Osvaldo Juan Zubeldia was the first to arrive Colombia of a school that marked its mark in the country. It changed many things in the way of working, in the demands placed on the player and in the way of taking young players to the first team. This Monday marks the 40th anniversary of his death.
Zubeldía’s school became famous at Estudiantes de La Plata, a club that hired him in 1965 as a coach. But before that he had played, as a left midfielder, at Vélez Sársfield (where one afternoon he scored three goals against Amadeo Carrizo), Boca Juniors, Atlanta and Banfield. It was in Atlanta, in 1959 and even before retiring completely as a player, where he began to direct and show that he had a good eye: two great figures of Argentine soccer made their debuts with him, the goalkeeper Hugo Gatti and the scorer Luis Artime.
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Upon his arrival at Estudiantes, the initial objective was to save him from relegation. Zubeldía took as a base a group of players from minor divisions that had been making noise. They called it ‘The third that kills’. Juan Ramón Verón, Oscar Malbernat, Eduardo Flores, Carlos Pachamé stood out there… And he reinforced that group with experienced goalkeepers like Alberto Poletti, Carlos Bilardo, Juan Echecopar, Ramón Aguirre Suárez and Raúl Madero.
The job was very demanding. Zubeldía implemented the double shift day. The concentrations were long. Some, like Bilardo, took advantage of the time locked up to study and graduate as a doctor. And he was a student of what other teams were doing to try to implement it in his. Like the offside tactic: a Czechoslovakian team was seen doing it and they proposed it to their group. It became one of his seals.
“The first time we put the offside into practice was at night, and on the Atlanta field. We had worked a lot on it. The top markers had to come out first, because if the central ones did it and one was stuck, it was a sure goal. To coordinate the action I put Madero. He gave the order, and everything went well. It was very useful”, Zubedlía once recalled.
In 1970, Estudiantes played the Intercontinental Cup final with Ajax. Guillermo ‘Chato’ Velásquez, the legendary Colombian referee, was the linesman at the match in Amsterdam. “I raised the flag for the Dutch 19 times,” said ‘Chato’.
Another move that had his stamp, and that was born from the great communion that Zubeldía had with the players, was known in Colombia as the ‘Zubeldiana’: taking a corner kick at the near post, someone would come in to comb the ball so that in the second, another would arrive and put it in. The players, including Bilardo, proposed to him to do it and he worked on it and perfected it. That formula, for example, turned a central defender in Nacional, Francisco Maturana, into an occasional scorer.
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“One day we played a game against Cristal Caldas. Their coach was Gilberto Osorio, and he went out saying on the radio that we weren’t going to beat him with that silly little play. It was about 20 minutes, I collected a corner kick at the near post, I went to the second post and put it in. Done, we won 1-0”, recalled Maturana.
“Glory is not reached by a path of roses.”
In Estudiantes, the formula worked out so well that the team became metropolitan champion in 1967, won the Copa Libertadores three times in a row (1968, 1969 and 1970) and won an Intercontinental Cup against Manchester United in 1968, with a 1-1 win at Old Trafford . In the museum of the English club, a phrase by Zubeldía is preserved, written on a blackboard, one of his maxims as a coach: “Glory is not reached by a path of roses.”
Zubeldía arrived at Nacional in 1976. Mario Posso Jr. wrote in the defunct Cronómetro magazine, in December 1981, that the Argentine arrived at Nacional to break a spell. In 1975, Nacional was the first Colombian team to win an official match in Brazil: they beat Cruzeiro 2-3 in Belo Horizonte. But the fans of that club, with the pain of defeat, made him a macumba. Nacional fell into a terrible streak, which cost César López Fretes his head, first, and José Curti, later, two other symbols of the club.
Zubeldía finished with that at the point of work. From the outset, he also introduced the double shift. “I revolutionized Colombian soccer because I ended the siesta. I’m done with heavy breakfasts and long lunches. To the court! To work morning and afternoon”. And he began, as he did in Students, to look at what was in the minor divisions. Hernán Darío Herrera, Pedro Sarmiento, Norberto Peluffo, Luis Fernando Suárez, Carlos Maya, Jorge Peláez, Carlos Ricaurte, Víctor Luna, Gabriel Jaime Gómez, Jorge Porras…
In his first year he was champion. In 1977 he was fourth in the hexagonal and the following year he lost the runner-up position in an incredible way. They played on the last date with Deportivo Cali. They needed to win to go to the Copa Libertadores. They were up 1-0 and wanted to secure. At the end of the game, Cali was going to take a corner kick. An assistant from Zubeldía sent the ball quickly so they could collect and from there, Ángel María Torres scored an Olympic goal.
1979 was a critical year. The first semester was very bad. He was in 11th place. “No fan put up with me as much as the one from Nacional,” he said. But he managed to recover and get into the finals. Until in 1981, he achieved a new star, in a tournament that had very particular circumstances. The base of Nacional was summoned to the Colombian National Team (directed by his student Carlos Bilardo) for the qualifying round of the 1982 World Cup in Spain. And two Peruvian geniuses who were in the club, César Cueto and Guillermo La Rosa, went to their country. Zubeldía gave continuity to the players of the minor divisions. And when the headlines returned, they did the Olympic lap.
He was a horse fanatic. ‘Burrero’, as the Argentines say. And it wasn’t just to bet, although he was always around, at the bank, with a radio, pending the results of the races. I used to travel to the racetrack, watch the horses train. His legacy was cut short with his sudden death, on January 17, 1982, when he was already beginning to prepare Atlético Nacional to play the Copa Libertadores that year, after being champion in 1981. Apart from Bilardo, other students of his came to Colombia to lead, like Verón (who made Junior champion in 1977), Carlos Pachamé, Eduardo Luján Manera and Felipe Ribaudo. And that school continues to bring out coaches, such as Miguel Ángel Russo, formed by his heirs and champion with Millonarios in 2017.
“The coach who doesn’t win is not convenient for a team from an economic point of view. But that does not mean that I live on Sunday’s game. I am interested in promoting the national player, working with a view to the future, ensuring that the people who follow the team are happy. I am sure that the day Zubeldía leaves, Medellín will be sad,” Zubeldía told Posso shortly after winning the star in 1981. He was right.
Osvaldo Juan Zubeldia
Birth: June 24, 1927.
Teams managed in Colombia: Atlético Nacional (1976-1981).
Titles obtained: Colombian League with Nacional (1976 and 1981).
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Taken from the book “The best technicians of Colombian soccer”, by José Orlando Ascencio (Intermedio Editores, 2019)
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