Meet Argentina's forgotten genius who was a world away from modern master Messi

I was re-reading the Leo Messi authorised biography I wrote few years back as part of my updating of it for the Spanish, Italian and English markets (due to be released in the UK before the World Cup) and I found a true gem. The story of the Trinche Carlovich, a genius, they say. The best player ever you never heard of before. But he is also something else -a very good way of remembering why the real genius are those that beat all the obstacles that Trinche could not overcome. Here is that tale…

Diego, Diego, it’s an honour to welcome the best player in the world to our city. The best player has already played in Rosario! His name is Carlovich.

That was Maradona’s response when he arrived in Rosario in 1993, at the start of his brief stay at Newell’s. Carlovich. As it stands it might sound like any other Yugoslavian name – an immigrant’s name. And so it is. In the streets of Rosario people fill in the gaps: Carlovich!? A football legend, the king of the double nutmeg. The man who, stepping on the ball, made time stand still. One day he escaped a defensive trap with a single backheel that lobbed past three of his opponents. There was no other like him. What Messi does, what Redondo did, what Maradona did, was in his DNA. Not Diego, not Leo, it was Carlovich. He was the greatest.

So they say.

There is not a single piece of film of the man they call Trinche Carlovich, an Argentinian footballer of the 1970s. You can find newspaper cuttings and the odd photo that will show the footballer with long legs and long sideburns. Hands firmly planted on his hips. Huge. A footballer from the neighbourhood. Those articles talk about individual moments of brilliance that grow with time and the telling. And also of one legendary game in particular.

Not long ago they asked Trinche, no longer physically able to do what he once did with the ball, what he felt when he heard these things, when he remembered how they used to sing his name from the stands and how they came from all over Santa Fe province to see him. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘turn back the clock. Would you have done anything differently?’ At the end of the day, he played only two games in the first division. Carlovich’s lip tightened. ‘Nooo.’ He turned his head. ‘Noo, sir, don’t ask me that …’ He bit his lip. His face contorted. ‘No, not that.’ And he wept.

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As the twentieth century dawned, immigrants from all over Europe flooded into Argentina eager to take advantage of the country’s economic boom. One of these was Mario Carlovich, a Yugoslav, who, like so many of his countrymen, was fleeing the continuing upheaval in the Balkans. He settled in the area of Belgrano, in the west of Rosario, and there he raised his family. Seven sons. The youngest, Tomás Felipe, was born in 1948. He would later acquire the nickname el Trinche, ‘the Fork’, presumably because he was tall with thin legs − even though he himself ignores the meaning and origin of the nickname. Like virtually everyone else in the neighbourhood, football was his passion. He was invited to join the junior ranks of Rosario Central when he was 15, and ended up making his debut for the first team some five years later. He played a second time in the first division. And that was it.

Carlovich was what the Argentinians call a volante, a left-footed defensive midfielder. He had class and vision but lacked speed. His technical brilliance failed to impress the coaches of the day, Carlos Grignol among them, who looked for physical presence rather than technical skill. But despite being six foot, he wasn’t built for contesting high balls. He wasn’t your ‘standard type’.

There was nothing standard about him.

On the day of one particular game, the team was getting ready to leave Rosario for Buenos Aires. ‘He arrived with a small bag, climbed onto the bus, nodded to the driver, ignored everyone else and made his way to the back,’ remembers the well-known Santa Fe journalist Eduardo Amez de Paz, who described that era so emotively in his book La vida por el fútbol (‘Life for Football’). ‘Ten or fifteen minutes later, when no other players had turned up, he went to the front and asked the driver what time they were leaving. “As always, son, we’re leaving at half past two, quarter to three.” Bored with waiting, he got off the bus, never to return. Days later it was discovered that he had gone to play for the Rio Negro club in the Belgrano neighbourhood, in an amateur tournament.’

‘There were some circumstances,’ he explains enigmatically now, ‘a few things that I didn’t like at Central, and made me feel alienated. So I left.’ A few months later he reappeared at Central Córdoba, Rosario’s third club, his ‘home’ for more than a decade, an institution that was always in the shadow of the canallas and the leprosos, and where he won the championship in division C and promotion to the division B in 1973. He donned the charrúa shirt over four different periods, playing a total of 236 games and scoring 28 goals. His style and his magic, similar to that of Juan Román Riquelme, remained for ever engraved in the memories of the inhabitants of the Belgrano neighbourhood, and those of La Tablada, where Central Córdoba’s modest Gabino Sosa Stadium is situated. It was to here that Marcelo Bielsa, the former Athletic Bilbao trainer, would make frequent pilgrimages over a four-year period, with the sole intention of watching Trinche play. The stadium now has a mural of Carlovich at the entrance, painted at the request of those at Canal + who travelled from Madrid a few years ago to make a documentary about him.

During those years at Central Córdoba, his legend spread throughout the pampas. One afternoon before a game against Los Andes, a club in Buenos Aires province, Carlovich realised that he didn’t have the necessary document that players had to give to referees in order to take part in the game. The paperwork had been left in Rosario. A local director who had heard of him but had not seen him (division B matches weren’t televised) approached one of the officials with a simple request: ‘Let him play. I know this person with the long hair and the moustache. It’s Trinche. Let him play because we’ll probably never see anyone like him around these parts again.’

The legend of Trinche Carlovich acquired national status and eternal historical importance one night on 17 April 1974 at the Newell’s ground. The Argentinian squad of Vladislao Cap was preparing to travel to West Germany for the World Cup. They were looking for a side to play a friendly for the Sports Journalists’ Circle charity and picked a Rosario Select XI. Ten first division footballers were called up (five each from the two main Rosario sides, Newell’s and Rosario Central) and one from the second division, Córdoba’s number 5, Carlovich. They had never trained together and arrived at the ground about two hours before kick-off.

The stadium filled up. There were no television cameras and nobody filmed it, but the those present (footballers, coaches, fans), plus a memorable radio commentary by Oscar Vidana on LT8, all spoke of ‘the dance of the Rosarinos’. In all its glory. No one could stop Carlovich. Trinche himself explains. ‘I nutmegged a defender, and by the time he’d turned around, I’d done it again. It’s the way I play, but on that day the stadium went crazy.’ The double nutmeg wasn’t performed on just any player but on Pancho Sa, the defender with the most Copa Libertadores trophies in the history of the game. Eventually, as their frustration grew, the internationals resorted to insults when they realised that things weren’t going their way. At half-time it was 3-0. In the dressing room Vladislao Cap approached the Rosario management to ask them to take ‘that number 5 off’. And he wasn’t joking. Carlovich started the second half, though.

It finished in an unforgettable 3-1 win for the Rosario side and the national side were jeered by a celebrating stadium that, for once, didn’t make any distinction between canallas and leprosos. Here was glory and sublime football in its purest form. It could have meant a new contract or a new club among the elite for Trinche, but Carlovich always returned to what Amez de Paz describes as his ‘first love’, ‘the neighbourhood, his friends and the amateur tournaments where his status was assured, where he had nothing to prove and could just enjoy the sheer thrill of the game. When he played in those, he never failed to turn it on, never failed to compete or enjoy himself, as he did, on occasion, in the more important Rio Negro tournaments.’ His neighbours at his Belgrano home remember that Trinche, after training or after a game, would carry on playing with the boys in the street, of whatever age, whatever time, and on whatever field happened to be available for a game.

‘I love the way the youngsters play, I love the potreros,’ recalls Trinche. ‘Today there are very few of them left, they all begin with synthetic surfaces but before it was grass, and more grass. What’s more − there’s no more space. It’s shrinking by the day in Rosario. Before there were lots of pitches, now there are no more pitches. I tell you why I like to play in the streets − a player who goes onto the pitch and looks up into the stands where there are 60,000, 100,000 people, how is he going to enjoy the game? He can’t play, ever. Those people in the stands, their demands, their insults …’

In 1976 he signed for Independiente Rivadavia, a club in the city of Mendoza. One Saturday he sent himself off just before the interval. He had to: if he hadn’t he would have missed the bus back to Rosario; Sunday was Mother’s Day. On another occasion, on a very hot day, one of those sultry days when you’d rather be at home doing nothing, Trinche and a couple of his companions worked the ball across to an area that was shaded by some trees. They were just touching the ball to each other; no one could get it off them. And after ten minutes or so the referee stopped the game. ‘Come on, lads, play football!’ Trinche answered: ‘It’s too hot in the sun, ref!’

‘Trinche was a footballing anarchist, something that stopped him making his first division debut much earlier,’ writes Amez de Paz. ‘It didn’t really happen for him until he was about twenty-one. They say that he only played when he wanted to, when he felt like it. I don’t think that’s strictly true. He enjoyed playing. It was in his blood. But he never looked on football as a way of life, nor was he interested in negotiating a contract. He wanted to play and for him that was all that mattered. The sheer enjoyment of playing.’

He only spent one year in Mendoza before returning to the province of Santa Fe, this time with Colón, but he only played two official games: muscle injuries were beginning to dictate his career. He returned to Central Córdoba where he achieved his second promotion. He began to be known for his lack of appetite for training, a lack of ambition. It is said that at one of the many clubs that he played for, outside Rosario, he asked for a car as part of his contract. When they gave it to him, he got into it and drove home to Belgrano, never to return.

One morning on the day of a game, the Central Córdoba squad got together at the Gabino Sol to head off to Buenos Aires. Trinche hadn’t arrived: he had overslept. They went to look for him and he came downstairs in his underpants, hair uncombed, and that, more or less, is how they took him to the capital. Nobody remembers who they were playing, maybe it was Almagro, but that day Central Córdoba won. 1-0. Goal from Trinche. We all want the stories to be true. Someone tells them so they must be true. Mustn’t they?

Trinche retired, but after three years of inactivity he returned to the field of play. It was 1986. He used to walk through matches but he could anticipate a pass long before anyone else. It was just one last season. For a few years he could be seen in the neighbourhood launching 40 yard passes and doing the occasional dribble.

Carlovich remains the antithesis of Leo Messi: his fame and the best of his career stayed in Santa Fe and because of this he is adored. His legend is commonplace in Rosario. One of those lyrical, almost poetic players who no longer exist. And that’s how legends and winners in Argentinian football, like César Luis Menotti, José Pekerman, Carlos Grignol, Aldo Poy, Marcelo Bielsa, Enrique Wolff, Carlos Aimar and Mario Killer, tell his story. ‘Remember I was just a young boy when Trinche, the likes of whom we no longer have, was playing,’ confirms Tata Martino, a native of Rosario, now at Barcelona. ‘He’d do nutmegs backwards and forwards, people used to rave about him, above all for his incredible amateur spirit and that Rosario trademark: his unique passion for football. He would play a World Cup game or a match with mates with the same conviction. He had almost everything you need to become one of the greats.’ The emphasis is on the word ‘almost’.

‘What does it mean “getting to the top”?’ asks Trinche. ‘The truth is that I never had any other ambition than to play football. And above all I never wanted to distance myself from my neighbourhood, from my parents’ house, where I go nearly every afternoon, to stay with Vasco Artola, one of my oldest friends. On the other hand I’m a very solitary person. When I played for Central Córdoba, if I could, I preferred to get changed alone, in the utility room instead of the changing room. I like to be calm, it’s not from any ill will.’

After leaving football he worked as a bricklayer, but life dealt him a terrible blow. Amez de Paz explains. ‘I didn’t know that Triche was suffering from a terrible osteoporosis, which had destroyed his hips and practically made him an invalid.’ Trinche had knocked on various doors seeking assistance, but with little success. ‘The first thing I did was speak to my friend, the well-known traumatology doctor and former footballer, Carlos Lancellotti,’ adds Amez de Paz who decided to resolve the situation. ‘He told me that he would operate on him free of charge, including taking care of the costs of the operation and the post-operative care, but that he needed a prosthetic. At first the request was refused due to lack of funds reserved for such cases. But an appeal was made to the Public Health secretary. Finally, in the first days of September, the order to acquire the prosthetic arrived.’

A tribute evening with two benefit matches was held, organised by Amez de Paz, together with friends, his own children and even the Maradonian Church. The cost of entrance was the equivalent of a euro. ‘We were utterly astounded. A host of great footballers turned up to participate in those games,’ recalls the veteran journalist.

That day, Tomás Felipe, el Trinche, Carlovich wept. As he did years later when they asked him what he would have changed about his professional career. ‘Noo, don’t ask me that …’

The only thing that interested Carlovich was the ball, and he never felt comfortable with commitment. He had all the attributes to build a great career, but lacked the character needed to maintain the discipline. ‘It was as if the ball took Carlovich, an intelligent ball, that enjoyed doing artistic things, and meanwhile dragging behind it a footballer,’ says Menotti. An amateur one.

It’s said that Trinche arrived on the scene around the same time as coaches obsessed with physical prowess, who sought to convert football from an art form into something entirely different. It was, they say, an ugly period for the game in Argentina, though that has a slightly hollow ring. ‘Perhaps what he lacked was the professionalism needed to compete in football at this level,’ confirms former footballer and coach Carlos Aimar.

Menotti adds: ‘He never found physical reserves that supported his technical abilities. What’s more, he never had anyone who accompanied or understood him. It was a shame because Carlovich should have been one of the most important players in the history of Argentinian football. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he became bored with professional football. He just enjoyed having a good time.’

Being number one, being the one everybody looks up to, is not for everyone. ‘Messi confronts each situation as it’s presented to him. But prior to that he has gone through a great deal, he’s suffered, and yet he’s come through it,’ says Pancho Ferraro. ‘He doesn’t throw in the towel. There are some for whom life becomes foggy and they can’t see the way forward. There are others who find themselves in the middle of hailstorms, and still come through it. Why do so many youngsters fail to make it? Carlovich, a great player. Rodas is a great player, but for some reason neither of them made it. And for me, it annoys me when people say “he didn’t have any luck”. The fact is they didn’t look hard enough for it. They didn’t go out and fight for it. That’s why the player who gets to the top and stays there should be applauded. Players like the Zanettis, Batistutas, Samuels, Crespos … these I applaud. Those who come and go … no!’