NZME’s world-renowned football blog Goalmouth Scramble is back. Our rotating stable of football writers will offer daily hot takes on all the action from the World Cup in Qatar. Today, Steve Braunius takes a close look at Lionel Messi’s pain and suffering.
OPINION:
You call that a GOAT? Lionel Messiwas more like a crashing old boar in that incredible World Cup game between Argentina and Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia winning was incredible, the noise in the stadium was incredible, and Messi was barely credible.
“Everything goes through him,” said the commentator, and she meant it as a compliment, that he was the team’s modem, its server. But the server was down. The modem had lost connection. Someone needed to turn him off and then turn him on again because that might have done the trick. As it was, everything went through him in the sense he couldn’t even hold down a glass of water.
No one has ever taken pleasure in his failings. He has no vanity, no ego, no hubris. The failings of David Beckham is always cause for vast pleasure — it’s no exaggeration to say that the penalty he blasted so far over the bar in Euro 2004 that it hasn’t come down yet, is still in deep space nine, remains the funniest thing in recorded history. To be David Beckham is to forever walk in earshot of the kid with the mocking laugh and pointing finger on The Simpsons. To be Lionel Messi is to never hear that awful, debilitating “Ha-ha!”
Argentina's Lionel Messi reacts with disappointment during his side's World Cup match against Saudi Arabia. Photo / AP
But his performance against Saudi Arabia was an epic fail. Argentina lost 2-1. Messi lost by a much wider margin, was thrashed in his own existential game of hurt and suffering. And we’d all seen it before. We’ve seen it in every World Cup he’s ever played in. It’s not that he chokes, or that he doesn’t show up. He works really hard, he makes the runs, he sees the spaces. He just doesn’t get anywhere. He’s not there, he’s gone.
The star of the show was the Saudi manager, Hervé Renard. That swept-back hair, that tight white shirt, that deep, deep tan — what a thrilling sight he provided, a generator that powered his team. He looked so 70s. He was Studio 54, he was stayin’ alive, he walked into a party like he was walking onto a yacht, he was Eurotrash, he knew Mick and Bianca and John and Yoko, he lived in a fancy apartment off the Boulevard St Michel and summered in Juan les Pins, he was the kind of man who read Playboy, he was the oil crisis, Watergate, Vietnam, Quaaludes, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, Goodbye Pork Pie, he wasn’t into punk, he was everything Messi wasn’t. He was fully alive.
