As Africa’s first soccer world cup is coming to the final stages, there is one team that carries the ire of the host continent, Uruguay. Being the last of the Latin Americans to qualify, no one had foreseen the team advancing this far. But the record books also tell us that they are one of the most successful national teams in soccer history with 18 major titles, one less than Argentina and two ahead of Brazil! Their success is extraordinary because of the fact that the nation has a population below 3.5 million. Uruguay is the smallest country to have won a World Cup. In fact, only six nations with a lesser population have ever made it to any soccer World Cup. Uruguay is also the smallest nation to win Olympic gold medals in any team sport. Los Charrúas was the team that originally introduced the Latin American flair to the soccer world. Their style of play, full of short passes and movement, invention and wizardry and much more attractive than the then prevalent muscular style fetched them the Olympic gold medals in the 1924 and 1928. And given the responsibility to organize the first World Cup in 1930, the tiny nation had worked hard to ensure its success and also became the winners of the inaugural edition of soccer’s ultimate prize. 
In the early years of the last century Uruguay became perhaps the world’s first welfare state and had the most advanced social legislation of the time. This made it much easier for football to move down the social ladder from the elites to the poor immigrants from Italy and Spain and to the descendants of Africans brought in as slaves. Thus the national team was able to draw on the potential of all of its citizens that gave them early prominence in world football. Uruguay’s first major triumph in the inaugural edition of the Copa America in 1916 had paved the way for football’s growth into an undisputed global game of the masses. The star of that campaign was Isabelino Gradin, whose very presence in the team had raised the objections of other teams. Gradin and his team-mate Juan Delgado were black and Uruguay was accused of playing with Africans. But Uruguay strongly argued that they were Uruguayans and thus had every right to represent their national team. An important victory was won for the popularization of the sport and strangely the lead was taken by the country with a minuscule black population. On the other side of the border Brazil had imported millions of black slaves, whose descendents were finding it hard to rise socially, including on the football field. When the next tournament was held in Brazil, the inspirational presence of Gradin on the field of Brazil’s most aristocratic club was loudly cheered by the local blacks who could see themselves in him. The man in the street took to soccer and the rest is history. Five years later when Uruguay took Paris by storm, decimating the formidable European teams, José Andrade was their star. Record books mention him as the first black player to play in Olympic football.
However Uruguay’s ultimate coup de grace for the Brazilian elite had come in 1950, the only time Brazil hosted the soccer’s biggest showpiece. The largest crowd the world has ever seen in a world cup match, more than 200000 people, had thronged the Maracana stadium as the nation awaited the formality. Brazil needed only a draw and was the overwhelming favorites against their tiny Latin American neighbors. They had annihilated every opponent on the way. With the result a foregone conclusion, members of Uruguay’s national FA reportedly asked the team to do what they could to avoid losing by six goals. “Four is acceptable,” they are believed to have said. In Uruguay’s locker room in the moments prior to the match, Coach Juan López informed his team that their best chance of surviving the powerful offensive line of Brazil would be adopting a defensive strategy. But one man was fuming as everybody was writing his team off. After the coach had left, Obdulio Varela, Uruguay’s Captain stood up and delivered perhaps the most inspirational speech ever heard in a soccer locker room. “Juancito is a good man”, he began by referring to the coach, “but today, he is wrong. If we play defensively against Brazil, our fate will be no different from others…” Lining up in the tunnel waiting to step out in front of an intimidating, world record crowd of 200000 Brazilians, which was roughly 10% of Uruguay’s entire population, the Captain had one last message for his team. “Put all those people out of your minds, don’t look up. The ones outside are made out of wood, those people don’t count. The game is played down there on the pitch and if we win, nothing’s going to happen, just as it’s never happened before.”
The skipper’s motivational words appeared to do the trick, with Uruguay holding the hosts goalless in the first half; the Captain himself marshaling the defense and choking the life out of the famed and feted Brazilian frontline. But the Brazilians struck early in the second half, sending the crowd into deafening frenzy. The astute skipper immediately sensed the drooping shoulders and dropping morale and quickly realized that if something is not done immediately, the Brazilians were going to ambush his side in no time. What followed was sheer drama. In the words of Uruguay’s goalkeeper of that historic match; “When they scored, Varela ran 30 yards to get hold of the ball and argue with the referee about a non-existent offside!” Varela explained the reasons behind his curious behavior later. “I knew they would go on and thrash my team if we didn’t cool the game down. All I wanted to do was delay the restart. I took the discussion as far as it would go, to the point that they had to get an interpreter so that I could talk to the referee. The stadium fell silent and that’s when I knew we could win the game.” Taking the ball to the center of the field, he shouted to his men in his commanding voice; “Boys, now it’s time to win! Let’s win the match from here”.
The skipper straight away took control of the midfield and Uruguay suddenly started growing in confidence. What followed went exactly as the cunning Varela had planned. Juan Schiaffino and Alcides Ghiggia scored late goals from the moves initiated by the skipper from the midfield to turn the game around and silence the masses. Against all the odds, the smallest nation to win the World Cup had delayed the coronation of the soccer emperors.
However, more significantly, in the very first world cup after the proponent-in-chief of the Aryan superiority theory blew his brains out in a Berlin bunker, the tactical genius of a black commander had inspired his army of suspect soldiers to an improbable victory in its war against a soccer super power. Obdulio Varela, nicknamed “El Negro Jefe” or the Black Chief due to his dominant personality and commanding presence in the field became the first and only Black Captain to lift the soccer world cup in the 20th century. More than a decade before Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, Uruguay had been the first non-African soccer team to have a black Captain. And I hope that should be reason enough for Africa to pardon 'La Celeste' and cheer them for their resurrection.
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