Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Erico

During the Chaco War, while the peasants of Bolivia and Paraguay were marching to the slaughter, Paraguay’s soccer players were in other countries playing to raise money for the many who fell helplessly wounded in a desert where no birds sang and people left no footprints. That’s how Arsenio Erico came to Buenos Aires, and in Buenos Aires he stayed. Argentina’s leading scorer of all time was Paraguayan. Erico scored over forty goals a season.

That magician had secret springs hidden in his body. He could jump without bending his knees, and his head always reached higher than the goalkeeper’s hands. The more relaxed his legs seemed, the more powerfully they would explode to lash out at the goal. Often Erico would whip it in with his heel. There was no deadlier backheel in the history of soccer.

When Erico wasn’t scoring goals, he was offering them on a platter to his teammates. Cátulo Castillo dedicated a tango to him:

Your pass from the heel or head is such

a marvelous feat

a thousand years won’t see a repeat.

And he did it with the elegance of a dancer. “He’s Nijinski,” commented the French writer Paul Morand, when he saw him play.