Messi for this moment – Liberation
Holder of seven Ballon d’Ors so far but zero world champion titles, the 35-year-old Argentine legend scored twice on Sunday, giving himself the trophy that was missing from his rich collection.
The whole world dreamed of it and Leo Messi did it. At 35 years and a few months old, Pulga (“the Flea”) has finally won “his” World Cup, the only title he was missing, and to join or even surpass the other diabolical left-handed of the team in legend. American, Diego Maradona. Here, he is cooked, annealed, he will be able to bend the saplings and return to Rosario, where for years he has been threatening to return without doing so, especially in the club of his childhood, Newell’s Old Boys. Perhaps he will come to an agreement with the PSG, the entertainment multinational that hires him, not to activate the optional additional year that appears on his contract in June. Just enough to give yourself the chance to grab a fifth Champions League with the club from the capital, like a last lap.
Seven goals
On Sunday, Albiceleste had the choice between imitating their 1986 predecessor, who won 3-2 against FRG, or copying their 1990 one (finalists, beaten by West Germany themselves from a disputed penalty). The scenario imitated the first for a long time: the South American crew led 2-0, before being overtaken. Then, this Sunday, December 18, he got carried away, proposing a version with a bonus track, one goal for each selection before the penalty shootout. Penalties, the Argentines and their captain Messi will have obtained many in this World Cup: 5 in 7 games, for four goals. For a long time the aristocrats of this game (from Di Stefano to Puskas, from Cruyff to Platini via Zico) have never won the World Cup. There were exceptions, of course: Pelé, Garrincha, Beckenbauer, Zidane or Maradona… Since 2002, it’s as if the most creative of them had been forced to sail with few sails, to field a succinct game. By the same principle, the best player of the time for at least fifteen years, seven Ballons d’Or on his clock, had to win the World Cup. How could it be otherwise?
The rosarino – seven goals in total in the last month in Qatar – has just repaired what the world considered an anomaly. In a way, he’s behind the times. “Reminiscent of the Terminator from the movie the Last Judgment, mocked the writer and screenwriter for cinema Fabián Casas not so long ago with Publication. It was modeled in Spanish cyber labs [allusion à son arrivée à l’âge de 13 ans à la Masia, le centre de formation du Barça, ndlr], programmed to carry on no matter what. If something disintegrates it, it rebuilds itself and starts again. Only a programmed android can duplicate Maradona’s goal of the century against the English (in 1986). The proof that he is a robot is that he did it in an unimportant match (a match against Getafe in the Spanish Cup in 2007).
ideal son-in-law
Like Telê Santana’s Brazil, uncrowned fanfare in 1982 and 1986, Argentina has offered much better teams (1994, 2002, 2006) than the one sent to ruin in Qatar. But after the opening defeat against Saudi Arabia, the players of the other Lionel (Scaloni, the coach) seemed on a mission, inhabited by a powerful collective force. Even Messi, surrounded by a group at his service, seemed to be in a trance. During the quarter-final against the Netherlands, he went to scold the referee, met on the Spanish pitches when he was playing for Barcelona, before criticizing him harshly to the microphones of the reporters. And to attack a Dutch player in the meantime during a television interview: “What are you looking at, asshole? Sure!”
The ideal son-in-law (now 98 goals in 172 appearances, current streak?) has bared his teeth and Argentina are ready to forgive their meteorite everything. “Maradona was similar to Julio Cortázar, on the side of the rebellion. Messi embodies perfection, his game is comparable to a paragraph by Jorge Luis Borges, one wonders how he could have invented it. For Maradona, as for Cortázar, one gets the impression that every action has cost him, that for every stroke of genius there is a price to pay”. analyzes the writer Hernán Casciari. The price to pay for Messi was only a long wait of fifteen years. It just finished.
