Riquelme, football's philosopher from Argentina

Editor's note: Argentina is creating waves in this early phase of 2006 World Cup football.
Coach Jose Pekerman has built the Argentina side around Juan Roman Riquelme.
Riquelme, Argentina's playmaker, sometimes seems to be playing a game beyond his peers.
He is modern football's philosopher in action.
As the World Cup throws up more twists and turns here is a story that delves into that moody Argentine's mindscape.

By Jason Cowley/The Observer, London
Very occasionally a player emerges in world football who, in style and method,defies categorisation. He is the player who invents his own idiom, plays in a manner and at a tempo that is entirely his own.
One thinks of the young Franz Beckenbauer who, as a counterattacking libero, showed again and again how a defender could be the most creative player in the team.
At this World Cup we have Juan Roman Riquelme of Argentina, the outstanding player of the tournamentso far, and the one stylistically most unlike any other here in Germany. Tall, slim, long-legged and often morose in appearance, Riquelme, who plays for Villarreal in Spain, operates in midfield, just behind two central strikers.
That, at least, is his nominal position, but in truth he goes wherever he wantsas he seeks to create space and possibilities for those around him. In many ways, he is the closest thing football has to a quarterback, the most influential and glamorous position in American sport. The quarterback is the creator, the player who invents the game as he goes along.
If it means passing back or sideways, in order to progress, so be it. Because what Riquelme has, above all else, is patience, the very quality Leo Beenhakker, the veteran Dutch coach of Trinidad & Tobago, says England, so hurried and committed to the longball, palpably lack.
As well as patience, Riquelme's great gift is one of decision-making, of knowing when to 'call the play', and of knowing intuitively what will and won't work and why.
As such, he is the fulcrum of what may be thebest Argentina side since the Maradona-led World Cup winners of 1986, the playermost cherished and, some think, most indulged by the coach Jose Pekerman.
Why is Riquelme indulged?
Because he seldom tackles, rarely hurries back to defend, even when he loses the ball, and can be wildly inconsistent. Above all, he seems to move at his own languid pace. He knows what he wants to do and how to do it, and everyone else will just have to go along with him.
If he plays well Argentina play well, and two days ago, beneath the closed roof of the magnificent Stadium AufSchalke in Gelsenkirchen, Riquelme offered those of us fortunate enough to be there a masterclass in how to move and pass and thus dictate a game.
The players of Serbia & Montenegro, thrashed 6-0, could do little but look on in baffled fascination as Riquelme, the Fifa man of the match even though he did not score, destroyed them with the brilliant simplicity of his passing and movement.
Argentina's second goal, scored by Esteban Cambiasso after a sequence of 24 passes, was the best of the competition, a symphony of collaboration - 'the most beautiful goal', according to Hernan Crespo.
And, because of the intricacy and languor of its build-up, the epitome of everything that the 56-year old Pekerman, appointed in autumn 2004, is striving to achieveas a coach dedicated to a slower, less direct, more classically South American game.
It is often said in Argentina that, because he rarely smiles on the pitch and is reserved and undemonstrative off it, Riquelme plays without joy. This is quite wrong. When, for instance, that second goal went in against Serbia and his team-mates rushed to embrace the scorer, Riquelme, alone, turned towards the bench, to coach Pekerman, and opened his arms wide in a kind of private rapture,as if to say: 'Yes, this is how the game can and should be played.'
Here, for sure, was joy enough. Yet Riquelme is often criticised in Argentina.
His performance in their first game, in which he provided the passes that led to both Argentina goals against Ivory Coast, was widely celebrated in Europe but received with some scepticism at home. He is too slow and unaccommodating, it was said, and plays only at his own pace.
He will not adapt; if the team cannotbe built around him, he retreats and withdraws.
'A friend of mine calls Riquelme the tollbooth,' says Jorge Valdano, a member of Argentina's WorldCup-winning team of 1986 and now a self-styled philosopher of football.
'When the ball reaches him it has to stop. The rhythm and direction of play will depend, to a great degree, on Riquelme's level of inspiration. And Riquelme is not always inspired.'
To which Pekerman counters: 'Some say that Riquelme is slow. But he's not slow when he's in possession. It's the ball that should do the running, not the player.'
On the train to Gelsenkirchen a group of journalists from Argentina were, as expected, divided over Riquelme. 'It's all aquestion of style,' said Ferrarini Guido of Diario Hoy.
'For me, Riquelme is too slow, too mournful even. I prefer someone quick, with happiness and with flair, like [Pablo] Aimar or [Lionel] Messi. But Pekerman sees only Riquelme. He is like a son to him.'
Born on 24 June 1978 in Don Torcuato, Buenos Aires, Juan Roman Riquelme grew up in a family of 10 in hardened poverty. But he is not, as some suggest, a semi-literate child of the villas miserias, the equivalent in Buenos Aires to the favelas of Brazil.
His was not a slum childhood. Nor is he of Amerindian extraction, though some suggest he is. 'That's the romantic cliche, isn't it, that Riquelme is the illiterate street kid, with an Indianfamily background?' says the London-based Argentine journalist Marcela Mora YAraujo.
'Yes, his background is very poor and very tough. But he went to school and he once told me how fortunate he felt to have grown up with enough open spaces around him in which to play football 'from dawn to dusk', as he put it. His family is very important to him and he still speaks of Don Torcuato as home.'
Riquelme, like Maradona before him, played for both Argentinos Juniors and then Boca Juniors, the club he supported and for which he dreamed above all others of playing as a young boy. When he was at Boca, and because he wears the No 10, he was called 'the new Maradona'.
What else would they call him? But the two players - in style, physique and personality - could not be more unalike, even if in their individuality and flair it can seem at times as if they are playing a different game from everyone else - their own game, without obvious peers.
In 2002, Riquelme, who is married with two children, joined Barcelona for a reported £10m. This was a difficult time in his life.
Shortly before leaving Buenos Aires his brother, Cristian, was kidnapped, as have been the family members of several notable South American footballers, most recently the mother of Brazil's Robinho. Riquelme negotiated with his brother's kidnappers and paid the ransom for his release. This, he has said, was why he left his beloved Boca, though this may be disingenuous, because he was also in dispute with the club over his contract.
The move was a failure. Barca's then coach Louis van Gaal spoke of how Riquelme was a 'political signing' from within theclub, not his, and he treated the new arrival with indifference. On the rare occasions Riquelme played, it was usually out of position on one of the flanks.For the first time in his career, Riquelme's confidence withered.
As a player, he needs to feel wanted, as Pekerman, for whom Riquelme excelled as a member ofthe 1997 World Youth Cup-winning team, makes him feel wanted. 'He needs to havethe whole team built around him,' says Guido.
In 2003, the year after he was left out of the Argentina squad for the World Cup in South Korea and Japan, Riquelme joined Villarreal - he speaks of being 'rescued' - a small-town Spanishclub with a wealthy and ambitious president.
This was the start of his comeback. He began to relax again, surrounded as he was by fellow Latin and South Americans, including Juan Pablo Sorin, the captain of Argentina. The intensity and expectation were lower than at Barcelona. He felt wanted again and soon he was once more the fulcrum of the team.
Last season, improbably, Riquelme inspired Villarreal to the semi-finals of the Champions League, where they wereknocked out 1-0 on aggregate by Arsenal, having dominated the second leg in Spain. Riquelme missed an 89th-minute penalty which, had he scored, would have taken the game into extra-time and probably taken Villarreal, because they werethe better side on the night and the momentum was theirs, on to the final in Paris.
Rarely can a player have appeared more fretful than Riquelme as he prepared to take that penalty. It was almost as if he already knew what would happen next. He spat repeatedly; he could not stop looking at the ground, andthen up he ran... and missed. Or rather, the diving Jens Lehmann saved his weakshot. Is it only in retrospect that he looked like a condemned man?
Inevitably, in Argentina, this led once more to anguish about his temperament and his suitability for the national team. All that is in the past, and now, as Riquelme looks up, with Argentina moving so confidently into the last 16, he must see before him the possibility of greater glory. Certainly, he is the tournament's most influential player so far, and its most original, the footballer-as-quarterback.
He may not run extravagantly with the ball like Ronaldinho, or move and dribble as Kaka can, and he will never score a wonder goal of the kind patented by Maradona. But as he has shown here, and Pekerman has long understood, Juan Roman Riquelme can control the tempo of a game like no one else. In so doing he can lead his hugely accomplished and motivated team to the greatest prize of all.