No Fight Club for Bilardo, just Friends

Like a group of screaming, goading and bloodthirsty primary school kids, Argentina’s football fans tuned into The Bilardo Hour late on Monday night en masse.

There was going to be a fight, and it was going to be well worth hearing.

For a moment, Argie Bargy felt that it had regressed to bygone years when jumpers were thrown down to make goalposts, when we loved it when plans came together, when Frankie said Relax, and when Ken Bates bought a failing second-division club in west London for £1.

Along with all the other thousands of listeners who had been promised broadcasting gold by Bilardo, this blogger was expecting a classic bout of fisticuffs.

You can keep reading here

Club president in the dock in Argentina - When Saturday Comes

Fernando Miele broke down in tears in the Buenos Aires courtroom on December 22. "My handling of the club may have been careless at times," conceded Miele, "but it was never criminal." San Lorenzo, the club in question and where Miele was president for 15 years, see things considerably differently. One of the five traditional grandes in Argentine football, San Lorenzo became the first club in the country to take a former president to trial for fraudulent administration.

Keep reading at When Saturday Comes, acá

Hola Hand of Gods

Right, after much ummming and arrring The Hand of Gods is back up and running.

More than anything, it'll just be links to pieces I've published online, so there'll be no more shoddy photoshop efforts or anything of the sort, just ramblings that have passed the eagle eye of subeditors...

Adiós Hand of Gods

Mum, Dad, the other three readers

After displaying the business acumen and negotiating flare of a señor sent from AFA, there is a new era in Argentine football blogging.

Weeks of intense meetings have resulted in the end of The Hand of Gods, and the beginning of a new, revitalised Argie Bargy at FourFourTwo.com - hopefully you will join me there

Also don't forget to check out The Enganche for more news and comment

Adiós for now

River vs. Boca

Everybody knows that there is nothing that Boca Juniors and River Plate - fans and board of directors alike - enjoy more than taking a dig at their city rivals. Minutes after a superclásico, cyberspace is inundated with abuse ranging from the outright profane to clever puns about the losing side. When a title is won, even if its just the Mar del Plata Cup, Buenos Aires is plastered with posters from the victorious side not so much celebrating their success, but rather pointing how their victory rates in the all-time scale of things.

This week, of all weeks, when it looks increasingly likely that there won't even be any football played this season (there will be, but for now the outlook is bleak), there have been two incidents worthy of a place high up in the folklore of River-Boca baiting.

First up the Millionaires. As the photo below shows, the Monumental was being used for other purposes than football on the day that Google decided to take a snap.

Boca, meanwhile, are at pains to distance themselves from the colours of their new sponsor, LG. "It's maroon, not red," insisted Jorge Ameal, the Boca president.

One of the club's vice-presidents, Marcelo London, said that if the company's colours were red and white then "Boca wouldn't even sit down to discuss a deal." If you say so.

Let there be football

"Do you know why the season isn't going to kick off," offers the bored policeman at the kiosk this morning. "Because Boca owe a shit load of money and Grondona's trying to cover it up."

Given the time of day and other more pressing matters at hand, i.e. breakfast, there wasn't time to stay and enjoy a bit of chit chat with the law. It was a slightly bizarre statement, however, because to suggest the chaos that football here has descended into is the fault of one club is plain lunacy.

The other slightly incongruent aspect of the scene was that as the copper held court, up above him a 20-something year old was pasting up a new billboard poster. It was a huge advert for Daniel Passarella’s presidential campaign to become River Plate’s president in the December elections. The football's off, but the boardroom politics wrangling continues. It's as if nobody is taking this threat of the season not starting seriously.

There's more. Finally sat down with a coffee and out of earshot of Señor Policia, Olé's excellent front cover stares up – PePetrol Sand. Pepe Sand has moved to the United Arab Emirates for 10 million petrodollars. The ‘fútbol’s not kicking off’ headline is tiny. For all of Olé's brilliance with their headlines and photoshopped front pages, their editorial decisions are slightly bizarre.

There are nine days till the 'big kick off', although as things stand there is no kick off at all. How many pages is this fairly serious issue given in the sports paper? One. Even the broadsheets gave it more column inches.

Most people are confident there will be a solution sooner rather than later, although needless to say the two sides are playing hardball for now. Some supporters are far from surprised at this latest development. Others took it a bit further and went down to AFA to let their opinions be heard but let the aerosols do the talking. Thieves! was the general gist of things.

Clarín added one detail from the 'escrache' - as public protests in Argentina are called - that the rest of the media missed. The anti-Grondona leaflets handed out at yesterday's protest outside AFA were printed three years ago. The protesters haven't even got the money to print flyers. But then the enemy in their eyes is still the same as it has been for the past 30 years, let alone three. Grondona, however, sees himself as the solution, rather than the problem. And therein is the problem.

Chewing the fat

In an inter-blog meeting somewhere in cyberspace, Mundo Albiceleste overlooked The Hand of Gods' recent exile and called up to discuss the forthcoming Argentina friendly, Brazil and that goatee... You can listen here