The life of Enrique Macaya Márquez can be told in links, advanced positions, world. Even in Telebeam orders, in passport stamps, in homicide plate reports, but never in outbursts. he will be remembered as A football lord, immutable, impassive, perhaps even cold. One of those gentlemen who doesn’t even swear by mistake or cry in front of a World Cup.
The rare bird that didn’t crack at the Lusail stadium didn’t want to beat anyone, but he beat the trio of majesty, Pele, Maradona, Messi. He has more World Cups than the sum of those who have played in them. Not for nothing in Doha international journalists were looking for it to see if it really existed.
The gray-haired man of half a century was not a hologram recalling the air of Qatar. In the flesh, dressed as he was 64 years ago, at his first World Cup on sitereceived a FIFA distinction for his perfect participation in 17 World Cups, since 1958.
the British newspaper Keeper highlights it as the Argentine of “hat-trick, the legendary broadcaster, The voice of Argentine footballJournalist Dave Hytner, chief football correspondent on that medium, was fascinated by his 17 adventures and dedicated an anthological article to him. The same thing happened with a domino effect with Hungarians, Croatians, Belgians, Danes, Koreans.
The body has memory. In the month in which his soul rattled through the streets of the Qatari capital, he felt the past itself projected, as if he could see himself landed as a debutant, with his young 23 years at the World Cup in Sweden.
After a huge “bird” (the DC-7) landed half a dozen times short of its destination, it had to continue its journey by train, bus and ferry. “More than 30 hours. On the flight I discovered that we were not going to Hamburg, but to Frankfurt. A lady taught me the phonetics to request a train ticket from Frankfurt to Hamburg,” she recalls. This time the trip was more generous.
Travel the world at 88 years old
-Many would have made a trip of that magnitude at 88 years old. Has your family tried to detain you at any time?
-No. I would not have stopped going crazy. They had already called me FIFA, Conmebol, I didn’t plan on not going. And I was accompanied by my son Gabriel.
-Have you traveled with the faith of a champion?
-No, with a measured faith. I had learned my lesson from the first World Cup, where I traveled to cover Radio Belgrano. They overcame us in what became known as “the disaster in Sweden”, with the Argentine team eliminated in the first round (6-1 loss to Czechoslovakia). Since I realized that anything can happen.
-What was the best of the 17 World Cups you attended?
-It is almost impossible to determine from the quality of the individualities in each that may or may not respond to the collective. If it comes to romantic interests, I will say that I choose Qatar.
-But he didn’t shed a tear when he realized that Argentina had become champions…
-No.
-Couldn’t you leave your impartiality at that moment too?
-I take refuge in analysis, in observation. I leave the emotion only for what is familiar. In Mexico, as soon as Argentina was consecrated and I worked alongside José María Muñoz, I remember that our South American colleagues came to embrace us, to thank us. The first thing I said to them was: but I didn’t play! In Qatar I was concentrated and attracted by the Messi phenomenon, this national team that made Messi a leader, could have taken that precedent or kept the debt, but ended up rounding it off, crowning a task.
-A year ago, when I imagined Qatar 2022, I said I’d never been able to talk to Messi. Did you finally resolve the issue?
-No. Amazing. I went to report one evening where the national team was concentrated, but I was unable to speak to him. I would like to ask you many things, why, for example, it stops suddenly, that custom is to rest, to find the perfect place. There are concepts that I would like to hear from him, I would like him to teach me to see it in another way.
For those who have entered the Guinness Book, all has not been a bed of roses towards West Asia: When he stopped in Madrid, he was told that due to some omission he did not have access to Qatar and saw his journey in jeopardy. “The production of Tournaments solved the problem right away,” he laughs at the scare that could have clouded everything.
For a month, her neighborhood in Doha was surreal, with reporters at every window. The company he works for rented a building, “a kind of modern lease” that made him reflect on simplicity Directorio and Carabobo, that 1930s Flores where he grew up along with four siblings and their parents, Ricarda Romualda and Ernesto. It is useless to argue with him. Perhaps seized by nostalgia for that world he inhabited through the eyes of a child, he turned around with the conviction that Alfredo Di Stéfano, his former neighbor, is still “the best of all”.
Birthday in Qatar
He didn’t have a conventional birthday party. On November 20, he celebrated his 88th birthday in the opening match of the World Cup, Qatar-Ecuador. That day also marked another extraordinary anniversary, 80 years of work, since starting his career as a newsboy in a position in Flores. At 15 he was already director of Radio El Mundo.
The one who played as a centrojás in the Nacional de Flores and Evita tournaments, is proud of all that he has achieved with a title of Mercantile Expert. He knows that for a generation he will always be Don First class football and for others the witness of unthinkable cycles: from black and white TV to color and from there to pixels capable of denouncing a player’s most imperceptible acne; from the first interview with Diego Maradona in his home of La Paternal, to that death in solitude, still incomprehensible.
Moved these days by the farewell to Pelé, whom he treated on many occasions when he landed in Argentina with Santos, he is in charge of clarifying that he has never been united by a friendship, nor was it the case with Maradona. for something Cacho Fontana entrusted him with the invention of the “usteo”: “I avoid the link so it won’t be misunderstood. It can be confusing, when friendship is involved, a reporter’s opinion may seem treacherous. This is much better: I have absolute independence.”
DirecTV Commentator, Don’t Think About Updating That Book (my vision of football) which he wrote nearly 30 years ago, at the height of Telebeam, when VAR wasn’t even a premonition of science fiction. Sweden 1958, Chile 1962, England 1966, Mexico 1970, Germany 1974, Argentina 1978, Spain 1982, Mexico 1986, Italy 1990, USA 1994, France 1998, Japan and Korea 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014, Russia 2018. . His signing in every World Cup is already a hard record for any colleague to beat.
“Marches a telebeam, Macaya”, they shout as a nod to the one who popularized that grandfather of the Var. “The Telebeam was an invention that we made, the rewinding, the analysis of the images, required more human effort. I would spend hours looking at the pictures before each show. It was less precise,” he laughs. “Look, I have a professorship at the University of Palermo: I always tell students that they have to learn the technology, not just master the football regulations. If you put a crooked camera, everything changes”.
Will we ever go back to that uninterrupted pre-Var football?
I think there is no going back. I think so because I think of the guys who do technology. I have been fortunate to work in times when dedication to regulations was required and when making a link from Banfield field was an epic. Now images may lie, but I’m in favor of technology, which modern football requires.
-He is not a nostalgic absolutist….
-No. The more technology, the better for the verdict. You can’t deny it. The problem is the interpretation. I want well-applied adult technology that is closer to the truth. The question is the approximation to the truth.
-Awesome with 2026, even with record widening?
-I don’t even think so. It is better to live than to think too much.
WD extension
Source: Clarin
