The most important soccer game that South America has to show off to the world was going to be played in a strange context beforehand: on a Sunday afternoon and, although common in times of Covid-19, with a tiny handful of people present, only 1,500 special guests. But the scene of the most anticipated South American classic, perhaps the most attractive in the world, exponentially enhanced after the Maracanazo that gave Argentina the Copa América and a title after 28 years neither more nor less than in Brazilian lands, will always be a significant showcase . What happened this Sunday at the Corinthians Arena in São Paulo, however, was that the stadium was not this time a globalized window for a football match, but for something else. Mainly, for one reason: there was no football. The match that the National Team led by Lionel Scaloni had to play against Brazil for the sixth pending date of the South American Qualifiers, as is known, was suspended in the middle of a scene of dramatic and spectacular dyes: unknown characters arguing with world football figures about him. green grass, ghosts of deported players, alleged false affidavits, five minutes of football and more than three hours of uncertainty from the squad that won the last Copa América, a foreign delegation in Brazil governed by Jair Bolsonaro.
Scaloni had put on the court the same team that won the last Copa America in the Maracana, that controversial contest from its origin and cursed fruits in its final for Bolsonaro’s Brazil, which embraced its realization as soon as it knew that Argentina and Colombia would not host the tournament in especially tough times of the pandemic for the region.
Lautaro Martínez had won a ball under pure pressure and “Cuti” Romero had cleanly removed the ball from Neymar. Those two plays and not much more were what could be seen from Argentina before the curtain fell on football. The game, seen a few hours away, was nothing more than an appetizer, an intermission, of a larger and more complex game, still confusing and indecipherable, and of multiple actors.
The causes of what happened at the Corinthians Arena are wrapped in a nebula of information whose actors involved have not yet been in charge of detailing with clarity. It is not understood why the National Health Surveillance Agency of Brazil (Anvisa) waited until the game started to interrupt it and take the four Argentine footballers. (who had been in their territory since Friday), whom he had denounced for apparently violating immigration regulations related to the coronavirus pandemic, when according to the entity they entered the country “violating health regulations” by “allegedly declaring, in an official form from the Brazilian health authority, false information “, regarding his stay in the United Kingdom in the last 14 days. Nor has the AFA explicitly expressed itself on the issue of such accusations against its players, even though its president Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia assured that “here you cannot speak of any lie because there is health legislation under which all South American tournaments are played” and recalled that “the health authorities of each country approved a protocol that we have come fulfilling the maximum ”.
Florencia Carignano, National Director of Migration, was one of the legitimated authorities on the issue who also distrusted what happened: “All people who enter a country, including soccer players, when presenting their passport to the immigration authorities, are they have the tools to trace its provenance. If Brazil considered the country where the Argentine players came from as a risk zone, beyond the protocol established by FIFA, it could have acted when they entered its territory. Waiting three days and getting on the playing field suspending a game seems more like a staging than a sanitary measure ”.
But as has been said, that of the field of play did not seem more than a hint of other motivations and times. That Maybe it started with the bid that pitted the clubs against FIFA and that Premier League decision, the English soccer league, to endorse clubs that do not want to give up their players for the triple date of FIFA South American Qualifiers. OR, perhaps, with the found determination of the two greats of South American footballWhile the Argentines who play there (Emiliano Martínez, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Emiliano Buendía, the four denounced by the Brazilian government) ignored the British alert and joined Scaloni’s squad, Tité opted to disaffect their call to those who are active in England, including Thiago Silva, Firmino, Gabriel Jesus and Richarlison.
Or perhaps, the issue escalated, in reality, as one more symbolic display of Bolsonaro’s advance against the judiciary, with which he has been cruel in recent times, cornered between the effects of his handling of the pandemic and the elections of the the next year. It does not seem casual what will come after what happened with the South American classic, where the Brazilian government acted before the world as “defender of its people”, against the supposed “Argentine transgression”: tomorrow, September 7, Independence Day in Brazil, they expect massive mobilizations of supporters of the president against the magistrates of the Court and in order to promote the intervention of the Army in the Supreme Federal Court, marches that the president himself encouraged. “I doubt that those one or two who dare to challenge us, who defy the Constitution and do not respect the Brazilian people will not return to their place; The one who gives the ultimatum is not me, it is the Brazilian people, ”Bolsonaro threatened last Friday. His son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, was the one who pointed out the “transgression” at the Corinthians Arena: “The Argentines played tricks. They knew they were breaking Brazilian law, they stopped Anvisa from noticing them and forcibly brought up 4 (players) from England. Argentina should be severely punished ”.
The AFA published a photo at 9:19 pm of the campus already on a plane bound for Argentina. What happens at the football level, Conmebol said that FIFA will define it, since the classification for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 is its refereeing area. It is not clear, with the football illusion of seeing Lionel Messi shine against the still warm Verdeamarelha and skeptical, the scene of what was the Corinthian playing field in the afternoon in which the only thing that shone was precisely football, but due to its absence. The untimely entrance of the health authorities to the São Paulo arena seems to be losing its tone of surprise with every hour that passes, to make way for what does seem the greatest staging: the surprising health interest of a government that from its inception disdained the coronavirus, calling the disease “fluzinha” and waving the denial flag to become the second country with the most deaths from the pandemic.
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