a question that found its most complete answer in Messi’s team’s win at the Monumental

What is soccer for? So many times I asked myself and self-reference plays like a mirror. Or not? Rather, what is the use of football played like this. That is what it is for. To be happy for a while even if the salary is not enough, the love of your life abandons you, your friends get sick. To give you a break, a relief, a truce. To forget, even for a little while, that you are an orphan, of your miserable life, of that constant suffering in this valley of tears. That they are not 22 running after a ball. It’s you, it’s me, it’s us touching, marking, biting opponents’ ankles. Goal. Making goals. Screaming them from the marrow. Revenge, small, ephemeral. And then, when the tension drops and you review a 3-0 like this Sunday, you feel at peace. You even feel good. And you keep the secret hope that it will be repeated with Peru, Thursday. And it doesn’t scare you anymore Qatar. Let them come one by one.

There is a way to play. That vilified, outraged by dint of “Serve if you want to win”, from “Pen pen”, of drums. The one that is transmitted from generation to generation and that someone baptized “ours”. What those kids with painted faces saw in the stands of the Monumental or in front of the TV screen, now they know that there is a way to play that is from here, argentina, our. That you can play like this. Not always like this, with such a dance, but in essence. Sometimes it will turn out better, sometimes worse. And it can even be lost, of course.

There are reasons for that to happen. The genetics of the Argentine soccer player, first. And after the planets align. If you have a Sun King, all the better. And there is an eye in seeing players. And there is an order. And there is a wish. And there is a wardrobe conviction.

Sideways glance, Lionel Scaloni you can hang some medals. Dibu Martínez, Cuti Romero, Nahuel Molina, Nico González and that boy Facundo Medina who entered at the end, only he and those who accompany him knew them, Samuel, Ayala, Aimar. The courage to put them on, to hold them when the hand was crooked, is another unquestionable merit of the technician. And that of the players, that of playing.

What is play? What they did this Sunday, October 10. Heart and short passes. Speed ​​change. Always hungry to attack. Do not resign yourself when the goal that was a goal hits the stick or it is taken out on the line. Sporting shame for the floor, deactivated vedettisms in search of the common good. We are eleven. That it is only one.

The National Team is trotting to the World Cup. Except Brazil, has no equivalent in South America. Big test is missing: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Belgium, Holland, the Africans who appear, the surprise of each World Cup, the imponderables, the chance if the coin falls on the other side. But that is also football. You can pass. It already happened. Higuaín’s shot with the Germans? And Messi’s cross shot in that final? He had gotten tired of scoring goals like this in the Barcelona and yet …

Messi and behind him, now yes, it seems, There is a team in which Leo does not save if he does not solve. Is not the same. We will have to look in a cave for those who called him cold chest, the mute man who does not sing the hymn, the sad leader. Pancake production increases in Argentina.

What is soccer for? What do I know. To tell your grandchildren: “I saw when we danced to Uruguay”. To tell them: “You don’t know what Messi was!” To tell them that one night in October 2021, alone in all solitude, at home and in front of the TV, you made yourself cry as a good soccer machirulo that you are. And that you opened a wine. And you toasted. And you thanked those men from the albiceleste who were you “playing soccer.” That for one night they made you feel like a child again. That made you believe that you can be immortal.