title. Italy needed a win to go on to the final. The game mucked about inconclusively until, after 18 minutes, a tall and gawky defender named Erny Brandts tried to thwart an attack by lashing savagely at the ball in front of his own goal. He knocked it into the netting and in the bargain crippled his teammate, Goalie Pieter Schrijvers, who was carried off on a stretcher. The score was now Italy: one goal up, and Holland: one goalie down. That might have decided things; Italy is the kind of team that can hang on to a one-goal advantage till the next ice age. But in the second half Holland moved its star, Johan Neeskens, up from his defensive positions and threw everything into the attack. The deadly Brandts, a one-man soccer game, struck again, this time in the right direction. The score was 1-1 and the Dutch added another booming goal before the end.

Forty-five minutes later, the sturdy Argentines, famed for their aggression on the field as well as their fearsome behavior in the stands, took the field against Peru, a team of elderly stylists. The peculiar system of the rankings dictated that Argentina needed to win by four goals to advance to the final. Otherwise a disappointing Brazilian team would have faced the Dutch. The Argentines won 6-0, a result hard to obtain in soccer even if both teams are kicking in the same direction.

When it was all over, the people wearing ranch mink coats and silk suits got up from reserved seats and left the stadium. But the fans wearing sneakers and jeans and old ski jackets stayed in their standing-room sheep pens and refused to move. For the better part of an hour after the game, they remained where they were, bouncing rhythmically up and down, throwing whatever bits of paper they had forgotten to throw earlier, waving thousands of blue-and-white national flags and roaring, "Argentina! Ar-gen-ti-na!" To mark the occasion, antigovernment terrorists known as the Montoneros strewed pamphlets about Buenos Aires, praising the team but deploring the nation's rulers, and bombed the house of the Treasury Secretary.

The next day interest began to build in the final as a soccer game, and not simply as the termination of a huge fiesta. Tickets had been sold out for weeks, naturally, and scalpers were selling seats for $300 or more. Movie theaters where closed-circuit color broadcasts would be offered were mobbed. What the world could expect to see--and had seen far too little of in this World Cup--was the collision of two rough, occasionally brilliant young teams that had played hesitant soccer in the early rounds but at the end had committed themselves to attack.

The outburst of rambunctious, aggressive soccer by the Dutch and the Argentines on the World Cup's 21st day, the last of the eliminations, came just in time to save the tournament from putting a quarter of the world's population into a state of narcolepsy. FIFA, the august and powerful Federation Internationale de Football Association, has almost as many member countries as the United Nations (146 to 149) and probably more active communicants than any religion. Its officials claim that well over a billion people watched, in person or on TV, some part of the month-long World Cup, the eleventh such international competition (the first was held in Uruguay in 1930; 13 nations participated, and Uruguay won). Leaving aside the Chinese (who did not ante up for the TV rights), suckling infants and most women--soccer is almost exclusively a male delirium--this means that virtually every man and boy in Europe and South America, and very large numbers of them in North America, Africa and Asia, and in all the ships at sea, caught some part of the action. In the U.S., where soccer is a late-bloomer passing rapidly from robust infancy to sprouting adolescence, more than 1 million watched on closed-circuit TV.

The intense interest in the series did not mean, however, that the heavens FIFA commands were without clouds. Much of the time the soccer was crabbed, cautious and defensive until Erny Brandts did his walkabout and the Argentines went wild. A meeting of the College of Cardinals produces far more pugnacity than was seen in the early-round matches.

The nature of the round-robin tournament often made it sensible for a team to play for a tie against any opponent that seemed dangerous, and to play for a win --thus committing defensive forces and risking a loss--only against the worst teams. In the typical game, each team fortified its own goal so thoroughly that only thinly manned patrols could be sent forward, and their efforts seemed more reconnaissance than aggression. If the opposing defense dozed off in a body, a goal might be scored, since the individual attackers were superbly skilled, but the likely game result was a strategic draw of 0-0.

Dreary possibilities lurked everywhere in World Cup statistics before the two finalists emerged. One was that Brazil's team, a cinder of its old self, could reach the final by playing its third scoreless tie in six games, and by scoring only five goals and winning only two games in the entire tournament. During the enchanted years of the great Pele, Brazil won the World Cup three times--1958, 1962 and 1970--but the marvelous flair for which it was legendary has been dampened by age and a disciplinarian coach, Claudio Coutinho, who admires the rough and rigidly patterned European style of soccer. The samba drums lugged to Argentina by Brazilian true believers never really caught the rhythm, and Pele himself, at 37 too old to play championship soccer, and too recently the best player in the world to resign himself to his job as a TV commentator, said miserably during the qualifying round that "Brazil, my beloved Brazil, has only given us reason to cry." He cried too soon, and back in Brazil a despairing construction worker and soccer fan named Julio Gondim poured sleeping pills into a bottle of rum and committed suicide too soon: his team did not drop out of the running until the last day of the elimination.

Ironies abounded. Holland was respected, even though lacking the attacking power of Striker Johan Cruyff, who, now aged 31 and rich beyond reason, refused to bother with this World Cup. Still, the Dutch team at first was clearly not the "clockwork orange" of the 1974 tournament (orange because of its uniforms and clockwork because everything it tried worked that way until the final against West Germany). It was a Dutch concept of "total football"--no stratagem at all but a blazing and relentless rush of soccer in which every team member played both attack and defense--that had dazzled the '74 tournament and given hope to soccer theorists that the days of the clogged, cupping defense that had slowed down soccer in the '60s might be over. But in 1978, even the Dutch at times reverted to fortress tactics. Missing was the best of this simple and beautiful game--the artistry of magnificent athletes moving the ball forward on the attack.

None of these ponderous matters bothered the Argentines in the least. In the big three-tiered River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires, at the outset of a first-round game between Argentina and Italy, the Argentine fans filled the floodlit night sky with a spectacular storm of torn-up paper. The shock waves set off by their cheering were perceptible as much by the skin of the face and the soles of the feet as by the ears. Italy won when the elusive Roberto Bettega slipped away from the defense and scored the game's only goal. It did not matter. The joyous uproar continued, out of the ballpark and into the night. For hours, the capital city's Avenida Corrientes reverberated with sound. Rhythmic horn honking blared from miles of jammed-up and flatulating cars and trucks, inside of and on top of which roosted thousands of happy Argentines, waving their white-and-blue flags and shouting. From apartment houses on the side streets others surged to join the mob; hands reached down from trucks to pull them aboard. The primal baying rose in volume: "Ar-gen-ti-na!" The noise stopped some time on the decent side of 6 a.m.

It had been a long time since the Argentines had had anything to honk and wave flags about, and if they could not cheer a win, they would cheer a loss or a kiss-your-sister draw. For one thing, Argentina's inflation rate during the past year has been a staggering 170%--highest in the world. More important, the Argentines have survived--most of them--a decade in which the disastrous Juan Peron returned from 18 years in exile to spread economic and political chaos. It has been a time in which the left-wing Montoneros murdered, kidnaped, tortured and spread terror at will, and in which the present military junta of President Jorge Rafael Videla has savaged the Montoneros and the more reasonable left as well by murdering, kidnaping, torturing and spreading terror.

Long before the games began, Videla seized upon the World Cup as a means of taking the Argentines' minds off their many troubles. And never mind the $700 million officially (and conservatively) estimated cost of building or renovating six stadiums and several airports, and of constructing the color television broadcasting system necessary to pipe the World Cup to the world.

FIFA's insistence on color is understandable. El Mundial--'The Global," as this competition was called--really is a world cup. A young Italian electrician working in South Africa saw the '74 Cup final on television, resolved to see the next final in person, and last week, well pleased with his bargain, had spent four years of savings on a month of soccer. It is a safe bet that some fans some where watching Sunday's game were making the same daft but splendid decision. And it is an even safer bet that kids everywhere, especially in the soccer-hungry U.S., already are practicing Bette-ga's graceful, evasive running, Dutch star Arand Haan's booming shot and the reckless headers of Argentina's Leopoldo Luque.

That, after all, is what is important. Soccer is not for theorists, or for FIFA, or for military juntas seeking wistfully to appear respectable. It is not for journalists, certainly, and perhaps it is not even for wondrously skilled professional players. Soccer's lovely simplicity started with children-- a ball, a patch of ground, a few kids -- and that is where its center remains.

--John Skow

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