Seba, my brother-in-law, has been living in Berlin since the year of the catapum but he is still very Argentine.
Read more Spain-Argentina: The Finalissima
He is so Argentine that, when the gray winter spreads over Berlin, he packs his bags and, for two months, takes the family to sunny Buenos Aires, Thilo included, of course.
Thilo is his firstborn and my nephew, and he is as Argentine as Seba even though he was born in Berlin.
When he speaks Spanish, the Spanish his dad taught him, Thilo throws himself into the pool and says that Messi is a shorty (a little guy). And if Argentina loses, he cries inconsolably as if his first girlfriend had left him.
(And this Wednesday he spent a good while crying, almost half an hour, until the English backed down and opened the highway to the Argentines and Messi, Enzo, and Lautaro appeared).
When we meet somewhere in the world, Seba brings me a fan of delicious Argentine empanadas that he himself produces in his shop in Berlin, and he also brings me books by Eduardo Sacheri. And between empanada and empanada and page and page, we also have a blast recovering sayings from the Rambo saga.
They are phrases as stupid as they are wonderful, and they make us happy in our nonsense. I mean the silly phrases of Colonel Trautman, Rambo’s instructor.
That guy drops gems like:
–John Rambo is capable of eating things that would make a goat vomit.
(Supposedly Colonel Trautman says all that to praise his disciple, but I don’t know, I don’t know…).
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Trautman also says:
–In Vietnam, Rambo’s mission was to eliminate his enemies. Kill or die, period! And in that, John Rambo was the best.
Kill or die.
Scaloni is like Colonel Trautman, the guy who has blind faith in Messi, who is like Rambo
As soon as referee Elfath blows the start of the match, the Argentines come out to tell us what the hell they came to do in Atlanta: kill or die.
Not a single minute has passed and Paredes elbows Bellingham. An elbow to the temple. And when Bellingham falls and complains and laments, Paredes shouts at him:
–Come on, get up!
The Falklands War is water under the bridge, this is the war in Atlanta, a guerrilla war that spreads over the pitch, a shove in every play, the art of provocation, the art of desperation.
Argentina fights and England survives as best it can: it wants to get down and dirty like an Argentine would but it can’t, England is premium and a bit soft, and it doesn’t want it as much as Argentina, which wants more and is shown by the hyperexcited Simeone and the belligerent MacAllister.
In the sky of Atlanta, as in the gray sky of the Berlin winter, lies the Argentina the reporter always lived, it is the miraculous Argentina of Kempes in ’78 and that of Maradona and the hand of D10S in ’86. It is also the Argentina of Messi in 2022, a team that gets up again and again because we all know it will and that is its hallmark.
Scaloni is like Colonel Trautman, the guy who has blind faith in his Rambo, and Messi is his Rambo, the superhero who breaks the clichés of history to rewrite his own story, a war veteran capable of eating things that would make a goat vomit. Messi is the GOAT, which in English means goat, but it’s not exactly that.
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Messi is more like Hernán Casciari’s dog.
