Bianchi

Woke up early on Saturday to play 6-a-side football with Argentines at 11am after listening to K’naan’s truly inspiring Wavin Flag. Having already played a few weeks previously, I knew what to expect, but the others didn’t. The pitch is inside; the turf is great, fake grass with fake specks of mud, but there is what appears to be a corrugated iron roof, turning the pitch into an oven. We played for an hour and forty minutes; most players had taken their tops off after the first five minutes.

Trudging back past beautiful houses in Barrio Parque, we passed an older gent wiping his windscreen, topless. As I still had my River shirt on, he pointed at it and exclaimed in French. At our nonplussed expressions he switched to Spanish, where it became clear that he was ‘puteando’ me for wearing a River shirt. The man in question, of course, was none other than Carlos Bianchi himself. Probably the most revered man in Argentine football, after Maradona, of course. Sworn at by a legend. Saturday afternoons don’t get better than that.