Of a circumspect character except when gritting his teeth, running, dribbling, passing or marking, Lionel Messi he was born to deserve the joy of winning. Because he is an outstanding footballer, a teacher to other footballers, especially children, who know thanks to him that playing is a matter of ending up happy.
He had hard times, Barça and later, also in the Argentine team, where he was marked by ungrateful countrymen who even reproached him for not knowing the national anthem. He faced with patience, but not with resignation, that kind of patriotic drool that does not really match the sport, and threw himself on his back before and now a team that has had him as the great hope that now shines, at last , with the rhythm of his football.
the football of Messi it is different than any other; His generosity on the field (and off it) has been revealed in these matches, in which he has generally put aside the infinite possibilities of his brilliance to cross, to tie up opponents, to warn theirs the best way to pass or get ahead.
His joy in the successive victories, his responsibility every time the Argentine national team missed performances that seemed made for the albiceleste, is the consequence of a responsibility that is part of his character. In this decisive championship for his life, it would already be strange that once again aspired to be world champion, that Messi that he was resurrected to become the fundamental piece of the passion to play that accompanied him in his Barça years and that seemed to live a decisive August, that of retirement.
It has not been like that, this footballer who never gives up (or who only gave up two or three times, one of them when Barça lost everything in the Lisbon match against Bayern) played against the Dutch from Van Gaal as if he were on lookout, or as a cabin boy, on a ship that did not deserve to be shipwrecked.
Faced with the shipwreck that his team incurred time and time again after claiming a victory that seemed certain, Messi he opposed good sense and rigor; He explained on the field that it is better not to take the result for granted and faced the penalties, that curse of the championship, with the attitude of a leader: if he scored, the others would go behind scoring, because his light illuminates the undecided. It was that gesture, that of going first, that now becomes a symbol of the virtues that correspond to this Argentina what win.
The football of this championship has been many times (with spain o Brazilfor example) the triumph of the other, of which it is far from being the favorite and, nevertheless, depending on the ineptitude or bad luck of others, they look at the most decisive phase with the possibility of continuing to make leaps in favor of unprecedented or unexpected joys.
That Borgesian curse, the syndrome of the other as an executioner, had been around Messi’s team since Argentina went two-nil ahead. Fresh Dutchmen made up a team that seemed different, so that being that, another, put Scaloni’s team against the ropes, which crashed against itself while Jorge Valdano swallowed sweat in the stands, next to the expectant disappointment of Kempes .
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The Dutch draw was a very serious variant of the Argentine excursion through QatarWell, anything could happen. Until that other curse, that of penalties, showed its vile face and put both teams beside themselves. I watched the game in suspense, with the successive tragedies, Spanish and Brazilian, as part of the business of losing. Argentina was forced to start over many times, also when penalties were necessary and the sweat of some and others was of the same quality: nobody is better or worse before a penalty.
When, at the end of this Argentine-Dutch tragedy, Messi symbolically raised the cup of his joy I felt that justice ends up being much more than the hand of God in football: it was the tribute that justice owes to a footballer, Leo Messiwho deserves to leave Qatar drinking in the World Cup the air that corresponds to his highest degree of footballer.