SPORTING PASSIONS FELIPE CONTEPOMI: MARK RODDENtalks to the Leinster outhalf about his love of soccer, and especially the club he supported as a teenager in Argentina, Independiente
IN ARGENTINA, when you’re growing up you always have a soccer ball at your feet.
There are sports and then football is like a religion for us. That’s why you play in the back garden, the back yard – everywhere. You don’t see it played in the street as often now because it could be a bit dangerous but when I was growing up you would play there too.
I support Independiente, the third club in Argentina after Boca Juniors and River Plate. It’s been hard because the glory days were over when I was a teenager. It was always River or Boca who won but we had some good years in the mid-’90s and two good years in 2004 and 2005.
In school most of the guys supported River or Boca and they were always the champions. Everytime you played them you ended up betting stupid things for a joke – like a sandwich or whatever – and I ended up losing most of the time. So it was frustrating sometimes but I’ve kept with my team. In both good and bad times you have to be with your team.
I used to go to the games with my friends or my twin brother. But to go to a game I needed to take a bus, a train, a subway, another train and another bus. It would take nearly two hours to get there and two hours to come back because you were literally crossing the whole city and even farther. It was like an odyssey, especially when you were young. It would take me the whole of Sunday but it was great because it was a big adventure.
The most famous Argentinian player to come out of Independiente lately is Kun Aguero of Atletico Madrid, and Esteban Cambiasso of Inter Milan was another. The former Manchester United striker, Diego Forlan, is Uruguayan but he went to play for Independiente when he was young – that’s his club in Argentina.
Watching Argentina is fun but sometimes it’s a bit stressful as well because we take the games very seriously. But if you can’t go to the stadium when the World Cup or Copa America comes around, you get together with friends or family and you watch it together. It’s always good craic – you can make a barbecue and then watch the game.
It’s exciting times now because for the last 20 years Argentina have had a great team in terms of names but never delivered that much. After Italia ’90 when they got to the final, they’ve never really got that far apart from the last few years when they won the gold medal in the last two Olympics.
Now you start seeing that these young guys have been there for ages but they’re only 23 or 24 years old, so they give you hope for the next few years. I’m sure they can deliver something and obviously with Diego Maradona in charge he’ll take the pressure out of the players and let them express themselves.
If you see a game now, a lot of the time the cameras are not even on the game, they’re on the bench trying to see what Maradona is doing. I’ve never seen something like that.
It’s great for us to see because Maradona represents a lot. He’s inspirational for our sport and I think that having him in the national team game is great.
When I was young I always supported one team in England, one team in Italy and one team in Spain. Liverpool was my club in England, maybe because they wore red like Independiente.
Unfortunately I haven’t had many chances to go to Anfield but I’ve been once and it was great. I try to watch it every time I can on TV and it’s great because now you have Javier Mascherano there and for me the best player in the world, Steven Gerrard.
As for rugby, there’s been a big change in Argentina in terms of its popularity. You used to have only rugby people who would go to watch but now you would have a lot of what we call football people that watch rugby or go to the stadium, especially when the Pumas play.
It’s great because the people really support the team. In the last World Cup they told me that it felt like a football World Cup – when Argentina played the city stopped and the country stopped and that’s an unbelievable feeling.
They even changed a River-Boca game for us. It was supposed to be played at the same time as we were playing the quarter-final against Scotland.
It was supposed to be played at five o’clock and they changed it to two o’clock so that people could watch both games. For the football association to do that was incredible, and it shows how much they support and respect the Pumas.
