Messi pays a harsh penalty

When the final whistle blew, Lionel Messi angrily kicked away the ball like it was poison and tore off his captain’s armband as though it was cursed.

A superstar of football knocked off his pedestal at the World Cup.

By a bunch of guys from Iceland, population 350,000.

Back on the volcanic, wind-swept island bashed by Arctic seas, in winters to come when storms are blowing and the sun is on strike, Icelanders will draw warmth from the memory of the 1-1 draw in this, their first World Cup match. They and the team celebrated the result like a victory. And rightfully so.

By neutralising two-time World Cup winners Argentina, who had Messi on the field, a cigar-puffing Diego Maradona watching from the VIP seats and the pope on their side, Iceland blazed a trail for small countries and territories everywhere.

This was no fluke. It was Iceland’s reward for two decades of thought, investment and ambition lavished on football, so all Icelandic boys and girls who want to play now have an abundance of pitches and qualified coaches.

Although Iceland has a pool of just 100 or so full-time professionals to draw from, their team is only getting better and growing in stature, no longer just a cute story of overachievement. And they developed a real taste for bringing the great and good of football down a peg or two.

First was Cristiano Ronaldo, sulky and frustrated after Iceland restricted his Portugal to a 1-1 draw at the European Championships in 2016, in what was Iceland’s first experience of a major tournament. Then followed a milestone victory against England, sent packing 2-1 in the first knockout round of those championships. The upset made Iceland the darling of underdoglovers everywhere.

And now Messi, the latest star extinguished by a blanket of sturdy Icelandic defending, physicality, organisation, teamwork and selfsacrifice.

He had a penalty saved. He fired shots wide. Iceland’s players stuck to him like chewing gum on a shoe. When two or three of them followed his runs, others stepped into the gaps he opened in Iceland’s defence, plugging them.

With Argentina pressing for a second-half winner, Messi sublimely controlled a long pass and was primed to shoot. The defender who stopped him from doing so, with an outstretched foot, was Birkir Saevarsson. When he’s not playing football, Saevarsson works a day job packing salt into jars in a warehouse back in Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital.

Forming blocks of blue up in the stands, the Icelandic fans never let up their din. This was David v Goliath stuff.

None more so than when goalkeeper Hannes Halldorsson stopped Messi’s penalty in the 64th minute. Halldorsson plays his football in Denmark. His market value, surely rising now, is less than Messi reportedly earns in a week at Barcelona. Halldorsson plays with a surgically reconstructed shoulder that was damaged when snowboarding in his teens. When he isn’t keeping goal, he works as a film director.

And he does his homework. He plunged to his right when Messi kicked and punched the ball away.

Halldorsson said he studied footage of previous Messi penalties and ‘‘had a good feeling that he would go this way’’.

Truth is, the penalty was poor. Weakly struck, badly placed.

‘‘It hurt missing the penalty. It could have given us the lead and that could have changed the match,’’ Messi said. ‘‘It would have changed their game plan, too. They probably would open a little bit more and we could get more space.’’

Maybe. Maybe not. Halldorsson told a different story.

‘‘Our game plan worked really well,’’ he said. ‘‘We could feel it right away in the first half that the game was playing out as we wanted.’’

Also in group D, Argentina’s next opponents Croatia flew into gear with a 2-0 win over Nigeria thanks to an own goal and a penalty from captain Luka Modric.

In group C, Kasper Schmeichel’s slew of saves made Yussuf Poulsen’s opportunistic second-half goal stand up in Denmark’s 1-0 victory over Peru, while Paul Pogba’s 80thminute goal gave France a 2-1 win over Australia after their captain Mile Jedinak had equalised from the penalty spot.