LONDON — It is hard to imagine how dull soccer might be without Latin players. Every successful club in Europe has them. And right now, with Argentina hosting the 43rd edition of South America’s championship, the Copa América, those stars are back on the continent where they began.It has not started auspiciously for Lionel Messi and company.
Argentina was held, 1-1, by Bolivia in the opening game in La Plata, near the capital, Buenos Aires, on Friday night. Colombia then just managed to beat Costa Rica, 1-0, after the central American team had Randall Brenes sent off for a shocking foul into the calves of Luis Perea.
Home nation depression, and violent play by a guest, is hardly the start that Argentina needed. Its national sport is in perilous financial times.
Its players are just passing through, all of them household names on some foreign team’s payrolls, except for goalkeeper Juan Pablo Carrizo, who plays for River Plate.
Sometimes, the longing to do well on a rare homecoming can be the enemy within. If we know anything about Messi, Carlos Tévez, Javier Zanetti or Javier Mascherano, it is that winning the Copa on home soil would be priceless.
They still might.
The poor start, the mocking newspaper headlines like “A night without altitude,” by the Argentine daily Clarín, hurts. “It’s not what we expected,” admitted Messi. “We must improve to win our remaining matches. We need tranquility.”
Tranquility is the least likely ambience they are going to get. Looking ahead to Wednesday, when Argentina meets Colombia in Santa Fe, the home team needs a performance that defies the name by which the stadium is commonly known.
It is officially called Estadio Brigadier General Estanislao López. But locals know it as “El Cementerio de Los Elefantes,” the Elephants’ Graveyard.
Surely not this time. Surely Argentina will demonstrate that the struggle in La Plata was more to do with opening-night nerves, the typical, tight, tied opening encounter we get in many a tournament.
Santa Fe, up in the northeastern corner of the country, is as close to home as Messi gets in this tournament. It is also familiar territory to a young man, Éver Banega, a central midfielder who is possibly the key player in Argentina’s search for a style to suit the current generation.
Banega, 23, is the closest thing Argentina has in this squad to a fantasista, a playmaker. Without one of those, all the forward running of Messi, of Tévez , of Ezequiel Lavezzi — or of any of the reserves: Ángel Di Maria, Sergio Agüero, Javier Pastore, Gonzalo Higuaín and Diego Milito — is wasted.
Messi takes the stick because Messi is Messi. On Friday, he had to do what he seldom has to do with Barcelona, to forage deeper and deeper in search of the ball. Nobody was providing it, nobody was establishing a rhythm. Bolivia, coached by an Argentine, stoically and stubbornly filled the midfield and denied Argentina’s renowned forwards the space to be effective.
In that sense, bully for Bolivia. It is a small neighbor, its players largely unknown outside their own league. And moments before halftime, Bolivia dared to hit the giant on the nose.
Its goal was a piece of impudence, a back heel from Edivaldo Rojas that slipped under the feet of Banega on the goal line. Rojas is a player born in Brazil, naturalized in Bolivia. Every team, it seems, has one of those.
By the time Agüero, a substitute, volleyed a splendid equalizer, the crowd had turned on Argentina, on the stranger Messi, on the national team coach, Sergio Batista.
It is the paying customers’ right to vent their feelings on a home team’s inability to stop Bolivia from doing what it had never done before, take a point in Argentina.
But this is not, yet, the time to panic. The Copa is a 12-nation tournament, and eight teams go through to the next round.
The natives grow restless not simply because of the result, but because they fail to see what Batista sees in the formation and philosophy he espouses. Hired when Diego Maradona was fired after the all-out attack was exposed by Germany at the 2010 World Cup, Batista is a man of order compared to Maradona, a man of whim.
The attack, attack, attack instinct of Maradona, at times as thrilling as it was basic, could not in the end take Argentina far. But Maradona at least knew that offense, and definitely not defense, was what is in the soul of his players.
Batista, a midfield anchor in his playing time, makes no bones about what he wants. He talks of Argentina performing in the manner, the tactical style, of the world’s finest team, Barcelona.
Messi, of course, is the cherry on the top of Barça’s all-conquering entertainment.
His brilliance looks like genius in the attacking third of Barcelona’s balanced 4-3-3 formation.
It can look forlorn, almost hopeless in Argentina’s attempt to replicate that lineup.
That is because Barcelona has Xavi Hernández, but Argentina has no one comparable. Xavi is the pivotal point of his club, and of the Spanish national eleven, because his eye, his brain and his feet can so precisely measure the passes that fantastic forwards need to make their runs.
Where is Argentina’s fantasista? Batista is clearly hoping it lies within Banega. The 23-year-old is growing into that role for Valencia, but Banega is attempting to tread where more recent Argentine playmakers — Juan Sebastián Veron, Juan Román Riquelme, Pablo Aimar — have failed to convince.
You might have to go back all the way to 1978, to the midfield generalship of Osvaldo Ardiles accompanied by the flair of Mario Kempes, to truly recall Argentines who could control and invent matches the way that Xavi or the Dutchman Wesley Sneijder do today.
Banega, flanked by the defense-minded Mascherano and Esteban Cambiasso, has a long way to go to be in that class.
If he makes rapid strides during this tournament, we may yet see the strikers of Argentina go all the way to the final on July 24 in Estadio Monumental. If not, all could end in tears — or once again in tear gas, as it did after River Plate was relegated last week, in the capital of a land that cries out for soccer success.
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