It’s Come Home! Argentina wins first major title in 28 years
In the middle of this constant cauldron of anticlimaxes, there was Messi – the best footballer of the world playing the best football in the world for a country called FC Barcelona – complicating this puzzle.
On Sunday morning – Saturday night at the Maracanas Stadium in Rio de Janeiro – the Great Argentina Anomaly was finally cast aside. In a final that had more collisions than on a Gurgaon highway, and more foul play than in Macbeth – 41 fouls and 9 yellow cards, not to mention the kind of method acting that would have made both Stanislavsky and Shah Rukh Khan proud – it wasn’t a pretty game, even by Copa’s take-over-a-quadrant-and-knock-the-ball-out standards.
But a Brazil-Argentina Copa final, despite all the mythology and near-empty arena, was bound to be a variation of a bullfight.
For Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni, getting the team to be more than a fecilitator for their star player meant playing Angel di Maria from the start – which Scaloni had, strangely, avoided in previous games. Hopefully, the triad of Di Maria-Messi-Lautaro Martinez would click. Even with the Angel on board frm the beginning, this didn’t happen.
Brazil made the raids. But their attacks were constantly foiled, not so much by Argentinian body blocks and tackles, but more by the
Seleçãon belief that Neymar with the ball down the left flank would break through by the sheer force of statistics. This also didn’t happen.
