Rearranging low down, and arguments at the top

The clubs of Primera B Nacional, Argentina’s second division, voted on Sunday to change the system for deciding promotion to Primera A as from next season. There is nothing very exciting and plenty that’s very confusing in these changes, but they’ll be important this time next year so I’ll do my best to explain them here. Also over the weekend, an Argentine FA vice-president had a right go at national team manager Diego Maradona on the radio…

The plan for B Nacional is still to have the straight league season of 38 matches, home and away, but to modify the playoff system that’s then used to determine the promoted teams. At present, the teams finishing first and second in the league table gain automatic promotion to the Primera División. Thereafter 3rd in Primera B (over the season) play 18th in the Primera A promedio (over three seasons) and 4th play 17th. That apparently isn’t complicated enough, so it’s been changed. Settle down with a mug of something hot and let’s see if I can explain it.

The division champions will still get an automatic place in the top flight, but that’s as simple as it gets. Third and fourth placed teams would play a two-legged playoff against each other, with an aggregate draw leading to the third-placed team declared victors. The winners would play another playoff, against the team finishing second in the league table, and the winners of that tie win the second promotion spot to the Primera. The losers are assured of a Promoción tie (back to that later).

Now, whilst all that’s going on some other matches will be underway. 5th will play 8th and 6th will play 7th, with each of these playoffs being over just one match. The two winners play each other, again in a single match. Now, remember that first match in the previous paragraph, between third and fourth? The losing side in that game (who didn’t go on to play off against the league runners-up) now play against the winners of this mini-knockout. The winners of this match take the other Promoción match-up.

After that, the two lucky sides who are through to the Promoción play off, as previously, against the 18th- and 17th-placed teams from the Primera A promedio. All of this was the idea, apparently, of All Boys president Roberto Bugallo, who presumably got it pushed through solely because it’s always been his life’s ambition to be ridiculed for unnecessarily complicated idiocy on obscure English-language football blogs. To top it all, the extra matches have to be crammed into less time, because of FIFA’s ruling that, to allow for next year’s World Cup, all domestic leagues have to be done with by the 31st May.

On Saturday, Enrique Merelas, a member of the AFA’s Executive Committee and a good friend of President Julio Grondona, was shooting his mouth off about Diego Maradona’s directorship of the selección. ‘This team is  a piece of crap,’ he told ESPN Radio Rivadavia. He also expressed anger at the exclusion of another ‘great personal friend’, Juan Román Riquelme, from the side, apparently forgetting that it was Riquelme who turned his back on Maradona’s Argentina. He also mentioned the possibility of Argentina failing to qualify for the World Cup; ‘It would be a catastrophe and we’d have to take responsibility. Playing a match [against Panama] with a team of local players was lying to the people,’ he added, seemingly under the illusion that any of ‘the people’ were of the notion that the Argentina B side will in any way resemble the team whose World Cup qualification is still very much in their own hands.

Everything, seemingly, is Maradona’s fault according to Merelas (also president of Primera C club El Porvenir), who probably wishes there was some way of implicating El Diez in the death last Thursday of Michael Jackson. If Maradona deems this worthy of a reply, we await his words on the subject.