SANTIAGO, Chile -- Take Route 60 east out of Santiago, past the town of Los Andes, through increasingly rocky terrain and up beyond the treeline. Climb up almost vertically, through no fewer than 29 switchbacks, past the Lago de los Incas.
If you stay on the winding road another two and a half miles, you'll reach the border with Argentina and the tunnel separating these Andean neighbours. But make a right turn after a mile or so and climb even further. Eventually, you'll hit the old border crossing. Greeting you defiantly, amid the icy winds and right smack-dab on the geographic frontier will be a 23-foot-tall statue: Christ the Redeemer of the Andes.
He's been there for 111 years and his message, inscribed on one of two nearby plaques, is solemn. "Sooner shall these mountain crags crumble to dust than Chile and Argentina shall break this peace which at the feet of Christ the Redeemer they have sworn to maintain."
At kickoff, the mountains were visible for the first time in days in the backdrop of the Estadio Nacional, courtesy of a smog-banishing breeze and clear skies. After 120 minutes of football and penalty kicks, the combination of floodlights and darkness made it impossible to see them, but presumably they were still there.
Chile did break the peace with Argentina -- in a sporting sense, obviously -- for 120 minutes. They attacked, harangued and harassed them for the entire match, accelerator jammed on "down" because that's how Jorge Sampaoli plays and that's what Argentina (who usually get the deferential treatment from opponents) don't enjoy. And after a 4-1 win on penalties, they were rewarded with their first ever Copa America, after 99 years and 37 attempts.
A colleague made the point before the game that 16 years of Augusto Pinochet and the University of Chicago School of economic advisors had fostered entrepreneurship and individualism, albeit at the expense of teamwork and collective endeavour. And this had infected the football, at least until the arrival of Marcelo Bielsa and then Sampaoli.
It may be a stretch and a forced analogy. But what's obvious is that without extreme teamwork, self-sacrifice and belief in your teammates, Sampaoli's football wouldn't work. It would be a bunch of stocky individuals running seemingly in circles leaving enormous gaps all around them, like some kind of silent movie from the 1920s.
They may have enjoyed some "home cooking" in terms of referees throughout the tournament. They benefited from more rest and less travel than any other team. And obviously, they had home-field advantage. But make no mistake about it, Chile are worthy champions, beating an opponent in the final that is simply better, man for man.
(Go on. Go position by position and ask yourself who you'd rather have: Claudio Bravo or Sergio Romero? Pablo Zabaleta or Mauricio Isla? Francisco Silva or Nicolas Otamendi? Don't stop until you've gone through both starting XIs. If you pick more than four Chileans, you either miscounted or don't watch much football.)
Yet that's why we have coaches and systems. Because when they work, tactics make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And that's what Sampaoli is all about. Guys like Jorge Valdivia, Marcelo Diaz and Charles Aranguiz will likely only ever watch the Champions League knockout rounds on TV. But in this system, for three and a half weeks, they were equal to the very best that European club football has to offer.
Was it going to be enough to beat Argentina? On a different day, probably not. Argentina had a penalty shout, referee Wilmar Roldan might have been a bit harsher when Gary Medel's roundhouse kick found Lionel Messi's breadbasket and, of course, there were the missed chances. Most notably, Gonzalo Higuain's at the far post in injury time, shades of what happened just under a year ago in Rio de Janeiro's Maracana Stadium against Germany. And then, there were the subsequent misses from the spot after 120 minutes.
But that's not how football works. It's not a question of adding up the incidents and seeing who comes out ahead. When the margins are this close -- seven guys booting a ball from 10 yards out is our accepted tiebreaker, meaning it is not a retroactive verdict -- it's about how you play as much as what you do.
On the night, Sampaoli had a gameplan and it worked. Challenge number one was stopping Messi 2.0 (the new international version) with added midfield playmaking. To do this, he drew up a whole new defense, switching from a back four to a back three. It's not entirely new in the sense that in the past, he used a three-man back line against better opponents.
What made it different was the personnel. Gonzalo Jara, he of the Edinson Cavani incident, was suspended. Jose Rojas, who started in his place in the semifinal, was dropped. Instead, Sampaoli called on Francisco "El Gato" Silva, who had last played for Chile back in October of last year, and he dropped Marcelo Diaz into the back three with Gary Medel.
Silva. Medel. Diaz: three central midfielders playing center-half at 5-foot-10, 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-5 respectively.
Was he done? Was he heck. Mauricio Isla slotted into the right wing-back slot, with Jean Beausejour on the opposite flank. Yes, the very same Beausejour who hadn't played a minute in the knockout rounds of this competition.
"I needed a centre-back with Silva's characteristics, he hadn't played much, but he was ready," Sampaoli explained. "Beausejour and Isla pushed up and played higher up the pitch than they would in a back four and that was important because it allowed Edu [Vargas] and Alexis [Sanchez] to play more narrow, on their centre-backs. And Diaz played an important role, shuttling between the defense and the midfield. He was our spare man and our driving force when in possession."
Put like that, it makes sense. Still, you can't imagine a more conventional manager chopping and changing like that without losing the dressing room. To do it, you need to match one of three profiles. Either you're some kind of Old Testament Deity at your institution (think Sir Alex Ferguson in the latter years), you have more charisma than Pope Francis or you've drilled in the kind of collectivist, 23-man squad, we're-all-equal trope that sounds good in Little League but rarely works in reality.
Sampaoli is in the latter category. "The idea was to stop the best player in the world," he said. "To do that, we had to control the game, dominate the midfield, press high and make the pitch big with our movement. We did that. Had we failed, Messi would have hurt us."
And if Messi was having an off-day -- he waned in the second half -- then the likes of Sergio Aguero or Angel Di Maria or Javier Pastore would have. After all, Argentina have tons of firepower.
"But instead it seemed to me like they relied on a defense that was solid and deep, conceding the ball and waiting for our mistakes," Sampaoli continued. "Of course we made mistakes, but the sheer volume of our attacks and our positional play mitigated whatever errors we made."
As the game wore on, it was never going to maintain the tempo of the first half-hour. But even then, with the two teams stretched and space appearing, Argentina failed to capitalize. And it was Chile who seemed to find extra reserves to tap into while Tata Martino's men increasingly seemed to rely on individual moments.
"The outcome of the penalties confirmed what we saw in 120 minutes of football," Sampaoli said. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martino disagreed. But without wishing to be too harsh, some of Argentina's problems were in fact down to misfortune, but most were either of his own making or due to Chile's play.)
After misses from Higuain and Ever Banega, Alexis Sanchez stepped up for the decisive penalty. He tapped the ball light into the bottom corner to the right of Sergio Romero, who had gone the other way. It was a near-Panenka -- "I watched every penalty he took in training and I never saw him do that," Sampaoli said afterwards -- and it underscored just how clear-headed and confident he was, even in that moment.
Sanchez may be one of two household names on this Chile team, Arturo Vidal being the other. But at that moment, he wasn't the resident superstar, he was just a cog in Sampaoli's Big Red Machine.
The collective had edged the individual. And Chile had won their first-ever Copa America, overcoming the titled aristocrats from across the Andes, which only made it sweeter.
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