Not two minutes after Argentina’s dramatic, extra-time quarter-final victory over Switzerland on Saturday, head coach Lionel Scaloni was already being asked about the semi-final. Looming on the horizon was a match against bitter rivals England. The reporter pressed: “This won’t just be a special game from a footballing standpoint, but also in an emotional sense. How do you imagine you and the players will come out for this game and what message would you give to all of us Argentines that are …” Scaloni cut him off. “This is a football match, OK?” he said curtly. “The message is that this is a football match. Let’s not look for anything else. This is a football match.”
Forty years ago, in the buildup to a match against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup, Diego Armando Maradona also met the press. Many of the reporters had positioned that match as a proxy for the Falklands war, the 74-day conflict four years earlier that took the lives of 649 Argentinian soldiers, 255 British soldiers and three islanders. Control of the Falkland Islands – the Malvinas, as they are known by Argentinians – had been wrested back from Argentina after a brief occupation. To Argentinians, it was a very fresh wound. Maradona said to the press: “This is just a match, OK?” He repeated himself several times, just as Scaloni would decades later.
“Argentina's semi-final against England is haunted by the ghost of Diego Maradona and the Falklands war.”
Maradona persisted with that narrative, his teammates remember, until the two teams walked out of the tunnel at Estadio Azteca the next day. “Diego was walking in line with us,” Argentina defender José Luis Brown recalled before his death in 2019, “and he started raving. He says: ‘Let’s go, yeah? These motherfuckers killed our neighbours, they killed our relatives.’ I understood, obviously … After the anthems, nobody said anything. We hadn’t said anything about that before the game but we’d all been thinking about it. We just went out there and ran.”
Wednesday’s semi-final between England and Argentina is, of course, not just a game. To the English in particular, it is no longer about the Falklands war. To the Argentinians? The conflict still persists in memory and has been passed down to players and coaches via oral history, inescapable. The image of Maradona has been ever present through this World Cup, in banners and songs and memory. It adds a fresh layer to Wednesday’s semi-final, where the spectre of the national icon looms large over a match that is never just a football match.
