There was a time when Barça fans came to the Camp Nou with enough time to watch Maradona warm up while the journalists did not move from the press room to listen to Menotti. Nobody had explained football better than El Flaco or played like El Pelusa. The match and the result were already a different story that depended on the opponent, and then, in 1983 and 1984, the Barça antidote was Athletic del Clemente. Both were night and day and ended in a bad way in a shameful Copa del Rey final that meant the goodbye of Maradona and Menotti and the triumph of the rojiblancos, also League champions.
Although notable – he also won the Cup, a League Cup and a Spanish Super Cup – the trophies were not Flaco’s most important legacy, even though the goals scored by Pichón Marcos – with a sausage of Schuster included – and Maradona – the one in which Juan José left his crotch on the right post of Agustín’s goal – scored against Madrid. The greatest treasure that Flaco left behind was his ability to talk about football, to think about the game sitting on a ball and with a cigarette in his mouth, convinced that football was time, space and deception, as he told Lu Martín. .
He also claimed in that famous interview that the first coach who tried to play like Guardiola at Barcelona was Menotti himself. It was not arrogance, but admiration for the coach who now leads Manchester City. El Flaco taught us to talk, to seduce and also to smoke, all of us who had been waiting for a long time for the arrival of that Argentine magazine called El Grafico to the newsstands on the Rambla. I still remember that I filled six pages with his statements at the presentation press conference at the Camp Nou. “We have repeat players,” he said to explain how he saw the Barça squad.
“I feel like a musician in front of the best of scenarios,” he added at the moment of stepping into the stadium, always so witty that he convinced the directors, concerned about the night outings of players like Maradona, that if the games were played by In the afternoon you had to train in the afternoon and not in the morning, as had always been customary at the Camp Nou. It was not easy to mix Maradona’s dribbling football with Schuster’s long passes. The point is that he ruled out continuing in a club that is affected by historical emergencies despite the renewal offered by Núñez.
He left us with the word in our mouths and one last sentence: “Football is the only place where I like to be fooled.” It would be necessary to create a dictionary with Menotti’s phrases. His good taste for the game and his cultured and even poetic speech when talking about life, and of course culture and politics, caused the usual division of opinions: some adored him while there were also those who derogatorily baptized him as “ the philosopher”; several kept the nickname Flaco. If football is looked at through Cruyff’s eyes, it can be explained with Menotti’s words.
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