Messi deserves the joy

Of a guarded disposition, except when gnashing his teeth, running, dribbling, passing or scoring, Lionel Messi he was born to deserve the joy of winning. Because he’s an exceptional footballer, a teacher for other footballers, especially children, who thanks to him know that playing is a matter of happiness.

He had difficult moments, at Barça and later, also in the Argentine national team, where he was marked by ungrateful compatriots who even reproached him for not knowing the national anthem. He faced with patience, but not with resignation, that kind of patriotic drool that doesn’t really correspond to sport, and he threw himself on his back first and now a team that had him as the great hope that now finally shines with the rhythm of his football.

Messi’s football is unlike any other; His generosity on the pitch (and off) has been revealed in these games, where he has generally put aside the infinite possibilities of his brilliance to cross, tie up opponents, advise their best way to pass or take the lead.

His joy for the successive victories, his responsibility every time the Argentine national team made mistakes that seemed made for the albiceleste, is the consequence of a responsibility that is part of his character.

In this decisive championship for his life, because it would already be strange if he aspired to return to being world champion, that Messi who was resurrected to become the fundamental piece of the passion for the game that accompanied him in his years at Barça and who he seemed to be experiencing a decisive August, that of retirement.

It wasn’t like that, this footballer who never gives up (or who has only given up two or three times, one of them when Barça lost everything in the Lisbon match against Bayern) played against Van Gaal’s Dutch side as if he was a lookout, or cabin boy, on a ship that didn’t deserve to be wrecked.

Faced with the shipwreck his team has suffered several times after claiming a victory that seemed certain, Messi has opposed common sense and rigor; On the pitch he explained that it is better not to take the result for granted and faced the penalties, that curse of the championship, with a leader’s attitude: if he scored, the others would go after the goal, because his light illuminates the undecided. It was that gesture, that of going first, which now becomes a symbol of the virtues that correspond to this winning Argentina.

The football of this championship has been many times (with Spain or Brazil for example) the triumph of the other, of which it is far from being the favorite and, however, depending on the ineptitude or misfortune of the others , seem the most decisive phase with the possibility of continuing to make leaps in favor of new or unexpected joys.

That Borgesian curse, the executioner’s other syndrome, had been around Messi’s team ever since Argentina took the lead by two to zero. Fresh Dutch made up a team that seemed different, so much so that being that, another, put Scaloni’s team on the ropes, which crashed into itself while Jorge Valdano swallowed his sweat in the stands, alongside the expected disappointment of Kempes.

The Dutch draw was a very serious variant of Argentina’s tour of Qatar, since anything could happen. Until that other curse, that of penalties, showed his cowardly face and made both teams mad. I watched the game with bated breath, with the subsequent tragedies, Spanish and Brazilian, as part of the business of defeat. Argentina has been forced to start over many times, even when penalties were needed and the sweat of some and others was of the same quality: nobody is better or worse before a penalty.

When, at the end of this Argentine-Dutch tragedy, Messi symbolically raised the cup of his joy, I felt that justice ends up being much more than the hand of God in football: it was the homage that justice owes to a footballer, Leo Messi , who deserves to leave Qatar by drinking the air that corresponds to his highest level of footballer at the World Cup.