Semi-final/South Africa v Argentina:The Pumas generate a sense of camaraderie others can only envy, writes Gerry Thornley. They also have a talent for thriving on adversity. But they need help to maintain their present momentum
On Wednesday afternoon, the Pumas could be found in the back garden of their lakeside Grand Hôtel Barriere in Enghien-les-Bains, half an hour north of Stade de France, having a barbecue with families and friends. This is the week of their first ever World Cup semi-final, but you'd never have noticed. They could just as easily have been a bunch of mates, along with wives, girlfriends and children, just having a barbecue and a few laughs. Which, of course, is what they were.
A flu-ridden Felipe Contepomi, tracksuit buttoned up to his chin, generously abandoned the get-together to give a little of his time.
"I think the most difficult part will be when many of the most important players who have been here for a long time will perhaps give up," he remarks.
"They are like the soul of this team so we want to transmit to the young guys to follow the same route. I think if you speak to the older guys or the younger guys, they feel very comfortable, they feel like a family. Today we have a barbecue and all the families are together, the children play together; it's like one of those things you have if you are at your home."
It was ever thus. Irish journalists lucky enough to be at their training in Naas prior to the Ireland-Argentina game in the autumn of 2004 will recall being invited into a similar party. Come to think of it, the Pumas seemed to spend much of that morning session launching and chasing garryowens. Plus ça change then.
"We play every game as if it's the last game of our lives," says Juan Martin Leguizamón, the young London Irish number eight. "I think that's the best point in this World Cup for us. We play with our heart and lives, and we knew before the tournament that we came here to win everything that we can."
The Pumas have always possessed a decent rugby pedigree, and there were sporadic big scalps, especially at home, such as three wins over France in the 1980s.
"But the first crack in the Pumas was in 1997 against the All Blacks," says Sergio Stuart, a rugby writer with Olé, Argentina's sole sports daily. "The defeat was by 93-8."
The Pumas conducted a post-mortem in an Auckland hotel room similar to the one in which they held their media briefings on Wednesday. It was a meeting for players only. They resolved something had to be done. That defeat underlined how much they were struggling physically and they went to their union demanding action. The UAR managed to generate enough sponsorship to put into place some scholarships and invest in gyms.
Even so, before the 1999 World Cup, José Luis Imhoff and Hector "Pipo" Mendez both walked away from the job, saying the preparations were still too amateurish.
Backed into a corner, the UAR turned to the then out-of-work former All Black Alex "Grizz" Wyllie.
"The players closed together," says Stuart. "They said, 'This is for us. This is only for us.' They took control of the ship. This is the only reason the players had a goal in the rugby World Cup in 1999."
Wyllie was not seen as a technical or tactical revolutionary, but where before players might turn up late for training with impunity, if they were two minutes late under Wyllie they were fined. If they dropped the ball in training, they were made do 10 push-ups.
Agustin Pichot always gives credit to Wyllie for "giving us discipline".
The defeat of Ireland in the Lens quarter-final play-off gave Argentinian rugby its lift-off. It helped that a crop of highly talented young players grew up together. The brilliant centre and captain Lisandro Arbizu, the dead-eyed Gonzalo Quesada, Mauricio Reggiardo, Santiago Phelan and Rolando Martin have moved on. But a core of seven are playing in at least their third World Cup.
Out of little acorns and all that, for just as critically, overseas clubs started signing Pumas.
"This is the second key," says Stuart.
However amateurish the domestic game and the UAR are, however dispersed throughout that vast country are their estimated 60,000 players, they do have a few celebrated clubs to which the better players tend to gravitate.
So it is that seven of this squad - Juan Martín Hernández, Rodrigo Roncero, Mario Ledesma, Martín Scelzo, Patricio Albacete, both Fernández Lobbes - began playing with second-division clubs, and aspiring and talented Argentinian players can now see the rewards to be made from rugby.
The UAR reckon they have 400 playing abroad. Admittedly, many ply their trade in the lower French and Italian second divisions, some even in Portugal and Spain, for what the Argentine media say is the equivalent of "a sandwich and a coke".
But the leading Pumas have had to acclimatise themselves in a foreign culture, language and rugby environment to earn their first-team places with the best clubs in Europe. They are undoubtedly stronger for it mentally and none the worse for it skills-wise.
Yet, as with the fall-out from the defeat to the All Blacks in 1997, so a period of critical self-analysis was required after their failure to qualify for the last eight in Australia four years ago.
"We have the same management and same group of players who were ultracritical after the last World Cup," explains Contepomi. "And we put our main focus on the following World Cup because that is the only tournament we play in. We were aiming all our preparations over the last four years for this World Cup. That was the main objective.
"Secondly, I think that we have a very good mixture of senior players and young players, and the quality of the young players that have been brought in has brought up the standards. If you see Juan Lobbe or Juan Hernández or Juan Leguizamón or Albacete, they are all under 25 years old. If you see the way they play, they look like senior players in their maturity and their skills."
Contepomi describes as "unbelievable" that the River Plate-Boca Juniors derby in front of 75,000 people in Monumental was put forward two hours to accommodate television coverage of the quarter-final. But he worries about the future.
"Now it is time for the IRB, the UAR and the alickadoos to do something because from my point of view I am a rugby player, and we have to focus on playing rugby and training, not seeing how we can exploit this great moment for Argentinian rugby."
Another key element in the rise of Los Pumas has been Marcelo Loffreda, who has been in charge since April 2000. Though hailing from amateur days, his club San Isidoro are probably the most organised in approach of all the clubs in Argentina.
In their first tour under him to Australia, Loffreda and his assistant Daniel Graco brought two VHS tapes and an old recorder with them to introduce the concept of analysing the opposition.
When Les Cusworth was brought on board with the help of the IRB in 2001 as director of rugby (and opposition analyst) it helped Loffreda in his desire to make the Pumas more professional.
In any event, it is believed that Graham Henry and Jake White were among those who recommended Loffreda to Leicester - opening opponents for Contepomi and Leinster in the Heineken European Cup at the RDS on November 9th.
"I think that he's a very straight, up-front, honest guy for all that he has got in his life," says Contepomi. "He's very tough mentally. That's the way he played and that's the way he coaches. I think he now has a golden opportunity to go to Leicester, one of the best teams in Europe. He will learn a lot about the technical stuff or stuff that being in an amateur atmosphere you are not able to know, but he has what perhaps some other coaches lack, and that is a passion and love for this game.
"The main attribute, I always say, apart from all his sacrifices, is the way he can turn a negative situation into a positive one.
"This team, in the last seven or eight years, we've been having always adversities, always, always; every single time we play; with our union, the IRB, money, players being released. But he'll always bring us together and turn it into a positive way of thinking. And I think that's a very important thing; having the virtue that when the storm is there to be calm, to wait until the storm passes."
Regardless of what happens tomorrow, all the squad will return to Buenos Aires for a reception at the Presidential Palace, aka The Pink House.
The likes of Pichot, Ledesma and others who will not be around for the next World Cup, but will probably play on until next June so as to say a proper farewell against Italy and Scotland.
Save for obvious replacements for Pichot and Ledesma at scrumhalf and hooker, the spine of a strong team will be around for another few years.
But there is no obvious, professional, home-grown replacement for Loffreda. And in the longer term, Los Pumas must play in a proper competition.
Syd Millar has sought to give some lead by pointing them toward the Tri-Nations on the grounds, assuredly correct, that there is no room for them in the Six Nations or the European calendar. There are obvious stumbling blocks, such as player availability, generating sufficient sponsorship and television revenue.
As Loffreda also points out, the current level achieved by Los Pumas is unsustainable without a stronger domestic game. In this context the IRB would probably back a detailed UAR proposal for a professional, regional league drawing on South American players, but there is no sign of one being framed.
However, unless the IRB and the UAR, and perhaps more pertinently the Sanzar unions, act quickly, the future could yet be as black as the starting point of this era. That is the sad reality.
