World champion Messi: an unforgettable Sunday of justice

It will be written and said over and over again until the statement becomes a commonplace, a cliché that, repeated so often, weakens its meaning. But all aspirations for originality are abandoned and it is impossible to escape the idea with the pulse still accelerated by the consecration: Argentina won the most dramatic final in the history of the World Cup this Sunday in Qatarwith a rush of adrenaline and emotion that secures a privileged place in a nearly 100-year football journey.

But that collective drama served in turn as the setting for one of the most impressive narratives in modern sports memory: the one that gives account of Lionel Messi’s careerthe Argentinian player who conquered the world with his -very Argentinian- football ability, but with a personality often far from the average among us, and for this reason questioned.

How else to explain the widespread desire – even if not unanimous, of course – that it was he who raised the golden cup? The Spanish coach Luis Enrique admitted it before the start of the World Cup: “I’m bad at making predictions, but I would like Leo Messi to lift the cupHe deserves it for everything he has given to football.”

The expression “he deserves it” by Luis Enrique illuminated an unusual idea, unrecognizable in professional sport, but shared in the first days of this atypical December: that the possible consecration of Messi it would mean an act of justice recognized even by its rivals.

Did that desire have anything to do with football? Though Luis Enrique focuses on what Messi has offered on the pitch, it’s hard to think such a wish would have been possible if his extraordinary ability hadn’t been matched by a distinctive style and demeanor. Personal qualities that transformed Rosario’s World Cup, and by extension the Argentina national team, in a transcendent fact, with a metaphysical backgroundwhich surpassed the strictly sporting.

They noticed their own and, much more, strangers. “Messi’s last World Cup is not just a competition. It’s a cause, a rebellion.” wrote journalist Sid Lowe in the British newspaper The Guardian. And he added: “His teammates sought not only the Argentine triumph, but his happiness, a kind of justice.

What cause was he talking about? The Argentine philosopher residing in Spain, Santiago Gerchunoff -son of the historian and economist Pablo Gerchunoff-, explained this in an interview with journalist Carlos Prieto this Saturday on the Spanish site El Confidencial.

“In Argentina at the moment there is a religious sentiment: It’s not about winning the World Cup, it’s about Messi winning it. You see it in his own teammates. What Argentina is experiencing in this World Cup is a historical and metaphysical mission, I think this separates it from the rest of the teams,” he began.

He went further: ‘When Messi gave his impossible pass in the first goal to the Netherlands, the Italian TV announcer said: ‘What goal did he see! I could not imagine. Nobody saw it. She just saw it. This is what Maradona prophesied: One day a man will appear who will replace me: Leonel Andrés Messi Cuccittini.” And in fact what Argentina is experiencing these days is a religious mythology, made up of apostles, prophets, incarnations of gods and heirs. In Argentina we are watching the World Cup and at the same time Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and the Bible, and this does not happen anywhere else”.

This was last month: an event that stirred consciences because it was far from simply talking about sport. It touched the most profoundly human part: the sense of justice.

“When Messi isn’t around, the World Cup will continue to be lived with intensity, but It won’t be the same until another mythology comes along with another messiah.”concludes Gerchunov.

It will prove to be naive and refutable around the corner, but Messi with the World Cup allows us to still believe in values ​​that seem forgotten.

The screenplay of Rosario’s film thus offers its perfect last page, so dreamed up that it can be considered implausible. The little hero hit by physical deficiencies first, and then by defeats, critics and rivals, surpasses himself and celebrates his greatest triumph. So far those things have only happened in the heads of Hollywood screenwriters.

Until this unforgettable Sunday of justice.