Heading to Qatar 2022: the Argentine National Team celebrates 120 years of emotion | A journey through the glorious history of the celestial and white

The greatest pride of football in Argentina, the National Team, has just celebrated 120 years of glorious history. Although since 1889 there is a history of clashes between Argentines and Uruguayans, in truth these teams were representative of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and not of both countries. The first game in which a team played on behalf of Argentina took place on July 20, 1902 at the Albion field (current team of the first division of Uruguayan soccer) in the Paso Molino neighborhood of the Uruguayan capital and ended with a win by 6 to 0 in favor of the Argentines which, according to the chronicles of the time, were witnessed by 8,000 spectators. It was also the first international match played by two teams that did not belong to Great Britain.

That memorable Argentine team formed with Jose Buruca Laforia (Barracks); William Leslie (Quilmes), Walter Buchanan (Alumni); Edward Patrick Duggan (Belgrano), Charles Buchanan (Alumni), Ernest Brown (Alumni); Edward Morgan (Quilmes), John Joseph Moore (Alumni), John Anderson (The most), Charles Edgar Dickinson (Belgrano) and George Gibson Brown (Alumni). Dickinson, 3 minutes into the first half, scored the first goal in the history of the National Team. Arimalo against, Morgan, Carve against, Anderson and Jorge Brown completed the scoring. Those surnames were a faithful reflection of a football that, at the beginning of the 20th century, was played mostly by young people of English nationality or children of the managers of the British companies that at that time controlled a large part of the country’s economy.

The official championships of the Argentine Association Football League (antecedent of the current AFA) were played from 1893 and lhe champions had always been teams and clubs of English origin. For this reason, when putting together an Argentine national team, the players had that origin. Just five years later, the Argentine children of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to participate, who, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, founded the vast majority of the clubs that exist today.

The second match between Argentina and Uruguay was played fourteen months later, on Sunday, September 13, 1903, and it also had historical touches: it was the first that a national soccer team played in our country. It took place in the field of the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina (current Campo Argentino de Polo) and that time the Uruguayans won by 3 to 2. And the third, held on August 15, 1905, was the first in which there was a cup in dispute: the Lipton Cup, donated by the Scotsman Sir Thomas Lipton Bartt, then a world magnate in the tea industry and which, with interruptions, both countries played until 1992. That match, also played on the Sportiva pitch, ended 0-0 due to lack of light after having played a 15-minute overtime and another of six and as a sign of gratitude, Argentina gave the cup to Uruguay. They were different times.

On August 15, 1906, Argentina and Uruguay met again for the Lipton Cup in Montevideo’s Parque Central. Argentina won 2-0 with goals from Alfredo Brown (Alumni player) and Tristán González (striker for Estudiantes de Buenos Aires, the team that currently plays for Caseros) and that was the first title won by a national team: the predecessor of a glorious payroll that includes two world championships (Argentina 1978 and Mexico 1986), two olympic titles (Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008), 15 America’s Cups and two European-South American Cups (1993 and 2022) in addition to the six youth world championships won in 1979, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2007. On October 29, 1911in another match against the Orientals for the Uruguayan Honor Cup, Argentina used for the first time its lifelong shirt: light blue and white with vertical stripes. The premiere was not the best: Uruguay won 3-0.

It is clear that it is impossible to summarize in a few lines a more than centenary journey that covers 1041 official matches if only those recognized by FIFA are considered. And whose main protagonists are the two greatest Argentine players of all time: Diego Armando Maradona (91 games and 34 goals between 1977 and 1994) and Leo Messi (163 games and 86 goals from 2005 to the present). Already the two most important technical directors in history: the world champions César Luis Menotti (1978) and Carlos Salvador Bilardo (1986).

The Argentine National Team has been the catalyst for the greatest national joys, none like the ones that caused us the two senior world titles or the Copa América in Brazil in 2021. And also from some of the biggest popular pains: the disaster in Sweden in 1958 and above all, Diego Maradona’s positive doping of ephedrine in the World Cup in the United States in 1994 sank the spirits of millions of Argentines. Each match of the National Team in a Copa América or in a World Cup stops the country breathing. And an unspeakable feeling of emptiness twists our soccer soul every time it loses a final or stays out of a World Cup. It wasn’t always like this. But more and more this is the case.

The National Team perhaps represents one of the last reserves of Argentine identity from a country that sometimes gives the impression that it does not believe much in itself. And so it will be from next November 22 when, captained by Lionel Messi, she makes her debut against Saudi Arabia in the World Cup in Qatar. and start a beautiful collective dream again. We Argentines do not want to win the Nobel Prize, the Oscar from the Hollywood Academy or any of the great universal awards. We want to be world soccer champions because nothing represents us more and better than football. The Argentine National Team has just turned 120 years exercising that representativeness. It will fulfill many more as long as our anthem sounds on any court in the world and we have a lump in our throats. And a clenched fist on the blue and white side of the heart.