Lessons from football

Cavallero, Zanetti, Ayala, Samuel, Sorin, Simeone….this was the point that usually proved to be decisive, there were too many contenders for the front half. This was my magic trick to control my emotions when younger, a magic trick I’ve slowly lost touch with in adult life, I should go back to it more. 

This - laying out Argentina’s ideal formation - is what came to my rescue in moments of intense feeling when they needed to be hidden. My face would immediately start looking like I was trying to remember a mathematical formula. 

When I got the urge to burst out laughing at something someone said in school assembly, Argentina came to the rescue. Sometimes it would be so funny I’d have to go right up to Batistuta. Once or twice I’ve had to stretch myself to the substitutes’ bench too.

Won't forgive Pochettino ever for conceding that penalty vs England, the biggest team of fakers

When my tabla teacher’s voice droned on while I had to sit in attention even when I knew my team’s World Cup dreams could be on the line on the TV two rooms away, the only rescue from irritation would be to imagine what combination the mad Bielsa had sent out that day. When my cousins cancelled their plans to visit, again like a religious mantra those names came back - Cavallero, Zanetti…Whatever happened, I’d always have that. 

In 2004, when Czech Republic lost in the Euro semifinal as the devil himself Angelos Charisteas headed in a dirty goal in Extra Time, I swore never to take football seriously ever again. When the economy collapsed in Greece a few years later, I felt no pity for them and hoped Charisteas was having trouble buying bread. Nikopolidis was the only one I had a soft spot for because of his grey hair, I was to later realise I have a soft spot for all goalkeepers, I hoped he had somehow managed to ensure his supply of bread. 

I haven’t let a match result affect me that much ever again but the lessons from that day I’m still processing. 

Never let your guard down till the final whistle, always be suspicious of people with squarish faces, take your chances when they come because they might not come again, winning is hardly ever about being the best are some well known cliches often drawn from football. For me, the most dominant thought associated with that day though is probably perceiving for the first time that the world was okay with injustice. It mattered to nobody that clearly one of the best teams to have played the game - the Czech Republic of Baros and Nedved - was losing to a team of fakers whose game was sure to put their own families to sleep. This lack of interest in justice is something I still get a lesson in every day, so too for the world’s infinite patience for fakery/dishonesty (I can't tell the difference, football didn't teach me that).

My ambitions of turning out for Argentina never materialised, and with Mascherano arriving on the scene, I decided the centre midfielder’s role was well taken care of anyway, leaving me to focus on other ambitions.

Long after this international career failed to take off, football gave me the biggest lesson of life yet when my 28-year-old ACL tore in an attempt to make an interception Ayala and Samuel would have been proud of. ‘Did you warm up before playing,’ a stern doctor asked me a week later, as it slowly started to become clear the career that had never taken off but had still found space to keep on drawing breath in bylanes, parking lots and artificial turfs - was finally over. I hadn’t warmed up, I shook my head slowly. 

Life’s hardly the same once you finally realise you can never play for Argentina (not even make a late debut like Saint Palermo) not because of any passport issue but because your knee is not good enough. 

In times of intense boredom during office life long after I had stopped playing (in India, not Argentina), it had again been Argentina to the rescue. Me playing alongside Mascherano looking up to see a long-haired Messi waving for the ball while making a run no one else saw except me was as believable as the tall tales that were being said in the ‘news meeting’ anyway. While that’s not possible anymore, maybe I should go back to that old familiar refrain in times of trouble - Cavallero, Zanetti, Ayala, Samuel, Sorin, Simeone, Veron, Aimar, Ortega, Caniggia, Batistuta.

In one of Shirshendu Mukherjee’s stories, a person with anger issues is told by his doctor to count from 1 to 100 whenever his emotions get too much for him, but this turns out to be a spectacular disaster as this person gets even angrier when people start quizzing him on why he is counting numbers instead of giving coherent replies. Who knows, questions like how to fit Aimar into a 4-3-3 formation or whether to drop Caniggia for Redondo so that I can revert to a 4-5-1 formation might start making me apoplectic when faced with idiotic questions henceforth.