Footy Blog!!

Much to my regret, I’m just too young for the 1970 World Cup. I was only five and I’m not sure we had a TV at the time - but I do remember the sticker album like it was yesterday.

A neighbour a couple of years older was collecting, and he gave me some of his swaps. The first one I received was a Peruvian, Ramon Mifflin if memory serves me right, staring seriously at the camera in that striking white shirt with the red sash.

I had no album to stick it in, but that image always stuck in my mind. For someone who didn’t make it out of England until he was 23 - my dad reached 84 without getting further than Dublin - that picture from Peru symbolised everything that was exotic and fascinating about international football.

A year later when the 1971/2 season kicked off I started my own collection of First Division stickers. Apparently it did wonders for my reading, though I dread to think what words I picked up. This was before the globalised days of Panini, when you got a quaint little biography about the players, and it was a world full of ‘veteran custodians’ and ‘crafty schemers who made their bow against Charlton Athletic in 1959′.

Somehow the mundane and the domestic never gripped me as much as the World Cup album. I waited impatiently for 1974 to come round so a new one would come out, and was then heartbroken to see that Peru weren’t involved.

But I did have a chance to collect them in 1978, was too busy being an adolescent to collect them in 82, and since then there has been no need.

Peru don’t qualify for World Cups any more, time and high living have taken their toll on Ramon Mifflin, but I’m in Lima watching some matches and doing a piece on the state of the game here for World Soccer magazine.

I’ve been here twice before, both times for international tournaments but this time the focus is on domestic football. I might have known that I’d find something here to stop me in my tracks and it’s a club called San Martin.

On Saturday I was at their match away to Sporting Cristal. This is a Lima derby in Cristal’s rather pokey little stadium on the banks of the Rimac river and San Martin had come across town in force! I was sitting directly opposite their supporters and was able to count them during a break in play - all 33 of them, plus a mascot.

San Martin won an excellent 4-3 victory and their coach described it as a Peruvian Chelsea v Liverpool. Their Colombian striker Martin Arzuaga scored a hat-trick but the man of the match was the mascot. Dressed up as a tooth, he kept up his animated little dances for the full 90 minutes and in mid-afternoon heat he must have sweated more than the players.

I understood the mascot because I’d been along to San Martin’s home game the previous Tuesday night. I write ‘home’ but the club have no fixed stadium and live a nomadic existence using a number of local grounds. For this particular match, a Copa Libertadores tie against Nacional of Uruguay, they had hired out the stadium of Alianza Lima.

It is customary for supporters in South America to hang up banners announcing the name of their home neighbourhood, usually the city’s working class districts, and San Martin did have a couple of banners - but with a different message. The ‘Furia Santa’ banner was displayed by a group of dentistry students, while the ‘Oriente Santa’ group was formed by students of administration and human resources.

San Martin is a club set up by a local university in 2004. And its tiny fan base - to be fair there were many more than 33 supporters present on Tuesday - is largely restricted to students at the university.

So their mascot is a molar and it is their rivals have the toothache because, extraordinarily, these five-year-old educational upstarts won the Peruvian championship in both the last two years. Unthinkably, they have now qualified for the knock out stage of the Libertadores at the expense of Argentina’s River Plate.

How is this possible? Well, with none of the pressures of a big club, San Martin have acquired a reputation for the serious and organized way they go about their business - sticking with a coach, Victor Hugo Rivera, keeping a group of players together and reaping the benefits.

The financial aspects are puzzling. A local journalist I know, perhaps made cynical by years of covering Peruvian football, suggests that the whole thing is a means by which the university can pay less tax.

Whatever the explanation, the San Martin phenomenon is exotic and surprising - something I should probably have expected from the land of Ramon Mifflin.

Comments on this piece in the space provided. Other questions on South American football to vickerycolumnotmail.com, and I’ll pick out a couple for next week.

From last week’s postbag:

Q) Do away fans travel to see their team play in the Copa Libertadores the
same way that fans of European clubs do in the Champions League and UEFA
Cup?
Bjhercha

A) It’s just not possible. Distances are vast, mass salaries are low and air travel is expensive (Rio to Lima cost me almost 400 quid). So there’s much less travelling support. For this reason the competition doesn’t end in a one off final on a neutral ground as in Europe, but with a home and away final over two legs.

Same old same old in Europe, all change in South America. The Champions League has the same semi-finalists year after year, but it’s a very different story in the Copa Libertadores.

The group phase is not yet complete in South America’s premier club competition, but even before the action got under way there was a guarantee that there would be no repeat of last year’s final.

Fluminense of Brazil, who lost the title on a penalty shoot-out, did not even qualify.

In fact, after that painful defeat, they fell into a depression and at the end of last year, only narrowly escaping relegation to Brazil’s second division.

As for their conquerors, LDU, or Liga of Quito, they have very little chance of repeating last year’s heroics and taking the title to Ecuador.

Indeed, the club which, last July, was ranked number one in the continent and, in December, number two in the world is now really struggling to make it into South America’s last 16 and thus next month’s knockout phase of the Libertadores.

After four of their six group games, they have just four points. On Tuesday, they face a crunch visit to Brazil’s Palmeiras. Defeat could render their final match academic.

And the striking aspect of this rise and fall is that it is not particularly surprising.

In Europe, success is a virtuous circle. Good results lead to increased resources, allowing the squad to be strengthened which, theoretically at least, means that results remain good.

Of course, there is the danger of the club chasing the dream and over-reaching. But, as the results keep proving, sustaining success is much easier in Europe than it is in South America.

There are cases of clubs winning the Libertadores three times in a row. But that was decades ago.

In those days, fewer clubs took part, with the holders only entering in the closing stages.

And it was not only the structure of the competition that made consecutive wins much easier way back when. This was also before the opening of the global market and the mass exodus to Europe.

That European virtuous circle is much harder to apply on the other side of the Atlantic, where winning often means that the squad is weakened. Landing trophies puts players in the shop window. The players want to go. Selling them helps the club pay its bills.

South America’s strongest clubs are those which, rather than kicking against this sad reality, have accepted it and work within it.

Over the last few years, Boca Juniors of Argentina and Brazil’s Sao Paulo have been the most consistent clubs in the Libertadores.

Both invest heavily in youth development with the aim of selling potential stars to Europe, thus enabling them to maintain competitive squads.

Boca’s former president, Mauricio Macri, the man who put the model into operation, used to say that the best products of the club’s youth work had a three-year time limit in the first team - one to adapt to senior football, two to enjoy them. Then it’s time to sell.

The model, then, comes with built-in instability, since the club is constantly saying farewell, or preparing to say farewell, to important players.

Rogerio Ceni, Sao Paulo’s talismanic captain and goalkeeper, is an exception. The 36-year-old, who has just suffered a long-tem injury, could have moved abroad but instead has spent half his life at the club.

At Boca, playmaker Juan Roman Riquelme is another exception, opting to come back from Europe when still at his peak.

Incidentally, I doubt that the Macri administration would have brought him back on a permanent basis - Macri always argued that paying one player much more than the rest was an invitation for dressing room unrest, a view borne out by the complaints Riquelme’s team-mates occasionally make about him.

Despite the exceptions - and for all the attempts to impose order on the process - even South America’s biggest and best clubs now exist in a permanent state of transition, which prevents them from consolidating European-style success.

Last year, Fluminense took advantage of this, assembling an excellent short-term squad and eliminating both Sao Paulo and Boca before falling to LDU.

The reign of LDU looks set to end, too. They are a shadow of the side that won last year’s Libertadores in such enterprising fashion.

In their case, it is not just the loss of key players that has affected the side. It is also the loss of the coach.

Argentine-born Edgardo Bauza stood down after hitting on a superb formula last year.

He converted striker Joffre Guerron to a right winger, where, in the extra space, he could use his acceleration and lung power. And midfielder Luis Bolanos was converted to a left winger, cutting inside and making the most of his strong running with the ball and cool finishing.

It meant that, in Quito, LDU could stretch the opposition and make the most of the altitude. Away from home, they always carried a threat on the counter.

Now, with both players gone, LDU look an ordinary side.

Uruguayan coach Jorge Fossati is competent - he won the domestic championship in a previous spell with the club - but his team, with a big target man up front, look very blunt in comparison with last year’s rapier thrusts.

But if they do go out early, the Libertadores goes on. Will the 50th version go to one of the favourites. Or will a surprise runner come through once again? Both are possible - and that is one of the big attractions of the competition.

Comments on today’s piece in the space provided. Other questions on South American football to vickerycolumn@hotmail.com, and I’ll pick out a couple for next week.

From last week’s postbag:

Q) As a Manchester United fan I have enjoyed seeing the Brazilians we have bought over the past few seasons.

But as they come over at an ever younger age (Fabio, Rafael, Possebon, Pato and maybe Douglas Costa) do you believe there is a chance that their fun, adventurous, ‘jogo bonito’ style may be cut away for an approach more akin to the physical, tactical and frenetic Europe leagues? Thus making the national side just like European teams!
Oliver Burrows

A) It’s a fascinating question. There clearly are dangers of a loss of identity in this process - you can see this with Possebon declaring his interest in playing for Italy.

The great contribution that Jose Pekerman made to Argentine football was in seeing early (mid-90s) the dangers of the process and using Argentina’s youth sides to give the youngsters a course in the identity of Argentine football.

Even if almost the entire senior squad play in Europe, when the national team get together they revert to style.

Especially in Brazil, there’s a danger of over-mythologising. I did a round table debate on Brazilian TV recently with veteran coach Valdir Espinoza.

He put forward the view that Brazilian coaches, in fear of their jobs, are nowadays ultra-defensive. He nodded vigorously when I argued that none of the leading teams in Euro 2008 would have space for a Gilberto Silva in their line-up. So this lack of ‘jogo bonito’ can’t just be blamed on Europe. This is an internal Brazilian dynamic.

The case of Anderson at your club is very interesting. United have changed his position - there is a danger that operating as a central midfielder sacrifices some of his natural ability. But having such a talented player there does give you fluidity through the midfield.

Brazilian coaches were astonished with the change. They have become much more inclined to pack central midfield with cloggers and marking specialists, though there are some hopeful signs of a change of approach.

In football administration, democracy is an awkward concept. One Rochdale, for example, clearly does not have the same weight as one Manchester United - even 30 Rochdales together would struggle.

It was the realisation of this basic truth that helped launch the Premier League, on the basis that if the major clubs were creating most attention and spending the most money, the structure of the game should reflect their importance. A decade and a half after its formation, once provincial English football now attracts top stars from all over the world.

Back in 1992 it would have seemed unthinkable - but when the Brazil squad is called up, these days it contains more players with English clubs than with Brazilian.

It is inevitably hard for domestic Brazilian football to compete with the major European leagues. For all its size, with its colossal internal market, Brazil is still limited by the low salaries paid to the majority of its population, which in turn place a ceiling on footballer’s wages.

Even so, domestic football in the land which has produced five World Cup-winning teams has considerable room for improvement - and one of the reasons is that the lesson of the Premier League has not been absorbed. The tail is wagging the dog.

The current structure means the big clubs are subservient to the small - or to something more sinister, to those who control the small. The biggest proof is the continued existence of the State Championships, one for each of the 27 states that make up this giant country.

This year’s state tournaments are coming to a close, which means big games in front of giant crowds. I’m writing this after returning from a Flamengo-Fluminense semi-final in Rio that drew a near 70,000 crowd, like the Botafogo-Vasco match the day before. In Sao Paulo, meanwhile, there is great interest in their semi-finals between the local big four, Corinthians and Sao Paulo, and Santos and Palmeiras.

Some will take this as evidence that people love the State Championships - and they would be wrong. People love big derbies. When the fixtures come out, the first thing a Manchester City fan checks is the dates of the matches against United, and he doesn’t mean he has to endure three months of watching City against the likes of Bolton Sunday Market reserves.

But that’s what happens in Brazil. Before the State Championships come to a finale, they throw up week after week of complete guff. The figures from Rio show the point clearly.

Nowadays the Rio State Championship is clearly second in quality to Sao Paulo but historically it is at least as important. This year it has been made up of 16 teams - the big four in the semi-finals, and 12 small ones. In all, those 12 teams have met each other 67 times during the course of the competition - with a combined attendance of 29,261. An average of 436 fans per game.

This is obviously absurd. Professional football without supporters is a glaring contradiction. The small teams bring nothing to the table and yet the big ones, who count their own fans in the millions, carry them along for months.

It is basic. If the likes of Flamengo, Vasco, Fluminense and Botafogo are spending mid-January until early May playing teams with no supporters, they are obviously operating massively below their potential.

Why is this allowed to continue? In part it is tradition. Brazil is so vast that a genuine National Championship only came into existence in 1971, so much of the history of the game is bound up in local rivalries.

But more to the point, it is power. The balance of power in the election of the president of the CBF, Brazil’s FA, is with the 27 state presidents. Taking away their championship would end their prestige, since typically, their own support base is with the small clubs.
So they don’t vote for a reform candidate, and in return they get to keep their championship.

The outcome is two layers of mutually perpetuating bureaucracy. Ricardo Teixeira has been CBF President since 1989 and now has a mandate until 2015, while more than half the state presidents have been in office more than 10 years and some date back to the mid-70s. The big clubs attempted a feeble breakaway in 1987, but continue to participate in a structure that sells them short.

The players know the truth. I first became aware of this in early 1996, when interviewing Branco, who was on the point of joining Middlesbrough. One of the reasons he was keen to get away was to avoid the State Championships, which at the time were even longer.

Recently Flamengo keeper Bruno let the cat out of the bag; winner of the Rio State title in 2007 and 2008, he said that this year he wanted to win something important.

Bad enough in themselves, the State tournaments also have a highly detrimental effect on the National Championship, which kicks off on 10 May and goes all the way through to early December. As any European fan knows, a long league campaign needs a pause before the action gets under way, to whet appetites for the big kick-off.

But retaining the State tournaments means there is no such pause in Brazil - and to make matters worse, it throws the calendar out of sync with the rest of the world, so that the global transfer window rips teams apart in the middle of the campaign.

State Championships may have a purpose for lower division teams, youth and women’s football but they have long since outlived their usefulness at the elite level. Scrapping them would be the single biggest step the Brazilian game could take.

Comments on today’s piece in the space provided. Other questions on South American football to vickerycolumn@hotmail.com, and I’ll pick out a couple for next week.

From last week’s postbag:

Q) After watching Porto’s 2-2 draw with Man United, I noticed there were many South American footballers on the Porto team, González, López and
Rodríguez all had good games but for me, the two players who really
stood out were a young defensive midfielder called Fernando, who had
great energy and was superb at spotting potential danger and snuffing
it out. The other was a striker called ‘Hulk,’ who had an
unconventional but effective style of bulldozing through the defence
with the ball. Do you know much about these two players and do you
think Dunga is aware of them? Could Fernando could be a long-term
replacement for an aging Gilberto Silva, who Dunga seems reluctant to
drop?
Lee Walsh

A) It’s a tribute to the strength in depth of the Brazilian game that players like this are produced who are hardy known back at home. Problem is, it’s hard to get in the national team that way, without a constituency at home calling for your inclusion. Hard, but not impossible - Elber did it, more recently Alfonso Alves was in the squad for a while.

Dunga should certainly be aware of them; I’m sure he sees it as part of his job to follow any Brazilians in the last eight of the Champions League, and anyway, he will have been watching Porto to keep tabs on keeper Helton, who he has called up in the past.
All they can do is keep performing to maintain the pressure - as far as Hulk is concerned, with Adriano out of contention for a while there’s a squad place going for a striker.

Q) I was just wondering if you could enlighten me as to whether you believe there is a wider reaching, and perhaps cultural, reason behind the difference in performance level of Robinho, in part Jo, and Ronaldinho (in his last season at Barca) when it comes to games away from home? Or am I wide of the mark and simply highlighting 3 recent examples who all happen to be Brazilian?
Andrew Bester

A) An interesting point. It’s generally true that away wins are much rarer in Europe than South America. In the Libertadores so far we’ve had 36 home wins to 16 away. In World Cup qualifying it’s 31 to 10 - and this ratio of 3 to 1 is not uncommon. I tend to put this down to travelling time, climatic changes, altitude etc, but there may be some psychological factors at work.

In the case of the players you mentioned, I don’t think it’s true of Ronaldinho in his pomp; one of his finest Barca performances came at the Bernabeu. With Robinho there may be some mental factors. I did a round table debate on Brazilian TV a while back, and the local journos were stressing that he’s worked better in support of someone rather than when he is given the responsibility of carrying the side. Perhaps he feels that responsibility more away from home, when the difficulties are greater. I’d like to know what City fans think about it.

Some years ago there was speculation linking Manuel Pellegrini to the job of assistant coach at Manchester United. Whether or not there was any foundation to the rumours, it didn’t happen, and Old Trafford’s loss has been Villarreal’s gain.

The entire population of Villarreal could comfortably fit inside the Emirates Stadium. But under Pellegrini, the little club has played host to some of the most attractive and effective football in Europe, become a consistent force in La Liga, pushed Arsenal all the way in the semi-finals of the 2006 Champions League, and now meet Arsene Wenger’s men a round earlier.

Pellegrini, a 55-year-old Chilean, has been steering the remarkable ‘Yellow Submarine’ (Villarreal’s nickname) since 2004. He is the longest-serving coach in the Spanish first division, and he has shown that, despite some high-profile failures, South American coaches can make a success of European club football.

Pellegrini is a million miles away from the rustic roughness of Luiz Felipe Scolari and has none of the desperately forced sophistication of Vanderley Luxemburgo. Unlike the two Brazilians, who came unstuck at Chelsea and Real Madrid respectively, Pellegrini cuts a suave, collected, urbane figure. He comes across like Roger Moore in ‘The Saint’ - and Villarreal fans should be willing to supply the halo!

In fact, if he so wished, Pellegrini is the ideal man to work out how to suspend a halo above his head. He is a fully qualified civil engineer. “It’s a profession,” he says, “that firstly teaches you to think, and secondly, to put things in an order of priorities with a logical sequence to solve problems.”

But if the study of engineering has given him an intellectual framework, over 35 years of practical experience in football have moulded him as a coach.

Pellegrini the player was a centre-back, a one-club man who spent 13 years in the blue of Universidad de Chile. As a coach, he took charge of a number of Chilean teams, but his career really kick-started when he moved abroad.

A decade ago he moved up to Ecuador to take charge of LDU of Quito. After taking them to the championship he went down to Argentina to join San Lorenzo. The local press were suspicious and he was irreverently asked if he had come to finish the building work on the stadium.

Instead he led the club to the Argentine title and to the Copa Mercosur, a since defunct Uefa Cup equivalent. It was the club’s first international title - and also the first ever achieved by a Chilean coach. He then won the title with River Plate before embarking on his European adventure.

The early months were not easy; Pellegrini believes that “for a coach the adaptation is much more difficult than for a player”. But he had arrived at the right club, one small enough not to be hostage to short term pressures and headlines.

“Villarreal is the perfect club to work and develop a project,” he says. And the project is one for which Pellegrini is tailor made.

In the long term Villarreal are looking to develop their own players. But their short-term strategy was to go South American. Before Pellegrini joined the cub, Villarreal were specialising in bringing players across the Atlantic. With his intellectual curiosity and extensive experience of the game in his home continent, the Chilean has hit the right blend.

“Always putting priority on treating the ball well, we’ve also added more mobility,” he says. “It’s a mixture of South American and European football.”

In the current team, South American players supply skill but plenty of steel as well. The little Argentine playmaker Ariel Ibagaza is a delightful, twinkle-toed player on his day and Mati Fernandez is a young Chilean attacking midfielder with enormous potential.

He has not found the adaptation to Europe easy - as a player who loves to turn and run at the opposing defence, he has found much less space in which to surge than was the case back in his homeland. But given enough room he can be highly dangerous, breaking forward and shooting powerfully like a junior Kaka.

At the other end Diego Godin is a Uruguayan centre-back out of the top drawer - unflashy, but hard and classy. And it could be that the key players against Arsenal will be the central midfield duo of the highly rated Brazilian (now naturalised Spanish) Marcos Senna and the fiercely competitive Uruguayan Sebastian Eguren, who will have the task of interrupting the London club’s passing.

Pellegrini will be aware that the odds are in Arsenal’s favour and has been keen to stress that domestic football is no less important than the Champions League - it is performances in the former that will get them back in the latter next season.

Saturday’s 3-0 defeat to Almeria was a blow, but Pellegrini will take it in his smooth stride, absorb the lessons and try to engineer Arsenal’s Champions League exit.

Comments on this piece in the space provided. Any other questions on South American football to vickerycolumn@hotmail.com, and I’ll pick out a couple for next week.

From last week’s postbag:

Q) I expect you watched, as I did, open mouthed as Argentina were thumped 6-1 in La Paz by Bolivia. In truth, the scoreline probably flattered the visitors as Carrizo was incredibly overworked and the woodwork was rattled. To me Argentina looked awful defensively, the left-back Papa was atrocious - I hear he is a fine crosser of the ball and he looked fairly quick, but apart from that his covering was poor, he was weak in the tackle and lost possession on numerous occasions, is he seen as the long term solution at LB - I would have considered maybe Zabaleta from Manchester City as RB and maybe Javier Zanetti on the left. Is Emiliano Insua of my club Liverpool seen as a potential international left back? And Heinze must go. Agree?
Neil Jones

A) I do agree on the last point. I’ve never been a big Heinze fan, even when he was being lauded in England. To my mind, at the top level he’s too slow to be a left-back and not commanding enough to be a centre-back - and he throws himself to the floor all the time (see Bolivia’s first goal).
He’s undoubtedly a spirited battler - Maradona loves him for this, though says that he won’t be selecting him at left-back. Personally, I find the De Michelis-Heinze combination too slow as a pairing, and I think this is an area Maradona will have to look at.
Papa is to my mind more of a left sided midfielder than a left back and I have the same view of Zabaleta on the other flank. Papa is not really a defender - was a bad selection for the Bolivia game, where there was no point in picking attacking full-backs. He is not a long-term solution, but it’s a problem position at the moment.
Insua didn’t do his chances any good with a rough time recently in the South American Under 20s - he captained the side, played the last few games at centre-back but didn’t do well in either position. Monzon played in the Olympics, but I’m not sure if he’s the tightest defensively.
Maybe Maradona might be tempted to stick with a back three, the formation he played at home to Venezuela. He has the pace of Angeleri at sweeper, or he could have a look at Boca’s highly promising Forlin in the back line, then he can go with the lung power of Jonas Gutierrez at left wing-back.

Q) Having watched most of the South American qualifying matches last week, I was struck by how fast, frenetic, and physical every game was. In fact, if the TV screen didn’t tell you the names of the team, then you could quite easily have believed you were watching matches from Europe in my opinion.
Would you agree with me that South American football, more than ever, is losing it’s identity in terms of style of play, at least at international level?
Neil Clack

A) It’s an interesting point. The nationalism factor and the level of competition mean that South America’s World Cup qualifiers have a tendency to be frenetic affairs. But there is a wider style point, and it has to do with the physical development of the game and its impact on the old style, foot on the ball playmaker.
The consequences of Holland 74 continue to ripple through South American football - that pressure they put on the ball, depriving the opposing playmaker of the time and space to choose his options. I saw an interview with Pellegrini (see above) where he was talking about this as the last great tactical innovation, and it’s a widely held opinion over here.
I recall when he was in charge of Ecuador, Luis Fernando Suarez arguing that the physical development of the game meant that these days anyone can complicate matters by packing the midfield. So, in his view, playing well meant attacking and defending well down the flanks. So Ecuador, who used to have an old style number 10 in Aguinaga, became a side that secured the centre of midfield with two battlers, and looked to break quickly down the wings. Colombia these days have no Valderrama - Macnally Torres is a fine player, but his task is to slip through the killer pass, not dominate the rhythm of the game from centrefield.
These changes have taken place in Brazil, too. A couple of weeks ago 1970 great Tostao wrote that “the games in Brazil are increasingly truculent, tense, rushed and of lower quality. Exchanging three passes has become a synonym of slowness. The strategy is to get the ball forward quickly and win a set piece. The problem is not just the lack of individual talent. It’s also the lack of understanding of what it is to play good football”.