Hernán Casciari’s moving account of Lionel Messi and his consecration in Qatar: “Nobody had ever seen a simple man on top of the world”

Moved and, at times, holding back tears, the writer and director of Orsai magazine, Hernán Casciari, read a fragment of a very emotional chronicle he wrote about Lionel Messi and Argentina’s consecration at the World Cup in Qatar.

“Lionel’s suitcase” is the title of the text which he will publish in the next issue of the magazine and whose synthesis he shared in the column he usually holds on Andy Kusnetzoff’s program on radio Urbana.

Casciari, who had already written “Messi is a dog”, one of the most viral stories on Rosario’s champion in which he compares the desire to play football of the captain of the selected team with the desperation that his dog (Totín) had for the sponge, told in detail what Messi means to Argentines who, like him, have emigrated To Barcelona.

Casciari pointed out in the text that “there are two types of immigrants”: those who arrive in Spain, keep their suitcases and after a short time say “it’s fine, uncle” and “holy shit”, and others who, like him, had the suitcase without saving and maintained “customs, such as mate or yeísmo”.

Throughout the text, Casciari has inserted Messi as “the leader” of the battle waged by Argentine migrants keep as much of their Argentinian identity as possible, mainly the way they speak.

“It was very difficult for all of us to keep saying dribble instead of dribble, but at the same time we knew it was our final trench. And Messi was our leader in that battle. The guy who didn’t speak kept the way of speaking alive for us” Casciari said.

And he continued: “So, all of a sudden, we were not only enjoying the best player we had ever seen, but also We observed that he did not lack a Spanish idiom in any interview”.

“Suddenly he was the most famous man in Barcelona but, just like us, I’ve never stopped being Argentinian anywhere else“he insists.

He also relates emotionally how they celebrated “his rudeness when he went to the Olympics to win gold for Argentina without his club’s permission” and that he always returns to Rosario at the end of the year to celebrate Christmas.

“It is difficult to explain how happy it made life for us who lived away from home. How it freed us from the boredom of a monotonous society and justified us. How it helped us not lose our compass. Messi has made us happy in a way that is so serene, and so natural, and so oursthat when the insults from Argentina began to arrive we could not understand it”, read Casciari trying to hold back the tears.

He also said that these insults and interrogations of Messi in Argentina had been a “nightmare” for them and he was confident that his resignation from the national team in 2016, after the frustrating defeat in the Copa América final against Chile in the United States, was ” A relief”.

“We couldn’t see him suffer like this, because we knew how much he loved his country and the efforts he made not to break the umbilical cord. When he stepped down, it was as if Messi had suddenly decided to take his hands off the fire for a while. Not just yours. We too were burned by those criticisms,” he said.

The next paragraph highlighted what, for Casciari, is “the most unusual event in modern football: in the afternoon of 2016, when Lionel got tired of the insults and decided to resign, a fifteen-year-old boy wrote him a letter on Facebook which ended saying, “Think about staying. But stay to enjoy, which is what these people want to take away from you.” Seven years later, Enzo Fernández, the author of the letter, was the revelation player of the World Cup by Lionel Messi”.

He observed with emotion that Messi returned to the national team and, years later, “won everything he needed and shut the mouths of his detractors”.

“Although some found him ‘vulgar for the first time’ in front of a microphone. It was when he said, ‘What a look, stupid, go there.’ For us, those of us who have observed his accent for fifteen years, it is was a perfect sentence, because he ate all the s and his yeísmo is still intact,” he said.

He finally celebrated that during the World Cup in Qatar he was able to confirm that Messi “is always the same” who helped them be happy.

For Casciari, “all of humanity wanted Lionel to win so badly. No one had ever seen a simple man on top of the world.”