This was a difficult and at times rather painful night in Sao Paulo: for those watching this turgid, tactically constipated semifinal between Holland and Argentina, for the Dutch players who ran hard for 120 minutes but were beaten on penalties, and before that glorious ending for Lionel Messi too, a star of this tournament, but suffocated here by a meeting of two teams set above all on not losing the half-share in the World Cup final with which they started the match.
After the winning penalty kick had been slotted Argentina’s players went to their supporters and danced wildly, whirling their shirts above their heads. Messi, bashful as ever, hung back, walking a joyful lap of honour on his own. It had just been that kind of evening. Comparisons with Diego Maradona — another time, another game — have become tedious by now, but they will keep coming.
Messi left no real imprint on this semifinal, but he has a final now against El Diego’s own grandest opponent to decorate with his World Cup-worthy talent. After a deeply uninspiring match here it is to be hoped for the sake of the spectacle that both teams come to win rather than avoid defeat, and that the attacking talent both have is allowed to breathe.
One by one the poster-boys have fallen away at this most pop-ish of world cups, but tenacity has always been a key Messi-ism, and here he was among the last men standing as ever, with only this disciplined, muscular Holland between the world’s best player and a World Cup final to match his talents.
Stillness In the event a game of no shots, no incident and a crushing sense of caution dawdled on, with Messi for much of the match in a kind of holding pattern, circling amiably. This stillness has been a feature of his World Cup, the ability to wait for his moment and pounce as he did here against Switzerland. And yet, at times, as Holland pushed forward more aggressively, with Arjen Robben by now the game’s most visible presence, it was hard to avoid the feeling that the world’s best player should influence a match like this more than he did.
And so, at the end of 120 minutes of something that resembled a groggy second cousin of high-grade tournament football, the game went to penalties. The first really loud cheer of the night arrived with the first kick of the shootout, a miss for poor old “Concrete” Ron Vlaar. Messi put the next one away with ease. And that was pretty much that on a night that, for all its slow-burn caution, ended in unbounded celebrations by the relentlessly boisterous Argentina fans.
The Arena Corinthians was rocking at the start as Messi kicked the match off — and immediately began to walk, as he does now, taking up an advanced lurking No. 10 position up against Holland’s three man defence. This has been the way of Messi’s tournament in the last few matches as he has evolved into the tournament’s most notable passive-aggressive influence, a player whose mere presence on the pitch has affected the texture of Argentina’s matches. It could be said Messi has done as much as anyone to protect his less-than-perfect defence, the need to double-team the world’s best attacker applying a discreet hand-brake to the opposition’s attacks.
With Nigel de Jong fit again the suspicion before kick-off was that Louis van Gaal would ask his gristliest midfield pivot to stay close to the game’s dominant personality. And here de Jong was at Messi’s side from Argentina’s first attack. At times Messi strolled. At others he dropped deep and knitted the play together like a mooching little regista. But there was little space, with the Dutch midfield and defence turning into a six-man anti-Messi block.
Although if Holland was cautious here so too was Alejandro Sabella, his customary fear of the counterattack gingered up by the presence of Robben. And so the match edged relentlessly towards its end-game. Messi, and Argentina, will need to produce a lot more to trouble Germany. But for now that will be forgotten. A “Peak Messi” World Cup final is a gift it looked, for a while, as though football might miss out on. But here it is all the same, a chance for the greatest player of the modern age to sparkle on what remains the sport’s greatest occasion. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
