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.”

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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 played for Boca Juniors, River Plate, Velez Sarsfield and Independiente as well as having a three-year stint in Colombia with America de Cali.

His managerial career began at the Cordoba club Talleres, with whom he won promotion to the top flight and the Copa Conmebol, a forerunner to the Copa Sudamericana, making them the first Argentinian side from outside the Buenos Aires-Santa Fe region to win an international trophy.

That was back in 1999, after which there came a hiatus. Gareca kept managing, but it was only after he took charge of Universitario in Peru that further silverware arrived in the form of the 2008 Apertura. Gareca then returned to Argentina, where he won three league titles with Velez in a four-year spell. Velez, with their traditional belief in the importance of backbone over flamboyance, were the ideal club for him. The team were disciplined, gave little away, and won games through the varied skills of a front three of Tanque Silva, Maxi Morales and Juan Martínez. So well-organised were they that even a youthful Ricky Álvarez, coming off the bench, occasionally made dangerous runs.

After a year with Palmeiras in Brazil, Gareca took charge of Peru shortly before the 2015 Copa América. They had reached the semi-finals in 2011, inspired to dour effectiveness by the Uruguayan Sergio Markarián (a fuel distribution manager who was so embarrassed by Uruguay’s 4-0 defeat by Holland in 1974 that, aged 30, he quit his job and retrained as a football coach), but had fallen away in the two years that followed. Gareca, though, restored the rigour and, with Paolo Guerreiro banging in four goals, led them to the semis again.

When that peak was followed by a poor start to qualifying, the suspicion was that for Gareca’s methods to take hold he needed to be working regularly with his team, and that he was more suited to tournament coaching.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peru’s coach Ricardo Gareca takes training earlier this week. Photograph: Martin Mejia/AP

Sure enough, at the Copa América Centenario, Peru eliminated Brazil before losing to Colombia on penalties in the quarter-final. But recently results have picked up, as though after two years under Gareca the players can now fulfil his instructions even after a month back with their clubs. Peru have won each of their past three games 2-1.

It’s not just Guerreiro scoring goals. He has five in qualifying, while Edison Flores and Cristian Cueva have managed nine between them breaking from midfield. Cueva will miss Thursday’s game but Jefferson Farfan should be fit to take his place despite a muscle strain.

Win their final two qualifiers, away to Argentina and then at home to Colombia, and they won’t just qualify for Russia, they’ll be one of the seeds. Realistically, with Chile fading and having to play in Brazil, three points would probably guarantee a play-off against New Zealand.

Peru haven’t qualified for a World Cup since 1982 and the prospect of getting there again has brought a sense of a collective madness to the country. Gareca has reportedly asked for a background check on everybody who has applied for media accreditation because four years ago, when the Argentina manager Jorge Sampaoli was in charge of Chile, he sent one of his assistants disguised as a journalist to monitor Markarián. The newspaper El Peruano, meanwhile, as a service to fans travelling to Buenos Aires, on Wednesday printed a long list of the consumer rights that protect those on international flights.

The midfielder Yoshimar Yotun has described Thursday’s game in Buenos Aires as “the game of our lives”. He admits the proximity of the World Cup is eating away at him. “I think all day about the final whistle of the game against Colombia in Lima,” he said. “Playing a World Cup is the most beautiful thing a footballer can experience.”

Success may have come late, but Gareca has led Peru as close as they have come to experiencing that in 36 years.