I kind of feel like people tried to dance around it before the match, but as soon as I saw that Argentina and England were playing each other in the World Cup semifinals, I thought, “Someone is going to bring up the Falklands.”
And, sure enough, they did. That someone was the entire Argentine roster who unfurled a banner that read “Las Malvinas son Argentinas,” or “The Falklands are Argentinian.”
However, the banner â referencing a long-time feud between Argentina and Great Britain over the South Atlantic islands that led to a brief war in 1982 â had to get into the stadium somehow, and that “somehow” was in some dude’s underpants.
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According to The Daily Star, a fan named Santiago brought the banner â which was really a hotel bedsheet with black paint that he bought for a few bucks â into the stadium by stuffing it into his crotch.
“I folded it as much as I could, put it in my private parts to get through security checks, and in the end we managed to get in,” he told Argentina’s Todo Noticias.
Alright… but what if Argentina had lost?
That would be a bad time to break out the banner. You can’t lose and then be like, “You know those islands we’ve been fighting over, even though most of the people on the island side with you guys? Yeah, those are ours.”
Just wouldn’t have the same power, and that would’ve meant that Santiago would’ve left Mercedes-Benz Stadium with a politicized bedsheet crammed into the front of his pants.
But that’s not what happened, and Santiago whipped out his crotch banner and threw it to the Argentines, who had no idea where that thing had been.
That might be the greatest crime of all.
In the UK, they were not impressed by the banner. In fact, UK Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey demanded that the players involved be banned from Sunday’s final against Spain.
Something that Spain would probably be a-okay with.
