Barcelona x Boca already had a 9-1 rout with Brazilian coach

Barcelona and Boca Juniors face off this Tuesday (14), in Saudi Arabia, for the Maradona Cup, a friendly match that honors Diego Armando Maradona (1960-2020), an idol of the Argentine club and who played for the Catalan team in the 1980s .

The teams have faced each other on other occasions in the past. The most famous of them, from a sad memory for Boca, took place in 1984, at the Camp Nou, in a duel valid for the Joan Gamper Trophy, the pre-season tournament organized annually by Barça.

It was a difficult time for the Buenos Aires club, which was experiencing a heavy economic crisis. The result, among other reasons, of the high investment to remove Maradona from Argentinos Juniors three years earlier, a loan that cost the coffers around US$ 4 million. Other heavyweights had also been hired to keep the ace company, which burdened Boca in the medium term.

Jorge Bitar, a historical director from Boca, didactically explained the balance of 1984 in a recent interview with Radio Gráfica: “There were more exits than entries.”

An episode that synthesizes this crisis and that became part of local football folklore took place in July of that year, in a game of the Argentine Championship.

With the players of the professional team on strike due to delays in salaries, Boca had to send an entire formation of youth to the field to face Atlanta.

By determination of the referee, Boca, despite playing in La Bombonera, their home, was forced to wear the visiting uniform, as Atlanta also has blue and yellow as its main colors. However, there was no set of spare shirts.

The palliative solution was to wear white training shirts and, to identify the athletes, the numbers were drawn with a pen. But the paint couldn’t stand the sweat and, within minutes, what were numbers became unintelligible smudges on the players’ backs. Atlanta won 2-1.

Amidst this scenario of economic and political instability, Boca Juniors traveled to Spain to face Barcelona in the 1984 Joan Gamper, a chance to raise a few thousand dollars and ease the crisis.

On August 21, tired of the trip to Catalonia, which added to an exhausting sequence of games in the region, the Argentines stepped onto the Camp Nou lawn for the Joan Gamper semifinal.

The team, coached by Brazilian Dino Sani, resisted until the 29th minute of the first half, when Alexanco opened the scoring for Barça. At 31, Scot Archibald has expanded.

The two goals in a row shake the Argentines’ nerves, especially those of Roberto Passucci, known for his heightened virility. With the score 2-0, Passucci made a bad entry for the German Bernd Schuster and was sent off, 33 minutes into the match.

“I remember that half an hour into the game, I caught a ‘patadón’ at the German Schuster and they sent me away. [na Europa], if you’re violent, you’re shown the red card,” said Passucci, more than three decades later, in an interview with La Nación.

The midfielder’s expulsion proved catastrophic, especially in the second stage.

After going to halftime with a partial victory of 3-0 (Archibald had scored the third), Barcelona crushed Boca and came to open 7-0 on the scoreboard, with Calderé, Alexanco, Schuster and Carrasco.

The Uruguayan Fernando Morena also took a penalty, but there was no pity on the part of the Catalans, who scored twice more, with Esteban and Marcos, finishing the rout by 9-1.

“It wasn’t 12 or 13 goals by a miracle. We are getting further and further away from European football,” said goalkeeper Hugo Gatti, from Boca, after the rout.

The clash at Camp Nou in 1984 represented the Argentine club’s worst defeat in history, including games from the amateur era.

Natalio Gorin, a journalist from El Graphic who accompanied that tour of Boca, published in the pages of the magazine what he saw of the sad rout he suffered. Words that, in addition to being very critical, especially in relation to the preparation for the trip, also did not hide the reporter’s club preference, who would later become director of El Graphic.

“I think I will remember this Tuesday, August 21, 1984 for my whole life. On that day I experienced unprecedented sensations as a journalist, as a man at El Graphic. So now, in the privacy of a hotel room in Madrid, I try to drive away the formalities Is it masochism? No, it can’t be. I open the notebook, I see this 9 to 1, and everything is a return [à derrota]. The last goals I jotted down like an automaton, scolding, as if an unconscious question rejected the simple action of writing down the minute and scorer of a goal: ‘Is this all happening or is it a nightmare?’