Messi for this moment – ​​Release

Holder so far of seven golden balls but zero world champion title, the 35-year-old Argentine legend scored two goals on Sunday, offering himself the trophy that was missing from his rich collection.

The whole world dreamed of it and Leo Messi did it. At 35 and a few months old, the Pulga (“the Flea”) has finally won “his” World Cup, the only title he lacked, and to join or even surpass in legend the other diabolical left-hander of the team. South American, Diego Maradona. That’s it, it’s cooked, annealed, he will be able to bend the saplings and return to Rosario, where he has been threatening to return for years without doing so, especially in the club of his childhood, the Newell’s Old Boys. Perhaps he will agree with PSG, the entertainment multinational which employs him, not to activate in June the optional additional year which appears on his contract. Enough to give yourself a chance to grab a fifth Champions League with the capital club, like a final lap.

Sept buts

Sunday, the Albiceleste had the choice between imitating its predecessor of 1986, victorious 3-2 against the FRG, or copying that of 1990 (finalist, beaten by the same West Germany on a disputed penalty). The scenario has long imitated the first: the South American crew leading 2-0, before being overtaken. Then, this Sunday, December 18 got carried away, offering a version with bonus tracks, a goal for each selection before a penalty shootout. Penalties, the Argentines and their captain Messi will have obtained a lot in this World Cup: 5 in 7 games, for four achievements. For a long time, the aristocrats of this game (from Di Stefano to Puskas, from Cruyff to Platini via Zico) 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 deploy a skimpy game . On the same principle, the best player of the time for at least fifteen years, seven golden balls on the clock, had to win the World Cup. How could it be otherwise?

The Rosarino – seven goals in total in the past month in Qatar – has just repaired what the world considered an anomaly. In a way, it is fitting with the times. “He is reminiscent of the Terminator from the film the Last Judgment, mocked the writer and screenwriter for the cinema Fabián Casas not long ago with Release. It was shaped in the Spanish cybernetic labs [allusion à son arrivée à l’âge de 13 ans à la Masia, le centre de formation du Barça, ndlr], programmed to move forward 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 meeting against Getafe in the Spanish Cup in 2007).

ideal son-in-law

Like Telê Santana’s Brazil, an uncrowned fanfare in 1982 and 1986, Argentina offered much better teams (1994, 2002, 2006) than the one sent to scrap in Qatar. But after his inaugural loss against Saudi Arabia, the players of the other Lionel (Scaloni, the coach) seemed like on a mission, inhabited by a powerful collective force. Even Messi, surrounded by a group at his service, seemed in a trance. During the quarter-final against the Netherlands, he went to scold the referee, whom he met on the Spanish courts when he was playing at FC Barcelona, ​​before sharply criticizing him at the reporters’ microphones. And to attack, in the process, a Dutch player during a television interview: “What are you looking at, asshole? Clear !”

The ideal son-in-law (now 98 goals in 172 caps, current series?) has shown his teeth and Argentina is ready to forgive his meteorite for everything. “Maradona was similar to Julio Cortázar, on the rebellion side. Messi, he embodies perfection, his game is comparable to a paragraph of Jorge Luis Borges, one wonders how he could invent that. For Maradona, as for Cortázar, one has the impression that each action has cost him, that, for each stroke of brilliance, 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 has just ended.