Passionate about his task. Vocational from the beginning. He started in rugby and went on to soccer where he does not deny stating that Luis Garisto was his sporting father.
A long-distance man who achieved international recognition by working for many years in Europe where he was nicknamed Diego Simeone’s iron sergeant at Atlético de Madrid.
Professor Óscar Ortega, who is beginning his new path in the national team, began his career in River’s youth teams working with Carlos Aguilera, Pato’s father, and with Jesús Rodríguez as coach.
“He was very young, he was 21 years old and the boys were 18 or 19, they were in Fourth. Although I was passionate about football, I respected teaching. I worked at a very important school in Uruguay, the British, where I began to learn the formative part of rugby and extract things that I saw from European coaches who were training rugby players by teaching the sport at school. It was there that I got to know the grid system, training in game situations… It is much more appropriate for rugby but it also opened my eyes for football”began by saying in a note with María Cappa in Túnel Magazine.
Ortega revealed that he worked on the sixth of Progreso and recalled that he took the 306 in Carrasco to get to La Teja at night.
In 1985 Alfredo Estavillo took him to the lower Peñarol. In 1987 Oscar Tabárez arrived and Professor José Herrera y Ortega worked in the second team with Ramón Silva as DT. Until Luis Garisto crossed his path and invited him to work in Argentine soccer.
Ortega, recognized Garisto as his sports father and narrated an anecdote.
“Luis taught me the other part. Let’s leave teaching aside, let’s leave metabolisms aside”, he told me. He taught me how I should work in this profession. I worked eight years with him. One day, when we were in Unión de Santa Fe, I did some work on circuits. Very good, it was very good, it was very novel for the time because they were game situations that were mixed with physical loads. And when training ended, Luis approached me and told me: ‘Today’s training was very good, very well dosed, you took tactics into account. I liked it. But do you see the cone over there? The Orange? It has to be yellow. Do you see the stick over there? The flag is missing. Do you see the goal? The network is broken’. And I looked at him without understanding very well. Then he grabbed a piece of newsprint and asked me if he knew about Swiss chocolate. Yes, I do. I was not lucky enough to try it but I know it”, I told him. And he surprised me: ‘You know it’s very good then. Well, I’m going to wrap it in this cellophane. Do you remember the chocolate from Uruguay? Any one, the one you like. Well I’m going to wrap it in cellophane. If you don’t know what each wrapper has, which one will you grab?’ The one in cellophane I told him. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘you have to sell your work well. You have to put the cone well, the flag where it goes…’. All those kinds of experiences shaped me.”
Ortega added: “I learned to put together a training session before the players come in, because if everything is set up, everything is well placed, the player who comes in thinks: ‘This is organization, this is real training.’ I learned a lot with Luis, to better sell professional tasks, to give him an image, the same as clothing or places. The places? I mean that players have to be careful when they go to a place. What do they take, how are they doing, until when are they. They have to take care of themselves because they live from sports and their physical condition, ”he expressed in the note with Túnel.
training method
When talking about his training methodology, Ortega provided clues in the note with Túnel about what can be seen in the national team.
Ortega revealed that he works with what he calls an integrated plural methodology. “That is, I integrate structures from many sides. I believe, without being the owner of the truth, that the integrated method needs to cover the leaks that would exist if we worked only on game situations. I believe that more orthodox methods should also be used. The footballer spends a lot of time without the ball on the field and needs to be in the game in good condition, both when he is decisive in making decisions and when he has to go out and recover. He needs the physical qualities.”
Later he added: “We work for a way of playing and with a coach who is very dynamic. It is a football in which you have to go out to press, if you lose the first pressure you have to recover far back and from there go on the counterattack. They are long distances and it is different to train that to a team that plays on the basis of possession of the ball”.
And he concluded: “If we find ourselves with a more physical team, we know that they dominate the long game, that they work a lot on the aerial game, that as soon as they reach the band they will place the first ball at the penalty spot. So we work a lot on the aerial game -because we know that centers are going to be thrown at us from all sides- the second ball, which is very important and has to do with the changes of rhythm backwards, because it not only gets smaller forward, but also backwards. behind».