As you’ve probably noticed, I was football-mad as a kid. I loved to play it and I lived for Match of the Day on a Saturday night and a local match on Sunday-afternoon television. And then, to make things even better, every four years along would come this orgy of football called the World Cup to liven up a long Suffolk summer.
I was born in 1965 so I remember bits of the 1970 and 1974 tournaments, but it was the one in Argentina in 1978 that had me glued to the screen. Every game the home nation were in, the pitch was covered in tickertape from their fanatical fans – it looked like giant dandruff everywhere. And one of their players stood head and shoulders (see what I’ve done there?) above the rest. He was their number ten, Mario Kempes.
He’s probably been forgotten by many people who saw those World Cup games. If any Argentineans stick in the memory, they’re more likely to be Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa, who both came to England and played for Spurs soon afterwards. Younger readers may never have heard of him at all, but as far as I was concerned he was the star of the tournament.
To begin with, you couldn’t miss him. Tall and handsome with long legs and flowing hair as black as your hat, he cut a majestic figure. He looked like a matador, which was what they called him. I’d better stop there in case you think this is turning into some boyhood homo-erotic fantasy. It ain’t, I can assure you. We didn’t go in for that sort of thing in Great Cornard. But no collection of my soccer heroes would be complete without Mario Kempes. He was a giant of a man and when he had the ball at his feet he seemed to be challenging anyone to have the courage to tackle him.
Even back then, there was something about the Argies. They were dark, unshaven, hard men with unbelievable skills and a volatile side to them lurking just below everything they did. I think they are to the Brazilians as the Scots are to the English; they have a chip on their shoulders over the relationship and no matter how hard they try they can’t get over it.
Nowadays, you can’t go to a Premiership ground or watch a Champions League game without seeing an Argentinean, so that air of unease about them isn’t as strong as it used to be, but back in the 1970s these unknown figures mainly stayed at home. Kempes was the only one earning a living abroad – he’d joined Spanish side Valencia a year before the tournament after scoring 86 goals in 107 games for Rosario Central.
In 1978, the Argentineans had never won the World Cup and, as they were the host nation, this was to be their best chance. Their manager was a long-haired, chain-smoking figure called Cesar Luis Menotti, who was so confident of the strength of his squad he decided to leave out the 17-year-old wonderkid of Argentinean football. The boy’s name? Diego Maradona. But you could see where Menotti was coming from. As well as Villa and Ardiles, he had a tough captain in defender Daniel Passarella and a courageous striker called Leopoldo Luque, who sported the kind of drooping moustache you don’t see any more and who should have been working as a villain in a spaghetti western.
And then there was Kempes, of whom Menotti said, ‘He’s strong, he’s got skill, he creates spaces and he shoots hard. He’s a player who can make a difference, and he can play in a centre-forward position.’
It wasn’t the kind of centre-forward we were used to seeing in England, though. He seemed to roam all over the opponents’ half, going wherever he pleased instead of ploughing the penalty-box furrow like a John Toshack.
But, as often happens, the host nation started badly and ended up second in their group behind Italy. That meant they had to play the next round away from Buenos Aires. Kempes, their main hope for goals, hadn’t scored in the first three games.
Menotti, who liked to think of himself as a bit of an intellectual, thought he had the answer, as Kempes recalled later. ‘We were so focused on the task in hand [that] we never left the training camp, and I couldn’t be bothered with shaving. After nearly three weeks I had a pretty decent beard and moustache. I played like that in our first two games, but shaved the beard off before our third. We were heading back to our camp after that match when the coach said, “Mario, why don’t you get rid of the moustache and see if your luck changes?”
‘The coach had been over to see me before the World Cup to see how I was getting on in Valencia. At that time I was clean-shaven. “You didn’t have a beard or moustache when you were playing for Valencia,” he said to me, “so why don’t you shave when we get to Rosario and you might start scoring again?” I took his advice and ended up scoring twice that day [against Poland]. That marked the start of a new chapter for me. After that every time he saw me, he’d say, “You’re due a shave today, Mario, aren’t you?”’
And with the next three matches being played in Rosario – the city where he’d begun his career – ‘El Matador’ came to life. After he’d scored both goals in the 2–0 victory over Poland, there was a 0–0 draw with Brazil and then the third and crucial qualifying game. The Argentineans needed to beat a good Peruvian side by a hatful to get into the final and they did it with ease. Rather too much ease, said the suspicious Brazilians. They had a point: Peru had a good side yet they rolled over as the Argies scored at will past Peru’s Argentineanborn goalkeeper. Stewards’ or what? But what did I know or care about that? All I knew was that Kempes had scored another two goals in the 6–0 bum-smacking.
That brought the Argies up against Holland in the final. The Dutch, who were in the final for the second tournament running, didn’t have Johan Cruyff, but they still had most of their other players from four years earlier and they were determined not to be bullied out of the game. The match even started with a row over a lightweight cast on winger Rene van de Kerkhof’s arm and that delayed the kick-off.
Despite a strong Dutch start, Kempes was the hero for the vast majority of the 71,000 crowd as he tapped home the opening goal after strong running by Luque and Ardiles. Substitute Dick Nanninga headed an equaliser ten minutes from time but you could tell it wasn’t going to be Holland’s day when Rob Rensenbrink’s shot hit the post in the last minute. In extra-time, Kempes took a grip on the game and every time he got the ball you could see the fear in the Dutch. Eventually, he beat and barged his way past three men to bundle the ball past the keeper Jan Jongbloed to put Argentina ahead in the 105th minute. He then set up winger Daniel Bertoni five minutes from time to make it 3–1 to Argentina. That was the end of the scoring, and joy, as they say, was unconfined. Cue more dandruff.
Kempes later said that the highlight of that World Cup was the players’ rapport with the crowd all the way through. ‘Even when we lost against Italy in the first round, they kept on singing. It was incredible. Every time I went on to the pitch, I had goose bumps. From the pitch, you can’t see individual faces but you can hear all the shouts getting louder and louder as the game goes on. The final was incredible. We were all on a cloud. I’ve never felt such emotion as I did then. The people’s fervour was exceptional: it was really something beautiful.’
El Matador also ended up as the tournament’s top scorer with six goals and was also voted 1978’s South American Footballer of the Year. Oh, and as well as winning the trophy, the Argentineans also won the FIFA Fair Play award. That’s like Switzerland winning a ‘Services to the War’ award.
After becoming a world champion, Kempes returned to Valencia, where he had two successful spells – one either side of a year with River Plate in 1981, when they won the Argentinean championship – making 247 appearances and scoring 146 goals. He was back in Spain in time for the World Cup in 1982, but his third and final World Cup tournament ended in disappointment. Kempes didn’t score – despite having his barnet cut – and the Argies went home early after the second group stage. That was the end of his international career, during which he scored 20 goals in 43 appearances.
He later moved to a smaller Spanish club, Hercules, before winding down his career in Austrian, Chilean and even Indonesian football as a player-manager. He finally retired in 1996 at the age of 41, but was fresh enough in Pele’s mind eight years later to be included in the great man’s list of 125 greatest living footballers.
For his final World Cup in Spain, the Argentineans numbered their players alphabetically by surname, so bizarrely Ardiles had the number one on his back. They made an exception for just one player who said he wanted to wear his favourite number ten. No, it wasn’t Kempes – it was Maradona who insisted on having it. No prizes for guessing who I think looked better in it – El Matador.