JOSÉ PEKERMAN IS AN ANIMAL lover. The Argentina coach has two cats and a dog and they are named after the world titles he has won coaching at youth level: Malaysia, Argentina and Qatar. The smart money is on the next animal addition to the Pekerman household to bear the name Alemania (Germany in Spanish), based on the evidence thus far.

Then again, Pekerman is the first to understand just how tenuous the line between success and failure, glory and ridicule, can be. “To win a World Cup everything has to be right,” he said. “The work you do for four years has to be timed to coincide with a peak over those seven games. Of course, that’s impossible, because of injuries, suspensions, bad luck. That’s why you need to keep perspective.

“Holland lost to Germany in the 1974 final. That was probably the best team I ever saw and I think most would agree. Yet they came up empty-handed. Does that lessen their achievement? No. You have to recognise them for what they did. You have to learn to praise results and praise performance. They do not always go hand in hand.”

It’s not a coincidence that Rinus Michels’s “Clockwork Orange” resonate with Pekerman. He is a big believer in creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. And if that means sacrificing some more illustrious parts in exchange for a better whole, so be it. “As a national team manager, you can’t develop a team the way you can with a club,” he said. “Particularly with Argentina, when our guys are scattered all over the world and we only see them when they return for internationals.

“If it were a club where you worked with them every day, you could mould your most talented players into the kind of team you want to put out. But because it’s a national side, you can’t do that. You have to find the players who fit the team best. And sometimes there is a trade-off.”

His squad selection for Germany reflected this. Javier Zanetti, the long-time captain, Walter Samuel, the Inter Milan defender, Martin DeMichelis, of Bayern Munich, and Juan Sebastián Verón were left out of the squad, as was Sergio Aguero, who, at 18, is Argentina’s home-grown answer to Wayne Rooney. In their place, Pekerman called on the likes of Nicolas Burdisso, Inter’s fourth-choice centre back for much of the season, Leandro Cufré, the limited AS Roma left back and Julio Cruz, another Inter reserve. Equally, in Pekerman’s preferred XI, there is no place for Carlos Tévez and Lionel Messi, two of the most crystalline talents in the world. Instead, he relies on the less glamorous Javier Saviola and Maxi Rodríguez.

Such choices have not always endeared him to the critics, some of whom have complained that he puts his tactical vision ahead of the individual qualities of the players. Because he attained most of his success coaching at youth level — where he won his three world titles — he is accused of not knowing how to handle stars. “The most important thing is playing a system well,” he said. “Everything else is secondary. My job is choosing a system and choosing the players who can execute that system well.”

His system is based around Juan Román Riquelme, the Villarreal playmaker. Because Riquelme is an atypical player — a stellar, creative passer, but also somewhat slow-footed and defensively suspect — the rest of the team is asked constantly to adjust to his positioning. Tactically, it is a tall order, but it appears that Pekerman has found a way to impart the necessary tactical awareness without burdening the players. When he explains how Argentina learnt the delicate tactical mechanisms to allow for a Riquelme in the side, his pedagogical side comes to the fore.

“We don’t have complicated tactical sessions,” he said. “I never did it when coaching kids and I’m not going to do it now. Rather, I think the trick is getting the players to understand concepts, rather than rules. If you can plant certain basic tactical ideas in the players’ minds, and they are clever enough, they will make the right tactical choices on their own.”

All that is fine and good, but it certainly helps that he can call on the likes of Tévez, Messi and Pablo Aimar when things get rough, as he did against Mexico in the second round. Having watched from the outside as Argentina’s 2002 side crashed out in the first round after being seen by many as pre-tournament favourites, he is cautious when talking about his team’s prospects.

“2002 was an enormous psychological blow,” he said. “As a country we were on our knees and the World Cup was a way of telling ourselves that, at least in football, everything was fine. That’s why it was so brutal when we were knocked out. Even though most of this team weren’t a part of 2002, they all know what happened, they all shared the pain and they want to set things right.”

If they do, Qatar the dog and his feline friends, Malaysia and Argentina, will have a new playmate: Alemania.