In real life — another name for football — there is rarely a brink. Almost always there are brinks that one either goes over like Brazil did on Friday, or steps back from like Argentina managed a few hours later. Tight as both games were, it was Brazil’s brinkmanship that cost one of the tournament favourites the game against a sturdy Croatia, and progress into the World Cup semifinal. In the other match, fortune favoured the less brave.
If the game was 45-odd minutes long, Argentina would have been home and dry, Albiceleste and how. The signs were gathering and forming. Such as when in the 32nd minute, Alexis Mac Allister from near centrefield fed the ball to Rodrigo De Paul to his right, who passed the parcel to Nahuel Molina, who swung it to the by-then-approached Mac Allister — who kicked a weak grounder to the 4 inches shy of 7 ft tall Dutch keeper Andries Noppert, perhaps out of sheer awe. As evident by the length of the last line, it is, even without a climax, an astounding flow of play.
Two minutes later, the pampas of Lusail Stadium came alive with the sound of VAMOS! Lionel Messi, his face strangely looking post-expressionist Dutch in its stubbly composure, eelscampered away with the ball, scoreline, and seemingly — ah, blind mortals! — the game. His feints were astoundingly fluid, as if that is the way everyone should with the ball all the time: crooked, channelling the great Garrincha just for fun.
Messi does not turn right even as he appears to turn right. He eclipses the ball with his right foot for a moment, continues on his leftward journey with his left foot goading his body attached to the ball on, leaving defender Nathan Aké stranded in his sandbank. A 1-2 swerving diagonal pass follows to Molina, who with Virgil van Dijk swooping behind him, directs the ball in — even as in the momentum of his flick-kick he spins and falls — beyond Noppert into the goal.
By the 73nd minute, courtesy a Denzel Dumfries foul in the Dutch box on Marcus Acuña, Messi converts from the penalty spot. Argentina is on their way to meet Croatia on Tuesday. They really are.
And then, in the 82nd minute, substitute Wout Weghorst rises out of somewhere, and corkscrews his neck almost like that girl in The Exorcist and heads in the first Dutch goal. We sense immediately Argentina already starting to punch below their weight. All aerial play was now looking like it was for the Dutch to make and take.
The game, never mind the scoreline, though, was still Argentina’s to take. By the 99th minute, Nicolás Otamendi pointlessly brings down Luuk de Jong, the way we, watching the game from home, may have knocked over a pint bottle, nervous tics have erupted in Lionel Scaloni’s team, this foul being one more manifestation.
What follows is a stunning example of Dutch engineering — not spit and glue jugaad, but Homeric level dyke-breaching. In the dying seconds of the first half of stoppage time, midfielder Teun Koopmeiners takes the free kick, which is really a dead ball pass to Weghorst standing next to the Argentinian wall, amazingly unmarked as if he had momentarily donned a blue-and-white jersey to blend in. The well-directed grounder is taken, the ball dragged and shot into the goal with keeper Emi Martinez and ten other Argentinians fumbling to stop the ball that is by now the equivalent of broken china.
Desperation can reduce the best teams to tatters. It can also squeeze out that last drop that has somehow got settled at the bottom of the barrel. In the dying seconds of the second half of extra-extra time, Enzo Fernández smashes the ball after a first touch into — no, on to the Dutch goalpost. If posts could move, beggars would ride.
The rest, as always in a penalty shootout decider, was Russian roulette in which one goalkeeper (Martinez) is the hero, and the last unsuccessful kicker (Steven Berghuis) is, unreasonably, the loser.
For a game that saw 17 yellow cards — the most ever in a World Cup game, including Leandro Paredes’ after the Argentina defender fouled Nathan Aké before booting the ball directly at the Dutch bench — at the same time keeping Argentina’s, and Messi’s, hopes alive, it was almost Tarantinoesque.
Foul tempers, a staggering goal, a brilliant though unorthodox Trojan horse manoeuvre, untamed horseplay, the oddity of Scaloni keeping Angel Di Maria on the bench right until the 111th min even when his side needed angelic intervention, a street brawl on the sidelines after Parades foul…. that it was a strange, memorable, unnatural game almost seems natural in retrospect.
Would Argentina have it any other way? That, as the awaiting Croats must be wondering, might not be a rhetorical question.
