It was June 1986. The cold of Olavarría was there, like every year at that point in the calendar. He was in his third year of high school at the Normal School. The Argentine team was doing well in the World Cup and that Sunday, June 22, the wait was long: at 3 in the afternoon, Argentina and England played at the Azteca Stadium. After lunch, the ritual began. I sat in my old man’s green Renault 12, parked in the sun outside the house. Inside, the voice of Victor Hugo Morales on Radio Argentina, and the sports pages of Clarín—the newspaper that we bought every day of that World Cup without fail—completed the picture. The sunshine of the Buenos Aires pampas made us forget the cold.
The three of us, my old man, my old woman and I, watched that game in front of a black and white television in the kitchen of the house on the premises of the “Luciano Fortabat” Technical School. We shouted both goals equally – the second, much louder, for reasons that need no explanation. I remember kneeling in front of the TV without being able to believe what had happened: we loved Diego since we found out about his existence and much more when he won us champions in 1981 (my whole family is from Boca). When the game ended and with it the suffering of the last minutes, the afternoon was already falling. It was cold, but there was joy. There were two games left to be world champions. The following Wednesday, before the match with Belgium, and on Sunday, June 29, before the final with Germany, I repeated each action with the precision that Carlos Bilardo would have celebrated: before the game, sitting in the car in the sun, listening to the radio and reading the newspaper.
When I saw the documentary 40 years later, a couple of months ago in a cinema in Recoleta, all that came to mind. This Wednesday and during the previous days of this June 2026, also cold (but Buenos Aires cold, that is, humid), those memories returned. I no longer have my parents with me (and I miss them every day), but now I have a beautiful family. I no longer live in Olavarría nor is there a Renault 12 but in our house in Villa Urquiza we have rituals before each game, of course. I will not make them public for obvious reasons that any Argentine soccer fan will understand. But there are: the food, the drink, the places in front of the TV. They haven’t changed since Egypt and they don’t have to change, obviously. And they work. We won the game we always want to win.
When I hugged my eldest son after each goal (my daughter watched it with her friends, but before that she ate and drank as usual, of course) and we cried together with my wife, like in Proust’s journey with the taste of a wet madeleine in a cup of tea, everything from 40 years ago came back to me. The effect has a psychological categorization: flash or photographic memory. It is a highly detailed autobiographical memory of a very shocking or emotional event. It is stored as a “photograph,” recording not only the event, but where you were and what you were doing. It happens to Argentinians with football: it would be long to list but I perfectly remember several of those emotional moments experienced with the blessed football that my grandfather, my old man and my brother played in Estudiantes de Olavarría, the one that my old man commented on LU32 Radio Olavarría, the one that we lived in La Bombonera with my friends and my brother, my nephews and my children.
Thursday, the day after, was a kind of joyous mental holiday. We worked, we took the kids to school or the club, we shopped, we had lunch, we had dinner, but we couldn’t detach ourselves from the moment we lived. The sensation was enhanced by the deluge of information in the form of videos, posts, memes and everything that the overabundance of communication of the present has in store for us. In the midst of all that, victorious morbidity through, I read several notes from The Timesthe flagship English newspaper. It was the other side: sad analysis, reproaches, criticism, praise for Messi and a note, signed by the bestselling writer Matthew Syed. It is titled l (Another disappointment for England — but the real tragedy would be not feeling.) The caption reads: “Maradona’s Hand of God, Gazza’s tears, Beckham’s red card: the defeat to Argentina brought a familiar pain, but such low moments make the high moments even sweeter.”
The text is exactly the other side of this story that I told at the beginning. The guy says that he watched Wednesday’s game with his children and that with the complete defeat, he remembered exactly where and with whom he was on Sunday, June 22, 1986, Diego’s World Day. He says that that time and this time sadness invaded him but at the same time, he felt that it was part of life: winning and losing. And that it is never good to stop feeling it because when the good news comes, it will also be lived intensely (they have been waiting for the good news for 60 years, but hey, that’s another story…).
There is another idea in your article (what triggered the writing of this one, by the way) that I find interesting to share. Appointment to Emile Durkheim and the concept of “collective effervescence”. 114 years ago, friend Durkheim wrote: “The mere act of gathering together is an exceptionally powerful stimulus. Once individuals come together, it generates a kind of electricity from their closeness, which quickly elevates them to a state of extraordinary euphoria.” Never more fitting to describe the state of mind that invades us Argentines these days.
That’s how I am, that’s how we are (I assume with some certainty). Between flash memory and collective effervescence waiting for the final. I think about my parents, always. Our Asturian cousin writes to us with her usual good vibes asking how we are. And I see my children anxious and expectant, as we prepare the complete and exact execution of the same menu prior to Egypt, Switzerland and England. That’s how it will be, stay calm Carlos Salvador. I hope the “kind of electricity” invades us once again to trigger, once again, all those memories we feel thanks to football.
Source: Infobae
