angels with dirty faces by jonathan wilson

You know the thing when you read 5 pages but have taken nothing in at all. I tend to go off into a different land when some books go into political detail. An absolute struggle to get through like 0-0 draw where no team has anything to play for or a gem of a book that is all engrossing like a World Cup Final that is won 5-4 after extra time. This book could have gone one of two ways for me. But while this is primarily a history of football, so entwined are the political and socio-economic strands, so inextricably is football bound up with all public life, that this is also a book about Argentina’. Wilson says ‘I wanted to include the theory and place the sport in its social, economic and political context, and I wanted to include the people, the players and coaches whose lives are so remarkable that they seem to have fallen from a magic-realist novel, but I didn’t want to stint on the football, on the games and the goals that actually make us watch in the first place, on the culture that provides the currency in which so much of Argentinian life is transacted. The Spaniard founded Buenos Aires in 1536 and called it Nuestra Senora Santa Maria del Buen Aire (Our Lady St. You know you’re in for a detailed account when the prologue goes into the history of Don Pedro de Mendoza setting off across the Atlantic from Cadiz in 1535. It has even preoccupied the country's greatest writers and philosophers.ĪNGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is the definitive history of a great footballing nation and its paradoxes. The subject is fiercely debated on street corners and in cafes. More than any other nation Argentina lives and breathes football, its theories and myths. Their rich, volatile history is made up of both the sublime and the ruthlessly pragmatic.Īrgentina is a nation obsessed with football, and Jonathan Wilson, having lived there on and off during the last decade, is ideally placed to chart the five phases of Argentinian football: the appropriation of the British game the golden age of la nuestra, the exuberant style of playing that developed as Juan Perón led the country into isolation a hardening into the brutal methods of anti-fútbol the fusing of beauty and efficacy under César Luis Menotti and the ludicrous (albeit underachieving) creative talent of recent times. Argentina is responsible for some of the greatest footballers on the planet. Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistuta, Juan Román Riquelme, Sergio Agüero, Lionel Messi.

Angels with dirty faces by jonathan wilson