-Brian Mendonça
On the face of it Argentina should, in my view, have lifted
the Copa América. But the dice was loaded against them. Though they were good
on the ground they conceded defeat – and how (4-1)! – on penalties. Perhaps
they were jittery playing on the home ground of their opponents. And yes, they
were playing in Santiago, the capital of Chile.
I felt the Argentinians played like the Germans with their
precision passing and generally restrained demeanour. The Chileans in
comparison were florid and all over the place, with their heavy build. Messi
was lucky to have escaped unscathed after Medel’s vicious blow to his solar
plexus. Isn’t it always sad that despite the refereeing (or inspite of it) the
beautiful game almost always degenerates to the mundane with its rough play.
I secretly wanted Chile to win though. Their performance in
the World Cup has not been so eventful while Argentina have held centre stage
with the media hype from day one. ‘The hand of God’ certainly helped them to a
dubious victory in the 1986 FIFA World Cup against England. But successive
reports of Maradona saw him losing out on life with his descent into drugs.
Their spat with Britain over the Falklands in 1982 seemed to make them more
European than Latin.
Chile came from the world of Neruda:
Night,
snow and sand make up the form
of my
thin country,
all
silence lies in its long line,
all foam
flows from its marine beard,
all coal
covers it with mysterious kisses.
Gold
burns in its fingers like an ember
and
silver illuminates like a green moon
its
thickened shadow of a sullen planet.
And how must we forget Borges, the great Argentine poet?:
My soul
is in the streets
of
Buenos Aires
Not the
greedy streets
jostling
with crowds and traffic,
but the
neighbourhood streets where nothing is happening,
almost
invisible by force of habit,
rendered
eternal in the dim light of sunset,
and the
ones even further out,
empty of
comforting trees,
where
austere little houses scarcely venture,
overwhelmed
by deathless distances,
losing
themselves in the deep expanse
of sky
and plains.
There must be a winner and there must be a loser in the game
of life. When the titans of South America clashed for the Copa América the
finals were played out between two neighbouring countries, viz. Chile and
Argentina. Though the former faces the Pacific, the latter the Atlantic their
poets have bequeathed to us a poetry that is unmatched in any continent.
Chile did have an Argentine coach in Sampaoli. They managed
to do what Brazil could not in front of their home crowd in the World Cup last
year.
Football has changed today. Both Chile and Argentina played
attacking football and employed negative tactics. But certainly poetry could
unite them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From ‘Discoverers
of Chile’ by Pablo Neruda (1904-73) translated from the Spanish by Anthony
Kerrigan; from ‘The Streets’ by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) translated from
the Spanish by Stephen Kessler.
Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 12 July 2015. Pix of Copa America logo courtesy soccerparole.com; pix of church of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile courtesy travel.nationalgeographic.com; pix of sunset over Buenos Aires courtesy absolutelatinamerica.com
Comments