San Lorenzo Quiz

It starts with a tram. A priest, Lorenzo Massa, watched one come close to running over a boy playing on the corner of calle México, and offered the boys the safety of the Salesian parish yard in Almagro instead. The club was founded there on 1 April 1908. In the street they had been Los Forzosos de Almagro — roughly, the strongmen of Almagro — and that name was actually proposed at the founding assembly before being set aside. The boys wanted to name the club after the priest himself; he agreed to San Lorenzo only once it was understood to honour two other things, Saint Lawrence the Roman martyr and the Combate de San Lorenzo of 1813, fought in Santa Fe province by San Martín's mounted grenadiers. The cassocks behind all of it gave the club its nickname. Cuervo — crow — is Argentine slang for a priest, from the black cassock; rival terraces used it to mock where San Lorenzo came from, and the fans took it as their own.

The name in the title is Almagro, but the club settled a few blocks south, in Boedo, and has been identified with it ever since. The old Gasómetro stood on Avenida La Plata, its huge wooden stands resembling the gas-holder tanks of the neighbouring gasworks closely enough that the terraces christened it after them. The last match played there was on 2 December 1979, a 0-0 with Boca Juniors remembered for Hugo Gatti saving a penalty, and then the ground was gone. A Carrefour hypermarket sat on the land for decades; the club only recovered the site much later, after a long campaign to return to Boedo. The cost came due quickly. On 15 August 1981 San Lorenzo lost 1-0 to Argentinos Juniors — played at Ferro's ground, because they had no stadium of their own since the 1979 sale — and became the first of Argentina's big five to be relegated. They spent one season down, filling grounds all over Buenos Aires, breaking attendance records in the division and sealing promotion as Primera B champions in November 1982. A home of their own took until December 1993: the Estadio Pedro Bidegain, named after a club president of the 1920s and 30s, built out in the Bajo Flores a long way from Boedo and opened with a 2-1 win over Universidad Católica of Chile in front of around 40,000, with the first competitive match there the following March. Fourteen years without a ground, ended by a friendly.

The football in between is why people still argue about the names. José Sanfilippo, the club's great goalscorer of the 1950s and early 60s, finished as the Argentine first division's leading scorer four seasons running, in 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961. In 1975 Héctor 'Gringo' Scotta scored 60 goals in the calendar year — thirty-two in the Metropolitano, twenty-eight in the Nacional — passing Arsenio Erico's 1937 mark of 47 and collecting a golden boot sent by Adidas; nobody in Argentine football has matched the figure in the fifty years since. Before all that came the 1947 tour of Europe, and a 6-1 win over the Spain national team in Madrid run by the Terceto de Oro of René Pontoni, Armando Farro and Rinaldo Martino. Then 1968, and the Metropolitano side remembered as Los Matadores: unbeaten through the tournament, and 2-1 winners over Estudiantes de La Plata in the final at River's ground, Veglio equalising after Estudiantes had gone ahead and Fischer settling it in extra time.

The modern club has swung between both extremes, sometimes inside two years. Héctor 'Bambino' Veira, a San Lorenzo player himself in the 1960s, ended a 21-year wait with the Clausura in June 1995, the first championship since the 1974 Nacional. Manuel Pellegrini — years before Villarreal, Málaga and Manchester City — won the Clausura 2001 and then the club's first international trophy, the 2001 Copa Mercosur, 0-0 at the Maracanã against Flamengo, 1-1 in Buenos Aires and 4-3 on penalties with goalkeeper Sebastián Saja saving two and scoring one. The very first Copa Sudamericana followed in 2002, Atlético Nacional beaten 4-0 away in Medellín and held 0-0 at home. Ramón Díaz took the Clausura 2007 in the first of his two spells. In mid-2012 they had to win a two-legged promoción play-off to stay in the Primera División at all, beating Instituto of Córdoba 2-0 away — Carlos Bueno scoring both — and drawing 1-1 at home. Juan Antonio Pizzi won the Torneo Inicial in December 2013 and left for Valencia within weeks; Edgardo Bauza replaced him and had the Copa Libertadores inside eight months, past Grêmio on penalties in Porto Alegre and then Nacional of Asunción in the final, Néstor Ortigoza's 35th-minute penalty at the Nuevo Gasómetro settling the only Libertadores final the club has reached. Six months later they were in Morocco, beating Auckland City 2-1 in extra time before Real Madrid won the Club World Cup final 2-0 in Marrakesh. The names kept leaving too: Pablo Zabaleta to Espanyol in 2005, Ezequiel Lavezzi to Napoli in 2007, Ángel Correa to Atlético Madrid at nineteen, Marcos Senesi to Feyenoord, Adolfo Gaich to CSKA Moscow. If you followed any of it, the questions here should be a pleasure.

The San Lorenzo set runs the full range — easy starters, a medium core, and hard questions a devoted fan has to think about.