Ben Jarman Futbol

Football is blessed with some astonishing characters, those who have helped shape the game in a manner so radical that it ill never be the same again. None are more astonishing that Marcelo Bielsa, the relentless eccentric who laid the foundations for managers worldwide with his expressive, high risk football.  Bielsa is well known for his eccentricity, from resigning at Lazio after just 48 hours, to using a cool-box as a touchline perch during his time in Marseille. But no story can sum Bielsa up as eloquently as when he was held at gunpoint during an Argentina training camp in 2001. It's 2am and the Argentinian national team has used an army barracks as a training base in preparation for an upcoming match, in the darkness a small figure huffs and puffs around the perimeter of the barracks. An old CD player hangs out of his baggy tracksuit bottoms and his old trainers pound at the wet ground. Bielsa isn't listening to 'Santana' or 'Led Zeppelin' - he is liste

In the 1970's under dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina sunk into financial crisis like they had never seen before, the gap between rich and poor widened to record levels and unaccounted Argentines disappeared, beaten to death by the police. Living in Argentina was a life and death struggle. Literally.  Slim, long-haired with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth as he conducted his players, César Luis Menotti was everything Argentina's dictatorship wasn't during the 1970s. Menotti was a socialist, a thinker, a rationalised football man who understood that the game acted as a social voice for the people when it felt that all hope had evaporated. He provided a platform for society to speak and when he spoke himself, quoted writers, musicians and poets to his players. Menotti was a shining light in Argentina's darkest time.  As globalisation enveloped the world and liberalism was surging across South America, Argentina had divided itself in to an 'absolute'