Football Ramblings

F ootball is a hard drug that offers immediate satisfaction and indignation; viewed through its prism, Kylian Mbappé can be idolised and Lionel Messi sacrificed in the same game. Reason has nothing to do with it: the drug attacks your emotions – and at the cost of the footballers. Mbappé cost €150m before he was worth that. As there is more money than talent on the market, promise and expectation get bought at the price of reality. The price turned the media spotlight on this prodigious child and so a ceremony of confusion began. Football is a very serious game but it is full of people doing all they can to make idiots of footballers. Mbappé, in this year of adaptation to his price and the expectations placed upon him, played well and played OK (he doesn’t know how to play badly). He also saw team-mates of the level of Edinson Cavani and Neymar from up close. A fine education, if you know how to see it, how to look for the right lessons. He had the privileg...

Lionel Messi didn’t win the World Cup. So what? Well, then he can’t have a place in the pantheon of football greats. Says who? That’s the popular theory. Pele won three World Cups, and Diego Maradona one. Does that make Pele a better player than Maradona? The Argentinians wouldn’t agree. So would many others. Both are wizards, let’s leave it at that. Argentina last won the World Cup in 1994 with Maradona at the helm. It’s been a long barren spell since then. Messi as Maradona’s anointed successor was expected to win the World Cup and claim his rightful place in football’s hall of fame. Four World Cups later, the dream remains just that. He came very close in 2014, only to be denied by the Germans in the final. Which is why all hopes were pinned on 2018. But the ageing Argentinian squad was brutally exposed by the talented young Frenchmen. Messi is not the only prodigious talent who has missed out on World Cup glory. Alfred Di Stefano, for all his magical feats, never w...

Regardless of what happens to Argentina at this World Cup, Messi needs to free himself of the burden of being the Albiceleste’s only hope and play his own game – with the ferocity we have come to expect from the Barcelona great. Lionel Messi  is a mythical creature. When he takes flight, he is a superhero in human form. He is complex math and unfathomable magic at the same time. He skips past challenges like light passes through stained glass. An almost supernatural being, Messi’s technical skills are so embedded it might appear to us as a scene from a sci-fi movie. He is at once light and wind, wobbling and bouncing off defenders before he appears from one side to the other as if by teleportation. Ask any of the national team coaches that will face Messi at the Russia World Cup whether they would set their team up without first deciding how to stop the Argentine playmaker? Absolutely none of them would go on to argue that Messi is not the deciding factor -- the one wh...