South American football expert Jonathan Wilson previews Sunday's Copa America final between Uruguay and Paraguay, in a piece exclusive to ITV Football.
For Uruguay, history beckons. If they beat Paraguay in the final of the Copa America, they will take the title for a record 15th time, surpassing the hosts Argentina. The whole of the rest of the continent has won the tournament only 13 times between them. For a nation with a population of just 3.5million – it might have won it twice, but it remains the sixth smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup – that is a remarkable record.
What is even more remarkable is how far adrift Uruguay had slipped. By the mid-eighties, its football had become a byword for thuggery, seen most strikingly in the 1986 World Cup, at which Jose Batista was, infamously, sent off after 52 seconds of the group game against Scotland. What they needed was a hero, somebody with the intellectual and moral credentials to restore self-respect and success. It’s become a cliché to describe managers as Messiahs but, really, what else is Oscar Washington Tabarez? He began to restore their reputation at the 1990 World Cup and, since his return to the national team in 2006, has overseen a radical improvement.
Tabarez is known as El Maestro because he used to be a schoolteacher, but the nickname conveys far more than that. He is one of football’s philosophers, a man who speaks in paragraphs not soundbites. On the wall of his house in Montevideo is a line from Che Guevara: “One must toughen oneself without ever losing tenderness.” It sums up his approach to football.
Uruguay has always prided itself on its “garra” - a word that translates literally as “claw”, but which, in a football context, has come to mean a combination of hardness, resolve and streetwiseness – believing it is that that has made it so disproportionately successful. By the mid-eighties it was being used to legitimise brutality, but Tabarez has worked hard to establish a new interpretation.
His Uruguay is tough. They make tackles. They defend when necessary.
Watch Diego Lugano or Sebastian Coates marking a forward and you see constant nudging and jostling, the sort of attritional physicality that eventually led Peru’s Juan Vargas to snap and plant his elbow in Coates’s face in the semi-final. If a goalbound shot is about to deny them a place in a World Cup semi-final, their players will block it with their hands and then celebrate the fact, as Luis Suarez did against Ghana last year. But they also accommodate the intelligence and creativity of Diego Forlan, the energetic attacking of Alvaro Perreira and the cunning of Suarez. Even with Edinson Cavani, prolific at Napoli last season, out of form and then injured, they were able to cope.
“We’ve got much more to give, and we hope to give it on Sunday,” said Lugano. “Historically we’re going from less to more, and we did that as well at the World Cup.” He was sceptical, though, about suggestions that the map of South America football has been changed. “Maybe it’s become harder to get good results against us,” Lugano said. And that probably is the key lesson of the tournament: South America’s lesser lights have become more organised. The likes of Venezuela and Ecuador, minnows two decades ago, are now serious teams. And that means that if Brazil or Argentina underperform, other sides will step up.
Uruguay, with their great history, perhaps occupy a halfway house between the Big Two and the rest, but on Sunday they face Paraguay, who in their refusal to lose have become the Rasputin of the competition. They went through a similar process to Uruguay in the early nineties under Sergio Markarian, the Uruguayan who coached Peru at this tournament and whose influence endures. The worry for Uruguay is that in the final, they’ll be facing a version of themselves, the foundations laid by one of their own.
Jonathan is editor of The Blizzard and you can follow him on Twitter
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