— Brabante | 09/02/1946 —

Much water will pass under the bridges, and sporting events will follow one another, piling up calendars like dried flowers in herbaria, or like expiring tapes stored in an old book. Details will be erased and the profiles that once made the crowds rise will be softened, leaving only a name or a play in the mind. Those of 20 individualized the Sporting de Viña tournament with the figure of Piendibene or Friedenreich, as those of 26 in Los Campos de Sport, with that of a Nasazzi or a Bidoglio. The details of the game that gave Argentina the victory in a certain match are no longer important, just as, surely, no one will remember the goal with which Chile tied second place with the transandinos. Only names, top figures, surnames that made the news.

The same thing, it occurs to me, will happen with the current extraordinary football championship. For the moment, many will remember the particularities of the current tournament, because they are the daily life of our footballing concerns. The precision of the Brazilian forwards, the beautiful initial disposition of our players, or the devilish combinations of the Argentine left wing. However, all of this will be relegated to second place when, years later, someone tries to memorize what the South American Championship of Buenos Aires in 1946 could have been. Only a memory will remain, a figure. Granite in its solidity, cyclopean in its strength, immense in its projections. We will see him, in our imagination, once again advancing and retreating, opening or closing the game, annihilating goalkeepers with his unrivalled dry shot, skilfully and calculatingly dodging the tightest defence, making crosses from the left or the right, collecting his goalkeeper's kick to prolong the play with a pass of ten or fifty metres, with precision that draws applause, to finish by arranging his tangled hair in a flirtatious gesture, which contrasts with the virility of his game.

An unmistakable figure in this tournament, he has also had the virtue of getting ahead of a school that seems to have become definitively popular. River Plate's unbeatable centre-forward, aware of what should be considered as a strategy in football, has been the first forward on the continent to break man-to-man defence. His constant and restless mobility breaks the canons of the strictest marking, carrying out work on the field that until now no one had dared to do. And the success has been so obvious that figures of the stature of Pontoni have been relegated to the shadows of the bench.

During the course of the championship I have been able to observe the majority of the stars perfectly, and neither the positivism of the Uruguayan Medina, current top scorer of the competition, nor the subtle and practical play of the Brazilian Heleno, nor the precision of Leônidas, have impressed me as much as the incomparable sufficiency of this true football genius. That is why once the memory of the present South American football championship is lost in the mist of time, only the granite figure of the greatest football player of the moment will remain unscathed: Adolfo Pedernera.