We will not live this again: Newell's Old Boys vs Sao Paulo, Copa Libertadores Final, 1992

What I've learned from watching hours of South American football from 1992 in pursuit of, I dunno, Marcelo Bielsa's soul, or something, is that South American football in 1992 wasn't very good, and the pressure in the late stages of pan-continental tournaments seemed to make it worse. The final of the Copa Libertadores in 1992 was played over two tense, scrappy, antagonised legs, technically poor but never technically boring. From a tactical point of view, it's not illuminating, but perhaps it does shine a light where I wanted to look: the soul.

At some point I'll try to go back to Newell's domestic league games and find them schooling somebody, because the problem in the Copa Libertadores final is that, as in the semi-final, Newell's are the underdogs and play like it. Wearing no.2 for Sao Paulo is Cafu, who became the most capped Brazilian of all-time, here just turned 22 but already a quality player, a significant threat from right-back; wearing no.2 for Newell's Old Boys is Fernando Gamboa, a few months away from turning 22, who ended his career with fifteen caps for Argentina but whose main threat is to the health of the opposing players. Gamboa might lack Cafu's quality but he rivals his confidence, watching a ball bouncing thirty yards from his own goal, then executing an acrobatic overhead kick to his own goalkeeper, ten minutes into the first leg.

That difference extends from the two no.2s across the entire teams. In the first leg, at Newell's stadium in Rosario, Sao Paulo do all the attacking but lose the game, to a first half penalty for handball that gives Newell's licence to be even more defensive than Sao Paulo were forcing. Newell's most dangerous action of the game came when Sao Paulo's keeper Zetti parried a long range volley, and was scythed down by Alfredo Mendoza as he picked up the rebound; that and a classic Pochettino header from a crossed free-kick, the kind I've seen him bury several times even in the few Newell's games I've seen, but here goes just wide. One of the main discoveries in this game is not the football, but that Newell's ballboys have a system using a fishing net on a stick to retrieve the match ball from the moat in front of the stands. 

In the second leg Sao Paulo have everything behind them. The soundtrack in Newell's changing room is Vilma Palma e Vampiros, a rock band from Rosario just enjoying their first continental hits, and then the words of Marcelo Bielsa. "There are eighty thousand people out there, but here there is a team of men who are willing to go out and win! Winning the Cup will allow you to walk with your heads held high in Rosario for the rest of your lives. Go out and win!"