It's about the ball, right up until the moment it isn't.
On Sunday afternoon Godoy Cruz played Defensores de Belgrano in Nacional B, the second division of Argentinian football, and among the sea of blue home banners were two crosses of St George, apparently expropriated from England fans at the 2014 World Cup.
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One reads: “Boys & Girls From Oakwell Barnsley.” The other: “Big Al – Y-Bird – South Croydon – CPFC.”
Reflecting on the levels of pure and gorgeous malevolence required to travel to Brazil, obtain an English flag, fold it away, keep it in pristine condition for 12 years, only to unveil it in your second-tier football stadium in the week Argentina play England in a World Cup semi-final reveals the true depth of this connection.
The restraint and optimism required to allow your minor act of territorial banter to fester and mature for over a decade is the very definition of a footballing rivalry.
And of course it is a rivalry that strikes so many other notes: war, culture, empire, nationalism, collective memory, the role of rules and law in constructing a society, and above all a mutual fascination that time seems to have deepened rather than dissolved.
Often you will see Argentina v England described as a “grudge match”, but really this is a feeling so much more complex than hatred, so much more nuanced than tribal revulsion: a dialogic relationship defined not only by distance and difference, but by a weird and long-repressed kinship.
