Reheated Rivalry

Is England vs Argentina really sport's biggest match?

‘The hand of God’ (Public domain)

Football is a game of opinions. Which is just as well, because frequently very little actually happens on the pitch. For starters, it is low-scoring: 220 runs should win you a T20 match while 110 points ought to get you over the line in basketball. But soccer? Such is the paucity of goalmouth action that “1-0 to the Arsenal” (set to the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 re-release of ‘Go West’) became an iconic chant.

🚨Kessler family folklore klaxon 🚨In the early 1980s, my dad took his American bride to her first English football match. Astonishingly — this was not a vintage era — the Gunners won 4-1, after which my mom remarked:

“That was a bit dull.”

To which my father deadpanned:

“Well, that’s as good as it gets, sweetheart.”

A couple that turned compromise into something of an art form over the last few decades (he wanted blue dinner plates, she preferred white, they settled on a tasteful white centre with blue rim) failed to agree on football. What did I say about opinions?

England, Argentina, Falklands and Malvinas

Yesterday, during my allotted daily allowance of five minutes on Bluesky, I stumbled across a Wall Street Journal article entitled: “The Greatest Rivalry in Sports Braces for Its Biggest Game Ever.” At which point I did what any self-respecting middle-aged millennial would do — I stood up, grabbed my belongings and pulled the “quote post in case of emergency” lever. The greatest rivalry in sports?

What about India vs Pakistan? Real Madrid vs Barcelona? The New York Yankees vs the Boston Red Sox? Look, I’m not here to dunk on this piece. First, because the Financial Times today published something similar. Second, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, who wrote the Journal article, previously co-authored a terrific book on the rise of the Premier League.

More to the point, I ain’t gonna alienate the Wall Street Journal — one of the finest English language newspapers (and one of the few that turns a profit) — on the basis that they may, theoretically at least, want to commission me one day.

I'm also cognisant of the fact that the piece was likely aimed not at nerdy English football fans like me, but American subscribers to the paper who might require a little prodding to care about the second semi-final of a tournament in which the US has long been eliminated.

Unrequited hate

Certainly, there are numerous cases where one half of a particular feud cares more than the other. Think New Zealand’s obsession with beating Australia at cricket, the Netherlands with defeating Germany at football or Wile E. Coyote with nailing Road Runner in the desert. (The coyote is obsessed with catching [and eating?] the Road Runner; the Road Runner appears largely indifferent.)

Is England vs Argentina one of those? Certainly, the subject of the Falkland Islands, or the Islas Malvinas, appears to be of greater centrality to Argentinian politics than to Britain’s. Yet the games between the two nations have, as the writers note, rarely ended without incident. Think the 1966 encounter which led FIFA to introduce yellow and red cards, Diego Maradona’s Hand of God in 1986¹ and David Beckham’s petulant little kick in 1998.

This was my own work and I was very pleased with it

But the greatest rivalry? Not to the English. If someone told me they didn’t like Lionel Messi because he was ‘an Argie’, depending on how well I knew them, I would either politely smile and back away or Google the signs of mild concussion. England fans — like all tribal associations — can be small-minded, petty and occasionally violent. But no more toward Argentina, a nation with whom we share so much: currency crises, beef exports, even cricket. (Argentina really ought to have secured Test status 100 years ago.)

It is, of course, enlightening to learn how outsiders view you. Rivalry, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But beauty can be unrequited. Rivalry must be reciprocated. Then again, if football has taught us anything, it’s that there will always be someone in the comments section convinced of your wrongness.

1. I fully accept the premise that had I watched this match as a 10-year-old, I may have taken a different view as an adult