Argentina’s rollercoaster ride to the brink of glorious redemption
LIONEL Messi’s World Cup was barely one game old and already the boos were ringing out in Lusail Stadium. Argentina, the two-time world champion, had just fallen apart in one of the worst upsets in tournament history, a 2-1 loss to Saudi Arabia.
Messi’s grand farewell to the Cup was shaping up to be a quick adios.
The team’s morale, he said after the game, was “dead”.
“It’s a very hard blow because we did not expect to start in this way,” Messi added. “We expected to get the three points.”
How Argentina recovered to reach the sixth Cup final in its history on Tuesday, with a 3-0 dismantling of Croatia, is already one of the great triumphs of Messi’s career. Over the past five matches, the team made small tactical tweaks and a larger mental shift to spark the kind of turnaround that he had rarely seen from his national team.
World Cups are won on momentum and, oddly, starting at rock bottom focused Argentina’s campaign.
“The first match was a hard blow for all of us, because we’d been unbeaten in 36 matches,” Messi said. “To start like that was an acid test for the whole squad.”
Instead of sticking with Plan A, Scaloni tore the whole thing to shreds. For the second game, a 2-0 victory over Mexico, he switched out half of his outfield players. And by the third, Scaloni was trying out a new strike partnership, pairing Messi with 22-year-old Julian Alvarez. It didn’t take long for Scaloni’s bet to pay off. Alvarez scored Argentina’s second goal against Poland to secure its passage to the round of 16 and has started every game since. On Tuesday, he became the youngest player to score two goals in a World Cup final-four game since a 17-year-old Pele hit a hat-trick for Brazil in 1958.
“Yes, we lost the first match due to fine details,” Messi said. “But that helped us to become stronger, to grow into this tournament.
“Every match was a final for us. We have played five finals.”
The actual final is now back at Lusail on Sunday (Monday in Australia), against France. Messi’s teammates feel a responsibility to send the legend out a winner.