He had survived so many things that, in the long run, we ended up believing that his slender figure, his cigarette in his mouth and his shoulder-length hair would accompany Argentine football forever. His parents’ house was riddled with bullets twice when he was a kid. An Argentine dictatorship which was angry at having a certified communist coach but had to resolve to cohabit with a national hero. And these decades of heavy smoking, a guilty pleasure from which he had to finally put his foot down after lung surgery in 2011. César Luis Menotti died on Sunday May 5 at the age of 85 and it’s football in his most romantic aspect which disappears a little with him.
