It is many mornings after the night before and the eve of what Graham Arnold hopes will be their greatest night of all – although Buenos Aires 1993 might take some beating. “I was talking about that in the car on the way here,” Australia’s head coach says. “It’s one of my great memories.” Back then, as a striker sporting a magnificent mullet and a moustache, he faced Diego Maradona for a place at the World Cup; 29 years on, the team he leads face Lionel Messi for a place in the quarter-finals for the first time in the country’s history.
“When I think back to my playing career, that’s one of the highlights of my life: to be able to play the qualifiers against Argentina in Australia and Buenos Aires but I’ve had a few highlights with Argentina,” Arnold says. “We beat them in the 1988 Gold Cup and with the Olympic team only last year. I just think they bring the best out of us and we go into tomorrow with a lot of belief and a lot of energy: it’s a big one. The name resonates around the world, as a footballing nation. It’s inspiring for Australia to play them.”
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Perhaps no night resonates quite like 93, for now at least, and Arnold is not the only link between that match and this one. The parallels between Messi and Maradona are irresistible too. “It’s crazy how similar they are to each other,” Arnold says.
Back then, they met in Sydney at the end of October and in Buenos Aires in mid-November. Arnold played up front for Australia, Gabriel Batistuta in attack for Argentina. Maradona was just behind. He was also playing his first competitive international since the final in 1990, called out of retirement to rescue a team in crisis.
“I clearly remember that we weren’t expecting to play Argentina,” Arnold says. “They had been beaten 5-1 at home by Colombia. Maradona had retired and put on a lot of weight and in the last five, 10 minutes the fans were singing for him to come back. He lost a lot of weight in six weeks and came back. He set up the goal in the first game. I’m not sure that he had that much influence but you couldn’t even get near him to kick him, he was that smart. Such a great footballer, and to be able to say that I played against him is great.”
It wasn’t just Maradona. At left-back was a tough, ginger-haired defender from Boca Juniors called Carlos Javier “Colorado” Mac Allister, called into the team after that catastrophic defeat to Colombia. You may recognise the name. Invited to the Casa Rosada to meet Argentina’s president Néstor Kirchner in 2005, Colorado [meaning ginger, reddish, as in the Colorado mountains] Mac Allister, who was born in the Pampas but has Irish and Scottish ancestors, would become involved with the centre right PRO party and eventually go on to serve as sports secretary in the Argentinian government. Three days ago he was at Stadium 974 in Doha with his sons Kevin and Francis, who are footballers, to watch his other son, Alexis, score his first goal for Argentina. Alexis too got the ‘Colo’ nickname – until Messi told teammates that he didn’t like it and to stop calling him that.
The first game in 1993 finished 1-1, the second 1-0 to Argentina, sending them to the World Cup. It was the last international Mac Allister played. Afterwards, he had appeared on television naked – local TV even got fined for it – but that was not the reason that his international career was limited to those two meetings with Australia and a friendly against Germany wedged between them. Instead, he believes it was because of a Boca-River clásico in which Ariel Ortega said “he tried to kill me”. Ortega went to the US that summer; Mac Allister didn’t. There, of course, the secret of Maradona’s slim-fast plan was revealed.
Maradona had been impressed by the reception in Australia – so much so that he had promised to ensure their national anthem would not be booed when they got to Buenos Aires, and he was as good as his word. Despite defeat, he had also been impressed by how they had played, and made aware of how little they earned. Earlier that evening Paul Wade and Raúl Blanco were invited on to Argentinian TV. During the show, the phone in the studio rang, Argentina’s captain calling in to congratulate them on how they had played. “Your tears of sadness will be tears of joy someday soon,” he said.
Very soon, as it turned out. That night, the Australian players were called down to the hotel lobby. A fleet of taxis were waiting to take them for a night out they would never forget, courtesy of Maradona. So just how good was it? Arnold laughs. “I haven’t got all day,” he says. After all, there’s another game to prepare, another story to write. Argentina again, the country that bring out the best in them.
