Our joy in idea of Messi winning World Cup has flown into the desert...

WE WALKED with the tide of humanity surging towards the metro station at Lusail in the early hours of Saturday morning and were swept along with it, up the escalators and along the walkways. The Argentina fans, wrapped head to toe in blue and white, sang their songs of exultation and triumph. A drum was beating somewhere behind us, near the golden stadium that shone in the darkness. Beating, beating, beating, as if it would never stop.

It was nearly 3am by now but we were in the middle of World Cup rush hour. An army of mobile phones rose above the throng and the volunteers got a chant going. It has become a small feature of this tournament. They turn their instructions to passengers into a rhythmic beat. They pointed their foam fingers and yelled ‘Metro’ through their loud speakers. And every time they chanted ‘Metro’, the crowd yelled back with ‘Messi’. And so we poured on to the train with that soundtrack in our ears. ‘Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi’.

Lionel Messi rolls on, too, like the beat of the drum, like the chant in the metro. His pass to set up Argentina’s first goal in their quarter-final against Holland a few hours earlier was utterly bewitching.

How did he see it through the crowd of defenders? No one on that pitch, no one in that stadium, no one else on the planet, saw what he saw.

His genius refuses to be extinguished quite yet and his attempt to gild his beautiful talent and his astonishing career with the one prize that has eluded him, the World Cup, has become the dominant narrative of this tournament. Here in the desert, it is the narrative that irrigates this competition and helps its increasingly absurd ringmaster, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, to claim, like a five-year-old child, that this World Cup is the ‘best ever’.

Messi’s talent urges you to love him unconditionally and to glory in the swell of emotion that seems to be propelling him towards the final, back at Lusail Stadium, next Sunday.

The antics of Cristiano Ronaldo in the last couple of months have made it easier to lapse into a lazy, easy interpretation that Messi is the saint the game deserves and Ronaldo its vain and egotistical sinner.

But if it is one thing above all others, this World Cup, which had such a murky cradling, and which has been the best ever for teaching us that money can buy most things and most people, has also taught us that nothing is quite what it seems here and that there is a dark side to almost everything at this tournament. That, sadly, includes Messi. And it certainly includes his Argentina team.

Like many fans of sport, I have always associated Messi with beauty. It’s a happy place. It was the same watching Roger Federer play tennis. It was sport’s escapism at its best. Grace and art and love for the game and creativity, all combined into something beautiful and, yes, something noble. They won but they won with style and elegance. They won well.

It was a shame Messi signed a deal to promote tourism to Saudi Arabia earlier this year but then I suppose we had already looked the other way when he joined PSG, a team owned by another repressive state, Qatar. There was still the football. That was still the sanctuary for everyone who admired him. His genius was still the sanctuary.

But then on Friday night, the thread that links him with grace frayed a bit more. By now, you’ve probably seen the startling picture of his Argentina teammates goading the Dutch after Argentina’s triumph in the penalty shoot-out. There’s nothing beautiful about that. It’s ugly. Really ugly. That picture should fill everyone who sees it with disgust and disdain. It’s the opposite of what sport should be.

It is still possible to cling to the idea that Messi is looking the other way as he runs. Almost alone among the Argentina players in the picture, he is not taunting the stricken Holland team. He is already looking over to Emi Martinez, Argentina’s goalkeeper, who had made two stunning saves in the shoot-out. Later, though, Messi broke off a TV interview to taunt someone from the Dutch camp. ‘What are you looking at, you fool?’ he said.

By then, tragically, there was something more important to mourn. As the game went into extra-time, Grant Wahl, a US journalist, who was widely respected, loved the game passionately and who had been detained by Qatar authorities at the Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium earlier in the tournament because he was wearing a shirt with a rainbow emblem on it, collapsed in the press box at the Lusail Stadium and died later in hospital.

It was the most dramatic game of the tournament so far but most people in that press box were too shocked and distressed to care a jot about the result by the end of it. Then you look down at the pitch and the players and all you see is ugliness and hatred, a lack of respect and compassion — and a lack, actually, of humanity in the midst of a stadium already tainted by the suffering of the people who built it.

Bleak doesn’t really cover it but I know this much: the joy in the idea of Messi and Argentina winning the World Cup has flown away into the desert.