When Holland and Argentina clash this afternoon in Marseille it will be another one of those games where the clouds of history cast shadows. The Dutch still vividly remember their 3-1 extra-time defeat to the Argentinians in the World Cup final of 1978. It was the end of the beautiful era for the Dutch, a period of flashing football and strong personalities which revolutionised the game and reaped a bitter harvest of two World Cup final defeats, both to host nations.

For the Argentinians that victory has lost a little of its lustre over the years as the realisation of the extent to which the team and the sport were prostituted for political propaganda dawned.

"If I had known what was happening I wouldn't have played on that team," Daniel Passarella has said of the competition which should have been the unapproachable peak of his distinguished career.

Passarella personally accepted the World Cup trophy from General Jorge Rafael, the head of the military junta. Presenting something was a break from macabre routine for Rafael who made thousands of Passarella's compatriots disappear in the years before and after the victory.

Passarella has a different, more distinguished footballing past than that of his rival today, Guus Hiddink, but if they could exchange more than the cursory few words of greeting, congratulation and commiseration today they might enjoy a fascinating discourse.

They coach two teams in the process of healing themselves from disaster. They both coach their countries with the memories of greater, more charismatic coaches still lingering in the minds of their respective publics.

Passarella took over after the last World Cup before the tears had even dried. The Argentinians began that competition brilliantly, but ended it at the quarter-final stage, fragmented and broken after Maradona's shameful and distracting exit following a positive drugs test for ephedrine. Passarella, who had coached River Plate to three league championships, took over in the aftermath and cracked the whip loudly and often.

His players are regularly drug tested. He made odd pronouncements about not wanting gays on his team and demanded that all his players get their hair cut, a decision which he and compliant players have attributed to a desire to alter the image of the team as well as the substance. Too late, though, for Fernando Redondo, the gifted Real Madrid player who cut his locks too late to heal the wounds which previous rows with Passarella had created. Too late also for Claudio Caniggia whose seedy past distanced him from the manager.

Passarella has been obsessive about blinkering his players to the distractions which surround a World Cup. The Argentinians train at L'Ecrat and Passarella has erected a 24-foot high fence around their training pitch. His team won't speak to the media unless it is in group sessions. Their manager insists that he feels they aren't ready to win a World Cup yet. But they are moving that way.

The most uncompromising of defenders in his time, Passarella's team hadn't yielded a goal in eight games before they met England at St Etienne. All this has been achieved without a figure of his own rugged dimensions (or Oscar Ruggeri's) marshalling the defence. He has changed the Argentinian way.

"We were never an organised team before 1978," he has said. "Menotti and then later Bilardo came in and changed the way we approached things, gave us organisation. They had different philosophies and I have taken a little of both and given a little bit more discipline."

Looking to become only the third man to win a World Cup as a player and a coach (Mario Zagallo and Franz Beckenbauer are the others), Passarella notes that it is the bad times rather than the good which have shaped him. He lost his 18year-old son Sebastion in a motoring accident some years ago and has placed his regrets on the record about playing on that 1978 World Cup winning team which acted as the heroic dupes for his country's military junta.

For Hiddink there are no such jagged peaks and troughs on his personal history. Just on his teams. The scars on the face of his squad are fresh and unavoidable to the eye.

The hero of their tournament so far, Edgar Davids, was sent from Euro 96 by Hiddink after the player accused the manager of favouritism. The team lost in the quarter-finals to England in a performance of almost surreal meekness.

It made for a tough time for Hiddink who, never having been an international player himself, struggled initially for the respect of his gifted charges and found it difficult to mend the holes left in the team by the virtually simultaneous departures of Rijkaard, Koeman, Van Basten, Wouters and Gullit.

Rehabilitation was a long time coming, but Hiddink was determined to effect some sort of reconciliation as a gesture to a squad which was fractured along racial lines to the extent where players of different colours ate at different tables.

The uneasy harmony has come close to cracking several times. Richard Witschge ruled himself out of the running for a place in France and publicly attacked Hiddink for his handling of team affairs.

Then, after the breathless injury-time victory over Yugoslavia in the second round, there was an unfortunate little incident which emphasises the tinderbox nature of the team.

Pierre van Hooijdonk, celebrating wholeheartedly, grabbed goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar around the neck. The goalkeeper, suffocating unbeknownst to van Hooijdonk, lashed out and hit Winston Bogarde in the face unintentionally. For viewers back home in Holland that incident sounded sirens of alarm.

Hiddink brought Bogarde and van der Sar in by the ear and made them talk through the business until the smallness of it became a joke among the players.

"It is a sign of the progress we have made in these matters that by the end of the week we were able to joke about the incident in training sessions," said Hiddink. "That wouldn't always have happened with this team."

"In the past this might have led to tension," added Frank de Boer "But we are two years further along and everyone is more adult. You have to react quickly and not let it get a life of its own."

Hiddink has been helped somewhat by the fact that his team, unusually for the Dutch for whom the opposite is generally the case, lack a natural leader. His team is composed in the main of relatively quiet players and there has been little of the outspokenness which have illuminated the Dutch camp in previous competitions. Even the fiery Davids has restricted his bile for the Dutch press, answering questions only in English and Italian at press conferences.

Tomorrow is a game which will define how either manager is remembered and judged in his own country. Passarella said this week that he will be standing down after the World Cup, probably to coach in Europe. If the Dutch fail to at least reach a World Cup semi-finals, the quiet, less autocratic Hiddink is unlikely to have his contract renewed. His appointment three years ago caused some surprise in Holland as his two previous assignments at Fenerbahce and Valencia had ended in dismissal, clouding earlier achievements with PSV.

"We remember 20 years ago in Holland," says Hiddink, "but we don't have the luxury of letting it motivate us too much. This team needs to find its unity and reach its own potential."

"This is the test for Argentinian football," says Passarella. "Winning with a different style and winning in Europe which no Argentinian team has done before."

Conflicting needs. Only one winner possible.