Category>Football
"The Barcelona forward is one of the greatest to have have played the game. But his international career highlighted the fraught marriage between football and country"
It was 10 years ago that Messi made his World Cup debut. He was hailed as the great hope for a country that had already won two World Cups, a country in which football is central to notions of national identity. “Football has resonance everywhere,” Moores says. “But more here in Argentina, because it really is the one area in which we are a recognised force in the world.”
"The Barcelona forward is one of the greatest to have have played the game. But his international career highlighted the fraught marriage between football and country"
It was 10 years ago that Messi made his World Cup debut. He was hailed as the great hope for a country that had already won two World Cups, a country in which football is central to notions of national identity. “Football has resonance everywhere,” Moores says. “But more here in Argentina, because it really is the one area in which we are a recognised force in the world.”
Lending credence to the idea that everything can be explored through football, a divided Argentina entered into endless discussions throughout the day. Young people said that, having missed the World Cup wins, they are more affected and hurt by Messi turning away from the possibility of giving them a taste of victory. Older fans explain in detail why a man who cannot deliver a trophy shouldn’t be so revered.
Opponents of the current government took comfort in the fact that the nation’s president, Mauricio Macri, would not pick up reflected glory from an Argentina Copa win, and pundits devoted much of the day to disseminating the many ways in which Messi ‘bottles’ it when it comes to delivering for his country.
Eminent thinkers discussed whether the bad karma is his alone or belongs to the whole squad, whether the curse is when he wears the strip or when he gets to a final.onight, all the political programmes on TV are about football,” Ezequiel Fernandez Moores, Argentina’s leading sports columnist, tells me from Buenos Aires. He has just returned home on the underground, and noticed that the arrivals board read “No te vayas Lio”: Lio, don’t go.
That phrase had been trending on social media since the early hours of Monday, when the Argentina captain announced, in tears, that he had quit international football after defeat in the Copa América final to Chile. Messi missed a penalty in the shootout and the result extended Argentina’s title drought to 23 years.
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