​Not two minutes after his side’s dramatic, extra-time quarter-final victory over Switzerland on Saturday, Argentina head coach Lionel Scaloni was already getting asked about the semi-final. Looming on the horizon was a matchup against bitter rivals England.“This won’t just be a special game from a footballing standpoint,” the reporter asked in Spanish, “but also in an emotional sense. How do you imagine you and the players will come out for this game and what message would you give to all of us Argentines that are …”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementScaloni cut the reporter off.“This is a football match, OK?” he said, quite curtly. “The message is that this is a football match. Let’s not look for anything else. This is a football match.”Related: ‘Knocking you out was a huge joy’: reliving the dramas of England v Argentina in 1998 and 2002Forty years ago, in the buildup to a match against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup, Diego Armando Maradona also met the press, standing outside Argentina’s training facility. Many of those reporters had positioned the match as a proxy for the Falklands war, the 74-day conflict four years earlier that took the lives of 649 Argentinian soldiers, 255 British soldiers and three islanders. Control of the Falkland Islands – the Malvinas, as they’re known by Argentinians – was eventually wrested back from Argentina after a brief occupation. To Argentinians, it was understandably a very fresh wound.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“This is just a match, OK?” said Maradona. And then he repeated himself several times, just as Scaloni would decades later.Maradona persisted with that narrative, his teammates remember, until the two teams walked out of the tunnel at Estadio Azteca the next day.“Diego was walking in line with us,” Argentina defender José Luis Brown recalled before his death in 2019, “and he started raving. He says ‘Let’s go, yeah? These motherfuckers killed our neighbours, they killed our relatives.’ I understood, obviously … After the anthems, nobody said anything. We hadn’t said anything about that before the game but we’d all been thinking about it. We just went out there and ran.”Wednesday’s semi-final between England and Argentina is, of course, not just a game. To the English in particular, it is no longer about the Falklands war. To the Argentinians? The conflict still persists in memory and has been passed down to players and coaches via oral history, inescapable in print and social media alike. And Maradona persists as well, still very much the figurehead of all of it even after his death in 2020. English fans do not hold up flags bearing the likeness of Bobby Charlton or Bobby Moore during matches; supporters of Brazil do not do so with Pelé.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe image of Maradona has been ever present throughout this World Cup, as he was in 2022, in Qatar. In stadiums across the United