'I could talk about tactics, but I'll be sincere,' said Gerardo 'Tata' Martino. 'Tuvimos mucho culo.'
Martino said this when Paraguay knocked Brazil out of the Copa America on penalties, but he could well have used a similar phrase after qualifying from the group stage, not having won a game, or indeed after the semifinal against Venezuela.
For all the preparation, tactics and team selection, Martino said it was culo that had taken Paraguay through. Luck, to put it in slightly less crude terms than the coach himself. 'Culo, and heart,' Nelson Haedo Valdez hastened to add after seeing off Brazil, agreeing with what his coach has said.
Paraguay reaching the Copa America final has reminded many of Greece's Euro 2004 victory, with the side based on a similarly defensive scheme and lacking the big name stars that dominate bill boards around the world. But Greece won a group game. And it beat France and the Czech Republic to reach the final, which they also went on to win. They may have only been 1-0 wins, but they were wins all the same.
Paraguay has the possibility of entering the record books for not just reaching a final without winning, but winning the tournament without actually winning. They just need another penalty shootout.
Luck has indeed been on its side. Brazil had eight shots on target to Paraguay's one effort in the quarterfinal.
In the semifinal, Venezuela hit the post three times. “You have to score, and we have players who take great penalty kicks,” shrugged striker Lucas Barrios, fielding questions in the mixed zone over the side winning on spot kicks, “and a keeper who is brilliant at stopping them.”
Paraguay's Dario Veron scores the decisive penalty kick of the semifinal penalty shootout as Venezuela's goalkeeper Renny Vega looks on. (AP Photo/Roberto Candia)
The semifinal with Venezuela was written off - correctly - as an absolutely shocking match of football, and the team got off lightly with only a fine for the post-match brawl, but while Paraguay awaits its chance to repeat their 1953 and 1979 Copa America wins, there is some logic in the albiroja making the final.
Of the four South American teams to make the last 16 at the 2010 World Cup, two also fell at this year's Copa America - Argentina and Brazil. The other two, Uruguay and Paraguay, have made the final. It makes sense that the teams that performed well a year ago against the best in the world should continue that form a year on.
Argentine magazine El Gráfico went so far as to suggest in their Copa America preview that it was a great chance for Paraguay to impose itself as one of the continent's powerhouses.
Whether or not the fashion in which Paraguay have reached the final, or indeed how it reached the World Cup quarterfinals, is one to applaud or not is a question of aesthetics and one for the purists to argue over. With a limited pool of players – Paraguay’s population is nearly 30 times less than Brazil’s, six times Argentina’s – the recent success has been down to no-nonsense tactics while developing a medium-term strategy to develop future talent. In the meantime, Martino has brought in a number of ‘transfers’, nationalizing Lucas Barrios, Néstor Ortigoza and Jonathan Santana, all Argentine by birth but of Paraguayan parentage.
Perhaps these inclusions have meant that the old tactic of speaking in the local language of guaraní during games to avoid their South American cousins understanding them has had to go out of the window.
But under Martino, despite some local antipathy towards an Argentine coach bringing in a number of Argentine players to pull on the red and white rather than the blue and white, the progression has been sharp, making the World Cup quarterfinals in South Africa for the first time in their history, and now reaching the first Copa America final in 32 years.
Martino will have to watch the final in the stands, having been handed a suspension after being sent off in the semifinal for arguing with the fourth official. He will look to his captain and goalkeeper, Justo Villar, for leadership out on the pitch. And if the final with Uruguay goes to penalties, Martino will look to Villar for luck as well.
