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Enough caviar, a bit of humility please
Have Argentina, the world’s biggest exporters of soccer players, lost their feeling for the national colours Diego Maradona wore with such pride and passion? Has the ever increasing exodus of players to Europe dented their edge, made them soft?
Fans’ opinions on websites after Argentina’s pale 1-1 draw with Bolivia, the first time their neighbours have taken a point in nine World Cup qualifiers this side of the border, suggest that’s what they are thinking.
Players are accused of being too comfortable with their high salaries at rich European clubs, allowing modest South American rivals to “paint their faces”, a local phase meaning to embarrass.
“A bit of humility, enough caviar,” a columnist wrote in the sports daily Ole. “The time has come for labourers.”
He went on to accuse the players of not bringing the commitment and fight required when wearing the light blue and white stripes.
Even Lionel Messi, who has played well for Argentina in recent matches while team mates have not, had a poor game.
The reality in South America is that Argentina and Brazil are the teams to beat. They are obliged to take the game to strong opponents who absorb the pressure and try to hit them on the break.
River Plate still making waves outside top flight
By Rex Gowar
River Plate were relegated, they play in the B Nacional championship, their profile has sunk: Right, right, wrong.
As Argentine Football Association chief Julio Grondona put it, River are not adapting to the second division, the B Nacional is adapting to River.
The record 33-times first division champions still command front page headlines on a par with arch-rivals Boca Juniors – during a season in which the biggest club match in the country, the “Superclasico” is missing from the fixture list.
It has been five years since away fans were banned in the second tier of the game in Argentina, principally for security reasons.
Now the Argentine Football Association has lifted the ban. This is because the rest of the B Nacional want to cash in on having River as opponents, especially in home games.
It started at the weekend when Daniel Vila, the politically-ambitious president of Independiente Rivadavia, a team based in the Andean province of Mendoza, encouraged River fans to go to their home game against the giants from Buenos Aires.
Do not forget to mention a small detail… just this last week the four leaders (including two brothers)of River Plate’s ‘barra’ (known as ‘the drunks from the stands’) were convicted of firing their weapons on a group of rivals, killing two and injuring two. Aside their cuteness as second division dwellers, they are still fourth division over privileged rich kids with a sense of entitlement that embarrasses most self-respecting Argentines.
Villar success highlights wider malaise
Paraguay goalkeeper Justo Villar could win the vote as player of the Copa America – emulating Oliver Kahn, the Germany keeper named top player at the 2002 World Cup.
If, or when, this happens, regardless of their merits as players, the vote could highlight a deficiency in the football played at the tournament.
Villar captains a team who reached Sunday’s final against Uruguay without winning any of their five matches, even if they scored five goals in three group games.
Paraguay coach Gerardo Martino said in an interview with Reuters in Asuncion in April he felt his team were shaking off the shackles of a tradition of defensive football with strength in the air to achieve a new balance.
Martino hoped to see Paraguay take another step forward from their good World Cup last year and they were 3-1 up against Venezuela going into the 90th minute in their final group match only to end up drawing 3-3 and scraping through as the second of two best third-placed teams.
Having won penalty shootouts against Brazil and Venezuela to reach the final, they could lift the trophy by the same means if Villar and his defence continue with their heroics during 120 minutes and the players follow up with more perfect kicking from the spot.
Not because of this directly, the South American Football Confederation is considering an expansion of the tournament to include six guest teams instead of just two from the Concacaf region of North and Central America and the Caribbean.
no doubt should he wins and that does mean players didnot do well. in the whole of the tournament, he did many great saves and some in penalty shootout. He can win and remember a goalkeeper is also a PLAYER
That winnin’ feelin’
Lionel Messi says he feels he will one day win the World Cup.
“I more than anyone want to win something with the national team and I’m going to,” Messi told Ole sports daily in an interview published on the opening day of the Copa America.
“A World Cup?” the reporter asked.
“That’s how it will be. That moment will come and I know I’ll enjoy it. I don’t know why, but something tells me I’ll do it.”
Messi, as the world’s best player, has every right to feel it coming.
He has said he wants to win the Copa America with Argentina and that playing at home is a good opportunity. The next goal would be the World Cup in Brazil in 2014.
And why not? Unless Brazil build a team capable of ending 64 years of hurt since the 1950 World Cup they lost to Uruguay in the deciding match at the Maracana.
a successful player, Messi cant afford to lose what he has not gotten as it stands now. copa america and world cup is the only cups he need to win all titles in this world… i believe he can do it…. and as the copa america this year… he has 90%advantage to lift it./…..
Velez Sarsfield’s claim to being Argentina’s sixth big club
River Plate, Boca Juniors, Independiente, Racing Club and San Lorenzo are Argentina’s Big Five clubs.
Until Estudiantes became the first club outside the elite Five to win a league title in 1967, no other team had lifted the crown since in the professional era began in 1931.
Many clubs have won a league title since Estudiantes’ first success and Velez have become the most successful of these, winning their eighth crown at the weekend.
It puts them one ahead of Racing, who have won only one in the last 45 years.
One of the chief characteristics of the big teams is their derbies, the clasicos. The biggest is the Superclasico between River Plate and Boca Juniors, then comes the Avellaneda derby between Independiente and Racing whose two large stadiums are less than 300 metres apart.
San Lorenzo’s derby rivals are Huracan but Velez have long surpassed Huracan as a major force. Velez’s area rivals in the west of the capital are Ferro Carril Oeste, now in the second-tier Nacional B championship.
Hi..I am from Argentina…To be a 6th big Team in Argentina is an endless discussion 
… Let me explain an approach. The five big team you mention reached that name by tradition and mainly Championships and number of fans. Those team won all Argentina Championships since the professional era in 1931 until Estudiantes won it in 1967, as you mentioned (and also Estudiantes won the Libertadores Cup in 1968, 1969, 1970 and 2009 and the Intercontinental Cup in 1968). Since that moment, started the discussion for the 6th big team in Argentina, mainly among Estudiantes by showing your National & International Titles and Huracan, by showing your number of fans and its “Derby” against the classic rival San Lorenzo. In last 20 years, Velez was added to the 6th big discussion by winning several local & international championships but with less fans that Estudiantes/Huracan. Depending on the parameters (fan population and/or Titles) you could have the 6th Team
The unbearable lightness of being – or how a thin piece of synthetic cloth can become a lead weight
Argentines often talk about how heavy a particular football shirt can be, River Plate’s, Boca Juniors’ or Argentina’s.
“La camiseta pesa” (the vest weighs (a lot).
This is what is happening to the players of River Plate, one of Argentina’s “Big Two”, who could be relegated for the first time this month.
The responsibility of being in charge of a squad that could go down to the Nacional B division is affecting coach JJ Lopez, who was a part of a great River team of the 1970s and early 1980s.
River were playing badly at home to Colon last Sunday so Lopez decided to bring off two midfielders and sent on two central strikers to add to the one he already had in the team.
It made matters worse because there was a gaping hole in midfield. River fell behind and only managed to equalise because they played “a los ponchazos”, like Indians waving their ponchos in air and charging forward without any organisation.
Grondona faces trouble at home
By Rex Gowar River Plate’s dire relegation situation is the principal talk of Argentina’s TV soccer chat shows, a bigger story than the crisis at FIFA where Julio Grondona, in power since 1979 and fending off corruption allegations, said he will seek yet another term in office as president of the Argentine FA.
River president Daniel Passarella – who like Michel Platini has occupied most of the top positions in the game: club skipper, national captain lifting a major trophy, national coach – attacked Grondona after his team’s defeat by Boca Juniors in the “superclasico” over his appointments of match officials. Passarella said it was a disgrace the number of penalties the referee, who was not suspended, had missed in the Boca box.
“You must go,” an angry Passarella said in a rare appearance at the weekly meeting of the AFA board where most of the directors are Grondona lackeys mindful of the AFA’s financial support for the clubs in an impoverished league with the government holding the TV coverage rights.
Grondona, who hit the headlines in England this week after attacking the F.A at congress, created the three-season points averages to determine relegation – a device to save Argentina’s traditional big clubs like River from the drop at the end of a bad season.
Now River, having taken only two points out of the last 12 in a relatively decent season but paying for poor results in the previous two, are in the bottom four of the relegation standings with three matches to go and facing a survival playoff against a Nacional B division side.
Noisy chat show discussions centre on the team choices of coach JJ Lopez and the fear that is gripping the River players and affecting their performances, while in Buenos Aires cafes and offices and on street corners fans wonder whether Grondona will intervene to prevent the club with most league titles from being relegated.
Former Fulham striker Facundo Sava, who has a university degree in psychology, wrote a sports newspaper column advising the players to discuss their fears openly as a way of reducing tension on the pitch having experienced a promotion playoff as captain of Racing Club in 2008.
River Plate enraged more than ever by Boca defeat
It is hard to recall a time when River Plate have been more enraged by a defeat to their bitter enemies Boca Juniors than now.
Club president Daniel Passarella, a temperamental former River and Argentina captain and coach, exploded at the weekly Argentine Football Association board meeting chaired by AFA chief Julio Grondona.
Passarella claimed referee Patricio Loustau should have been suspended, which he has not been, for his poor performance in Sunday’s “Superclasico” which Boca won 2-0. He did not spot five penalties against River, Passarella told the sports daily Ole.
Grondona — who had the power to designate a good, experienced referee for the big derby – should resign, said Passarella. Grondona dismissed it as the rant of a man whose team had lost.
Passarella has a point, though, corroborated by video replays of the match. Boca’s central defenders Matias Caruzzo and Juan Insaurralde should have been punished for fouls on River’s forwards as they sped through the middle into the box and for manhandling them at corners in the opening 20 minutes.
Neutral observers and Boca fans say the increasing blight of players grabbing each other at set pieces happens every weekend in Argentina. It does and referees should deal with it but Caruzzo was very guilty on Sunday. A good player with a potential international future who does not need to cheat, he is a serial offender at holding opponents’ shirts and pulling them down.
What has happened to River Plate is that the ghost of relegation has raised its ugly head again.
The River Plate yoyo
River Plate are playing two championships in one and until Sunday’s shock 2-0 home defeat by modest All Boys they had as good a chance of winning the Clausura title as they do now of relegation.
In the craziest of Argentine league championships, results are impossible to predict and playing away is an advantage. There have been 50 away wins and 41 at home so far in 13o Clausura matches this term.
River, with a record 33 Argentine league titles, began the 2010/11 season in August in trouble, worried about their low relegation points average which is measured over three seasons. They have never been relegated.
They slipped in and out of the bottom four places in the table of averages until a fourth place finish in the Apertura championship standings in the first half of the season kept their heads above water.
They have had a better Clausura and would have gone top if they had obtained the expected victory over All Boys, promoted last year, at the Monumental that their pedigree demanded.
Defeat, instead, has resurrected the spectre of relegation as other results helped conspire to edge them back down towards 17th place in the averages, which is one of two relegation playoff berths. The bottom two of the 20 teams are relegated automatically.
Worse still is that they are not favourites to win next Sunday’s “superclasico”, the big match against arch-rivals Boca Juniors at the Bombonera, even if their away form as a team built to defend and counter-attack, also a break with tradition, has been better. Their three defeats were at home.
Relegation in Argentina – is the system fair?
Olimpo, a modest team from the port city of Bahia Blanca on the windswept Atlantic coast in southern Buenos Aires province, are doing well in the Clausura championship. They are in fourth place three points behind leaders Velez Sarsfield.
Boca Juniors, one of the big clubs from the capital, are 14th — seven points off the pace.
Yet Olimpo, promoted this season, are in greater danger of relegation than Boca. Their fourth place in the table does not save them from also occupying one of the promotion playoff berths as a result of the three-season points averages.
The averages were introduced 28 years ago and although the move was not presented as such, it was designed as a safety net for a poor season by one of Argentina’s big clubs after San Lorenzo suffered a humiliating relegation in 1981, though it failed to save Racing Club in 1983, the first year of its implementation.
River Plate, third two points off the pace, began this season in the promotion playoff places and are now only just outside them with the constant fear of slipping back into them with a defeat.
The bottom two sides in the 20-team division go down automatically, those in 17th and 18th place meet teams from the second-tier Nacional B championship in two-legged playoffs.
River’s delicate position was due to a very poor 2008-09 season and failure to redress the balance enough the following season. They finished the Apertura championship in the first half of this season in fourth place and have been doing even better in the Clausura, edging away from danger — although playing pragmatic, defensive football a long way from their traditional, attractive attacking style.
it cant be fair can it? And you need to be a maths teacher to work it out
The fans need to take a step back and cool down a bit.
The extra pressure that they are applying to the players is probably not so helpful.
http://www.football-bear.com