How it is, what surrounds it and what still has to end at Lusail, the stadium where Argentina will make its debut

Journalism books recommend that the most important thing appear in the first paragraph of the note. So it’s worth saying even if it sounds tiring and repetitive. It’s hot in Doha. Very hot.

You don’t have to do unlicensed weather journalism to realize that these temperatures are no longer normal: 35 degrees in the sun. And one more is not left because there is hardly any shade. Sun or air conditioning, that’s the question. The Dohanos themselves say it: this time of year, they say, thermometers usually show about fifteen degrees lower.

With this argument, beyond the large investment, it was in this way that the State was able to bring the World Cup to these latitudes and take six months. The encouraging fact: They predict that fresh weather will arrive in a few days. They will be 25th.

We’ll have to wait to find out if it’s true or a broken promise. Important fact: Water is not expensive, but it is worth as much as oil. Always keep a bottle on hand. Cold or hot. It does not matter. Forgetting that commandment is a cardinal sin.

About time. Is there a World Cup climate in the capital of Qatar? There are five days to go before the inaugural match between Qatar and Ecuador and a timid effervescence is felt in the streets of the city. It’s true that Doha is decked out for the occasion. You can see footballs, thematic sculptures, posters announcing the competition, matching advertisements and gigantic images of the best footballers in the world. But It lacks the passion and madness that fans who come from all over the world tend to infect.

Other important fact: the jerseys of the Argentina national team are still the majority. A small snapshot of the situation: two Nepalese – one conspicuously in a jacket – proudly wore blue and white and shouted “Ar-gen-ti-na” in slow motion.

Immediately, on our way, as if it were a script, Hanington appeared on the scene, a 26-year-old Kenyan who arrived a month ago to work as a volunteer, who went crazy when he saw the AFA shield on the shirt of one of the correspondents from clarion.

“Messi is the person I admire the most in the world,” he released as if he were born in Rosario. Hand. He was from Nairobi and felt the same about La Pulce as any Argentine at that time. How do you say “handle” in Kenyan?

I was crushed to see the giant​

The Lusail stadium is impressive, where the Argentine national team will make its debut against Saudi Arabia. With 80,000 spectators it is the largest of the eight that make up the combo of World Cup playing fields and its construction cost about 800 million dollars and more than 11,000 immigrants as labour.

​What is striking, even if not so much after having toured the city and its surroundings in the last few hours, is that the surroundings of Lusail, already tested and functioning with its super technological structure, I’m at work. Literal.

Difficult to get there by car because the detours and accesses have not yet been completed. Even the GPS, lord and master in the city of eternal highways, seemed baffled. So much so that the driver chose to ignore his instructions and slip through a slightly out of place guardrail to cross under the highway and reach what would have been the foot of the Lusail.

To do this, one had to traverse a neighborhood of twin houses, the color of desert ochre, which, as in all of Doha, was somewhere between glitz and construction. The joke came out quickly. “If someone from Aprevide – the body in charge of guaranteeing the safety of stadiums in the Province of Buenos Aires – passes here today – the match will not be played. They will close the field”, shot an old connoisseur of our football. And yes, I wasn’t exaggerating. there was rubble the size of the Obelix menhirs.

But accesses were not the only thing that remained to be done this Tuesday, seven days after Argentina-Saudi Arabia near the Lusail stadium, face of the city of the same name, also known as the City of Energy – this is another nice story-.

In the flowerbeds of the areas where spectators will enter there were newly placed seedlings accompanied by a drip irrigation system that was in charge of supplying them with water. But more than drops of water, speaking of the irreducible Gauls of Asterix, what they would need to become plants in a week is a good dose of magic potion.

Furthermore, a few meters from the stadium, there is the terminus of a kind of metrobus – it will certainly serve as a transfer to the metro – which was not yet in use.

Everything, it is insisted, is in progress. Nothing seems to be impossible on this small peninsula.

around 1pm with heat in destruction mode, the venue was filled with workers who had come out of the bowels of the stadium to take a short break. The most coveted place was the minimal shaded spaces. On the floor, curled up in places where the sun’s rays didn’t reach, they took the opportunity to eat and take a nap. I should get back to work in a bit. The heat doesn’t subside and the World Cup, even if it doesn’t seem like it yet, is about to start.

Doha, Qatar. Special delivery.