/ 12 December 2003

Pele’s tips for top hit rock bottom

Football needs money like the coca plant needs rain. The first bumper crop in Colombia’s previously fallow football history came in the 1950s, after the local Abramoviches decided to invest serious money in the game and buy the best that South America had to offer.

What that meant was a major exodus of talent from Argentina as Alfredo di Stefano and other superstars left River Plate, Boca Juniors and Independiente for clubs with extravagant sounding names such as Millonarios de Bogota.

I met this sports journalist in Medellin last week called Jaime Herrera, one of these wonderful blokes who knows absolutely everything there is to know about their national game, who can tell you who scored the winning goal in a quarterfinal of the Colombian League Cup in 1946, and who has a vivid recollection of players who died 20 years before he was born.

He told me to forget about Di Stefano. People always say, of course, that he is one of the four all-time greats, along with Pele, Maradona and Johan Cruyff.

‘Well,” said Jaime, with absolute conviction, ‘el ‘Charro’ Moreno was better. Maybe the best player the world has ever seen.”

Charro means cowboy in Uruguay, though Jose Manuel Moreno was Argentine. Never mind. The facts show that he was indeed a phenomenal goal-scorer, but the most interesting, and most incontestable, legacy he left concerns the eternal question: whether sex on the night before a big match is a good or a bad idea. Cowboy Moreno actually took the question a little further.

With him the question was whether whoring, dancing, drinking heavily and going to bed at 5am on the night before a game was conducive to peak performance on the park next day.

The answer was a resounding yes, in his case. So much so that once he experimented with no sex, no dancing and not getting completely ratted on the night before a match. He even forsook his customary pre-match bottle of red wine at lunchtime. The experiment was a predictable disaster. He played the worst game of his life.

Ah, but yes, the traditionalists out there might say, bet he didn’t last too long in the game, though. Wrong, he did. He played 20 years of first division football in Colombia and all over South America. He even came out of retirement once when he was 45.

As Eduardo Galeano recalls in his delightful book Football in Sun and Shadow, he was coaching Medellin in a Libertadores Cup game (South America’s European Cup) against Boca Juniors. Medellin were 1-0 down at half-time. So he changed into his football kit, came on for the second half, scored two goals and his team won.

The first golden age of Colombian football, over which the Morenos and Di Stefanos presided, was followed by the first significant success at international level. Colombia qualified for the World Cup finals in Chile and, while they went home early, they managed a 4-4 draw ‘against Lev Yashin’s Russia”, Herrera informed me, as proud as if it had happened yesterday.

‘Then that was that for nearly three decades. All we had was that 4-4 draw to nourish us till our next World Cup appearance in 1990.” Money, once again, poured into the game. In that World Cup in Italy they made it to the second round.

But it was in the 1994 tournament in the United States that Colombian football really seemed to have come of age. A year earlier, on September 5 1993, as my friend Jaime reminded me, Colombia had pulled off the mother of all football victories — the most astonishing result of modern times.

The Colombia of Rene; ‘the Scorpion” Higuita, Faustino Asprilla, Carlos Valderrama and Freddie Rincin beat Argentina 5-0 in a World Cup qualifier in Buenos Aires. They were so good that Pele tipped them to win the World Cup.

Whereupon overconfidence set in.

‘The players thought winning the tournament would be a formality,” Herrera recalled, bitterly.

So they went out boozing and drinking, in homage to the mighty Moreno, but it appears they lacked the Cowboy’s iron constitution. They lost to Romania and the US and were the first team out. Andres Escobar scored the own goal that gave the US victory and when he returned home to Medellin he was shot dead.

Jaime assured me that, tantalising as the idea is to the football world that Escobar was murdered in retribution for his blunder, the truth of the matter is this: he went to a bar and started getting friendly with a woman who was deemed by another man there to be his private property.

Which might not have been so much of a problem had the man in question not been what in Colombia they call caliente, meaning ‘hot”, in other words up to his neck in drug trafficking. Escobar’s fate was sealed. Whether he had scored that own goal or the winner in the World Cup final, he was a dead man.

Colombia had another miserable World Cup in 1998, turning up as they did with an older, sadder version of the 1994 squad. It’s been downhill ever since. Having promised so much, having seemed 10 years ago as if they might become a South American version of Holland, they failed to qualify in 2002 (whereas puny neighbouring Ecuador did make it to Japan) and they seem to be in serious danger of failing to qualify for Germany 2006.

Colombia are last in the 10-team South American qualifying group after four games, with eight goals against and two goals for. Venezuela, where they hate Colombia but it was always understood baseball was the national sport, are five points ahead — in large measure because, in what was interpreted as a mighty national embarrassment, Venezuela beat Colombia in Colombia three weeks ago.

‘It was terrible,” recalls Herrera. ‘We’ve got good talent in the team but they seem to be suffering from that amnesia that sometimes descends on teams, forgetting that the point of the game is to score. The Argentines mockingly say these days that if football were played horizontally Colombia would be world champions.”

One big problem for the Colombian team has to do with money. Too much of it can kill a team, just as too much rain can kill the coca plant. In this case, as Herrera explained, what happens is that a lot of clubs in Colombia are making big money selling their players to European teams.

But before selling them they have to put them in the shop window, and what better shop window than the national team? Which is why enormous pressures and/or inducements are put by club presidents on national coaches to pick their boys. Sometimes the coaches succumb; sometimes they do not.

The effect on a team is unbalancing, detrimental to good results.

There are 14 games still to go in the South American World Cup qualifying group. Four qualify automatically from the group and a fifth team goes to a play-off. Put all the money you want on Brazil and Argentina, but the other three places in Germany are up for grabs. —