FOR just a split second he stood there, the force with which he’d swung his left leg wheeling his little frame around to watch. What a view, what a vantage point.
And then he was gone, wheeling away towards them and emptying himself of four days’ worth of tension and pressure. Four years’ worth. Maybe a lifetime’s. And in four days he’ll do it all again.
This is the life of Lionel Messi. The tortured, magical life. The Lusail and Mexico, a dog of a game for 63 minutes and then the 25-odd yards that separated Messi’s perfect vantage point from the back of Meme Ochoa’s net. They’re all part of another tortured and magical chapter now. His last stand? Not this night. So we all roll on to Wednesday and Poland.
The night had begun in the morning, not with Mexican or Argentine voices saturating the conditioned air of the Saturday commute but Saudi ones. The dark green masses filled Doha metro carriages and belted out their chorus — "Where is Messi? We ruined his life.”
But they hadn’t. Here he was finding beauty where barbarity and brutality had been. Twenty minutes after his cathartic opener, he laid a second on for Enzo Fernandez who experienced this kind of night for the first time. And Argentina, a tournament favourite who faced elimination on day seven, were flying again. The Lusail shook and rocked. What a night.
We’ve been here before, of course. Not here, in this place where recently there was precious little in the way of habitation but now a brand new city of blinding light and excess has risen. The Lusail area can be seen and yet not believed. It’s Arrival meets Vegas meets Dune. Capitalism and unlimited wealth meet futurism, give it a rattle and, if in doubt, lash some gold paint on it.
But Messi and us, we have been here, the second game of a World Cup with questions, concerns and ghosts of Albiceleste past swirling around whatever citadel they’ve descended upon. On his tournament debut in 2006 it was Gelsenkirchen after they’d scraped past Ivory Coast. Jose Pekerman brought the pudgy, shaggy-haired teen on against Serbia to become the country’s youngest ever World Cup player. He scored 13 minutes later to round off a 6-0 win. Questions answered.
Four years later, Maradona waddling the Johannesburg sidelines, they’d again been unconvincing, sneaking a 1-0 win over Nigeria in the opener. Messi sat in behind Carlos Tevez and Gonzalo Higuain and pulled strings in a 4-1 win over South Korea. Questions answered. In 2014, they’d almost been caught by Bosnia at the Maracana. Game two in Belo Horizonte was a slog, but less of a slog than this, until he sidestepped a defender in injury time and from 25 yards curled a sumptuous winner beyond Iran. Questions answered.
Then came 2018. An opening draw with Iceland sent Argentina to Nizhny Novgorod. The ghosts didn’t float this night. They hung over the railings from the VIP section, Maradona’s minders doing herculean work. The weight of it all hung heavy on Messi and this time it was too much. One of the visions of the night was Messi as he’d lined up for the anthems, paler and smaller than usual, not wiping his forehead but digging into it like a man who had a date with an executioner. Croatia won 3-0.
The mere prospect of such stresses were supposed to have been banished by Scaloni’s rebuild. Thirty-six games unbeaten as Messi took on a more vocal role than ever, as he now led by word and deed and whatever else you needed from him. And then on Tuesday afternoon in four nightmarish minutes it was all happening again. The Saudis were 2-1 up and we don’t know if there was nothing Messi could do about it…but we do know he did just that — nothing.
Thus here we were all over again…where we’d been before. Scaloni may have spent the intervening days settling the senses. But when he made five changes it didn’t do much to project calm. The ghosts were here in person too: Ricky Villa, Mario Kempes, Jorge Burruchaga and Jorge Valdano all in Doha for the second anniversary of Maradona’s passing on Friday. Diego’s face was everywhere on the steep northern face of this cavernous place, on flags, on people’s backs and fronts and deep in their souls.
At 9.19pm local time, 19 years after this impossible journey to somehow live up to Diego began, Messi sent them into his first frenzy by cantering out of the tunnel to warm up. A half hour earlier, a short boat ride across Doha bay, his PSG team-mate Kylian Mbappe had celebrated serene progress to the knockout stages. In his first crack, Mbappe won it all in 2018 — sans stress. The mere prospect.
Every fan here will tell you what this all means to them — the world. They’ll do a damn good job of explaining why winning it all would matter more to them than any other country in the planet. But go to enough of these things and something eventually becomes clear: it means just a fraction more to Argentines. Why? Because they don’t ever need to tell you.
It’s there on their faces, in their eyes for 63 agonising minutes. This tournament and the piece of gold handed out at the end of it all every four years, it courses through them and, at times like this, consumes them. Our seat on this night is in what FIFA would call media overspill. A block of Argentines are right behind and right beside us. And it’s coursing through them tonight. In that little lull after the anthems, grown healthy men look ready to drop, a mother fidgets and fixes her daughter’s already perfect air. Something, anything, to distract, to work nerve endings driven demented by this cup and that team out there.
And when it came time for the tension to be eased by some football, we got nothing of the sort. The first 45 minutes here were not for the purists but for the prisoners. A half of the harshest punishment. What to say? There were four times as many fouls as shots. Need we say more? The wonder was the noise that rained down on both teams was deafening encouragement and not consternation, although that would arrive.
With Leandro Paredes removed from midfield, Messi dropped deep and the ball largely bypassed him on its way — lumped forward to no one, skewing and spinning out of a collision, horsed out into the stand. The ball was brutalised and, when we began again, everything was still in the balance.
On 50 minutes he drove forward to be chopped down on the edge of the box by Erick Gutierrez. The free-kick sailed into the same north face of blue and white. There was a flicker of ambition from Argentina now. But Mexico’s bank of five had three more parked right in front of them and the space was suffocating.
What a wonder then that he found the air when he did. It was a lovely little ball across that bank of five from Angel Di Maria that found him and in an instant he swung that swing, his left foot commanding the ball off along the surface to nestle in the corner.
The release of tension and tears in the stands was volcanic. Out of the abyss. Again, their idol tying their other one, Maradona’s mark of World Cup goals matched perfectly.
Get ready for Messi’s next stand. It might be his last. But it might not. What a magical life.
