Lionel Messi brings a happy end to one of football’s great stories after World Cup glory – The Warm-Up

MONDAY’S BIG STORIES

The Sense Of An Ending

For at least a generation, the men’s World Cup hasn’t really done spectacular finals. Generally speaking, this has been an occasion that produces a certain kind of nervous tension: compelling, yes, and maybe even enjoyable if you like that sort of thing. Two teams trying not to lose a game, one of them just about managing it. The fireworks have tended to come before and after kick-off.

Well, we’ve snapped that streak now. It turns out the best way to get something special out of this fixture is for one side to completely fail to turn up. Completely. France’s first shot on target was a penalty, given away by a snoozing Nicolas Otamendi and scored by Kylian Mbappe. That came in the 80th minute. Their second came two minutes later, the equaliser, Mbappe channelling Jerry West via Jackie Chan. It’s not how you start games, it’s how you finish them.

Except that wasn’t the end of it, and momentum kept sliding around through extra time. By the time the final final whistle went, too much had happened for it to distil down into any kind of sensible pattern. Think about something for a few seconds and something else will pop up to distract you. Think about Didier Deschamps’ substitutions and you’ll remember that Randal Kolo Muani played pretty well, but then Emi Martínez’s late save will barge into your attention, followed quickly by the late late chance that followed for Lautaro Martinez. And then you’ll need a sit down. And then you’ll remember, with a start: hey, didn’t Lionel Messi have a decent game?

There will be hundreds of thousands – millions – of words written about this final, about this moment, but if you were watching on television then you don’t really need any of them. You just needed to see the journeys of two of the spectators. France’s president Emmanuel Macron turned up at the final expecting to shake some hands, cheer a defensively tidy French performance, and get his face in a couple of photographs alongside some actually popular Frenchmen. By the end he’d turned entirely inside out by the dramatic punch and counterpunch, and we last saw him desperately gabbling into Mbappe’s ear while the striker sat and stared into the middle distance. The footballer looked like a toppled king; the president, frantic and twitching, had sweated every drop of authority out of himself. Football breaks people.

The other man was Angel Di Maria. Every TV director needs a Di María in their lives. His first hour of the evening, that short spell where he played football, was pretty handy for Argentina. But after that he became a gift to the whole watching world, the most reliable reaction shot in the whole stadium. Here he is hiding inside his bib. Here he is trying to eat his bib. Here he is swallowing tears of anguish, and here he is swallowing tears of joy. Football breaks people, in defeat and in victory.

And football breaks itself. We – that’s the broad collective mass of everybody that gives even the faintest toss about football – have been subject to and subjects within the same story for nearly 20 years, ever since it became clear that this new Maradona, this skinny collection of elbows and ankles and angles, was actually the real deal. Will he? Won’t he? Can he? Why can’t he? And now Messi has won the World Cup and that story, that whole arc, is simply over. Alexander wept when there were no more worlds to conquer; football sighs, for it has been conquered. We can finally stop living this story, and get on with the business of telling it and retelling it, from now until forever

The Man With The Golden Glove

Let’s give Emi Martínez his own little section here. There is a great and semi-glorious tradition of goalkeepers acting the clown during penalties, going back at least to Bruce Grobbelar and his jelly legs. Australia earned their place in Qatar after Andrew Redmayne cavorted his way through a shootout against Peru, and now Argentina are champions after Martinez sacrificed his dignity to get up the French noses, and from there into their heads.

It is a rebalancing, a levelling of the playing field. For any penalty the odds are always in the striker’s favour, but they know that, and the keeper knows that, and everybody in the stadium and watching on television knows it too. And that means the pressure is all on the taker. Nobody would ever miss under laboratory conditions, but in the moment, after two hours of draining football, with the world watching, and— Ugh, he’s thrown the ball over there. What a [beeeeeeeep].

There’s nothing noble about it, but it does seem to work. Distract, annoy, irritate; make an already unpleasant situation even less tolerable. The worst outcome for the keeper is that the penalty taker scores, and that’s what should be happening anyway. But they only need to rattle one or two opponents and it’s all worthwhile. Aurelien Tchouameni had a decent game and an excellent tournament. But when Martinez threw the ball away, you could see his equilibrium dissolve. He was inside the circus and the clown was in charge.

Obviously the story of the evening is Lionel Messi, for such is the nature of transcendent brilliance. But Martinez’s path to the final, to his gold medal and his gold glove, is the other kind of football story, the one made up of false starts and setbacks. Messi’s path to the World Cup has gone through Ballons d’Or and trebles; Martinez made it to Qatar via Oxford and Rotherham. His first call-up to an Argentina squad came in 2011; his second in 2019. And all that time on loan, on the bench, and getting bounced off to Aston Villa has sharpened him into one of elite football’s elite [redacted]s.

World Cup squads are motley things. You need the chosen one, the golden boy, and you need the footsoldiers around him. If Martinez doesn’t get out quickly and hugely to Kolo Muani in the time added on to the time added on to extra time, then Messi doesn’t get to complete football. You need the ringmaster, and you need the clown. You need the player that will win the golden ball, and also the lad who’ll put the golden glove over his crotch and wiggle it about, just because he can.

The Other Lionel

Since we’re talking about Messi’s supporting cast, and the bizarre journeys they’ve taken to this moment, let’s think briefly about the extraordinary rise of Lionel Scaloni. Right man, right place, right time: assistant to Jorge Sampaoli, then caretaker after his acrimonious departure, and then given the job permanently in the face of pretty stiff opposition, probably because he was the cheapest option. And then: third in his first Copa America, winner of his second, and now a World Cup-winning coach.

When a team loses their opening match of a World Cup, the whole tournament shifts around them. It becomes a gauntlet, every game a must-win. Pure knock-out football. Messi is the inevitable heart of this Argentina team, but Scaloni has been shifting the shape and personnel around him. Each game a new opponent, each game a new plan. A narrow four in midfield to stifle Croatia in the semi-final, and then a surprise return for Angel Di Maria and an expansive 4-3-3 to smash the final open.

And what spirit they have! To throw away one two-goal lead looks like carelessness; to throw away two, and yet somehow win both penalty shootouts, speaks to an iron in the soul. At times over the decades, Argentina have seemed shrunken in the long shadow of Diego Maradona. Talented squads have arrived at World Cups and crumbled in the moment. Player by player, this is probably the weakest squad Argentina have sent to a World Cup since… well, ever? And yet there they are, kings of the world. The players take the credit, of course, but the man in the polo shirt deserves his share.

IN OTHER NEWS

The internet is currently 85% videos of Argentina celebrating, and they’re all good fun. But there’s something quite poignant about this one: Messi holding the trophy; everybody else, his team-mates and coaches and their families and friends and assorted hangers-on, parading him around as if he were the trophy. They came to the World Cup and they won the greatest prize of all: they won Messi holding the World Cup.

RETRO CORNER

You may recall, or you may have heard in the build-up, that Messi’s international career began with a red card in a friendly against Hungary. But we hadn’t actually looked it up until yesterday. And we’re going to call it: soft. Amazing he didn’t just chuck international football in as a bad— hey look, there’s Gabor Kiraly’s trousers! Sorry, what were we talking about? Hey look, there’s Juan Pablo Sorin’s hair!

HAT TIP

It will likely be some time before we’re able to work out just how successful a project this was for the Qatari state. Sportswashing can often feel like a pointless exercise, as the awkward headlines pile up, but so much of it takes place out of the public eye, behind tinted windows and velvet ropes. And they got lucky in the most important regard of all: this was a banger of a tournament on the pitch, ending with one of the finest finals.

Ultimately, he suggests that “this has been the most closely scrutinized and culturally contested World Cup ever, and that is a good thing. The personal, cultural and political presence of the Global South has been made tangible and that, too, is important. Perhaps the tournament’s biggest legacy will be a global media and public more critically sensitized to the political and cultural meaning of spectacle? That, at least, would be worth celebrating.”

COMING UP

Now that the support acts are done, it’s time for the main event: Wigan Athletic vs. Sheffield United in the Championship. Wait! Come back!

Andi Thomas will be back tomorrow. Do join him.