Ricardo Gareca is scathing about football in his homeland. “Argentina has the best players in the world,” he said this week, “but they have not made a team and that is the problem they have today.” That’s why the side Gareca manages, Peru, lie above Argentina in the Conmebol standings and it’s why Peru stand on the brink of their first World Cup qualification in 36 years. Gareca has, above all else, made a team. His entire managerial career seems to have been about making a team from less than ideal ingredients. The 59-year-old has never been fashionable, has never propounded anything approaching a philosophy, has never, it seems, since an ill-starred stint at Independiente in 1997, come close to managing one of Argentina’s big teams. Increasingly, though, his methods have been successful. “Ricardo has a positive spirit that I have seen in very few people,” said Juan Carlos Oblitas, the sporting director of the Peruvian football federation. “When you touch on a negative topic he asks you to move on from there.” Gareca was an angular forward variously nicknamed el Tigre (the Tiger) and el Flaco (the Thin One) in a career in which he won 20 caps and…