ARGENTINA LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY

Messi's Strike Rattles Mexico And Lusail, Brings Team Back From The Brink

- Siddharth Saxena

Lusail Stadium (Doha): A little boy tore off the jersey he was wearing. His father, cheering wildly next to him, didn’t notice at first, then gently admonished him for the act, as if to say, “You don’t do these things in the costly tickets section.”

The boy was beyond caring. Both went back to madly cheering for Argentina after what had just happened. It was an almost pagan ritual of the extraordinary. What they didn’t notice was that the other sibling next to them, only barely older, was sobbing, shaking uncontrollably, sinking into his crumpled Argentina flag as he wept and wept.

He may not have been alone. Many in the vein-pulsing, eye-popping, heaving Lusail Stadium, packed to capacity at 88, 966, would have had a lump in their throats. So overwhelming, so cathartic was the effect of the moment. It was unifying and euphoric in its collective release.

On the field below, Lionel Messi had just skidded the ball low and sharp past the left of the ultra-chill, gum-chewing Guillermo Ochoa to cause this tremor. It didn’t look the most elegant, but it was perfect in its calculation, with Angel Di Maria knowing exactly when to let go of the ball. The execution was devastating in its effect. It would affect Messi, shake him to the core like he did all of us.

It would be the shaking off, yet again, of a million tons of doubt and fear – yes, even the mightiest of them too feel it – like he’s had to do so many times in this strange saga of a career, where he is otherworldly talent one moment, frail human the next. Messi felt it, we felt it. The world was not far behind.