Julián Camino and Claudio Gugnali, Alejandro Sabella’s inseparable assistants. Photo: photo Mauricio Nievas
“Do you guys play tricks?”, challenges the 27-year-old who smiles shyly with irreverence, as if he were not the best player on the planet. Veterans react quickly, more impossible porteños (despite the fact that one was born in Maipú and the other in Ensenada): “We? We are champions of everything …“
And that’s where the table was set up. Some time later, the game was played at the top of one’s lungs, as if it were a group of gauchos facing each other in a grocery store in the Pampa Húmeda of yesteryear. Fernando Gago stands behind one of the veterans and passes the cards to Leone Messi. “It’s hostile ground,” they admit. And the screams continue. The uproar has generated the curiosity of Alejandro Sabella who comes to see what happens on the bottom of the plane that flew at the beginning of his cycle at the helm of the Argentine national team that would culminate with the runner-up of the World Cup in Brazil. The DT’s face changed when he saw that the protagonists were two of his assistants.
The anecdote was born in a conversation between Via Giuliana Y Claudio Gugnali in the Confessions cycle of TNT Sports. As follows? “It was Lionel”, they clarify, in case it was necessary who challenged them when playing the joke. And they continued with a Chicano: “Listen to me, you can play football very well but you can’t come and challenge us like that. We were champions everywhere. We had Enzo Pérez as a son in Estudiantes “.
“They couldn’t even sit at the table, against us”, Gugnali tells Camino. And they went all the way, to play away. “Sabella didn’t like it at all,” continued Claudio, Estudiantes defender.
Julián Camino and Claudio Gugnali, Alejandro Sabella’s assistants, recalled the final in Brazil 5 years after the 2014 World Cup Photo: Mauricio Nievas
The memory takes us to the tail of a plane, in one of the first flights of the Sabella team. Camino screams in Messi’s face: “Lack of envy! Shit, give me, shit …“, remembers what the other assistant from Pachorra said to him.” Messi looked at me as if to say, ‘He is crazy’“.
“It was totally hostile terrain”, Camino accepts and says that not only Pintita has passed the signs: “The other was Di María, but we knew it.”
At the end of the game they challenged each other in a rematch and the two found the coach: “That’s it, you already have them”, they told Alejandro, who couldn’t believe how his teammates had asked for calm: “Yes, playing ugly we will have them. A new one! “.
The late Alejandro’s teammates reveal that, before the World Cup in Brazil, they had doubts that the team would resist being locked up for almost 40 days in the Atlético Mineiro property in Belo Horizonte: “And you think we had a problem,” you ask. “Never”, the other ends. “What a lovely time we had.”
Every night they knocked on their bedroom door: “The tricks tournament begins.” And when they told Sabella he would have gone crazy: “What a trick, come and analyze the games!”, Reproached Pachorra. “We had to leave them alone, so we moved on to the hype … but we beat them anyway,” Gugnali swears.
When he saw the speech between the assistants of Pachorra, Ricky Alvarez, who was in the second place in the world, dedicated these words to them: “Much of the credit for the group that was formed in that process, went to these two guys. Sometimes, and at certain levels, the human and emotional factor is as or more important than any tactic and strategy, “wrote Ricky Alvarez to bow to Camino and Gugnali’s anecdote.”
The speeches of Camino and Gugnali
Source: Clarin
