Messi performs a miracle against Austria that no statistics can express or explain

In the first two games of the World Cup in the Americas, thirty-nine-year-old Lionel Messi scored five goals and missed a penalty. The referee forgave him a red card in the match against Algeria. But we don’t believe in that. We simply didn’t see it that way, we saw something else. We have seen a player who stopped playing serious football three years ago, when he left Paris Saint-Germain for America, that in some club from Florida, like Buffalo Bill, he amuses idle old men with his skills. And maybe Messi’s end happened in 2021, when he left Barcelona, ​​the club where he spent his life. He was thirty-four at the time, and older. was then the oldest among the greatest. Neither Pele nor Cruyff at thirty-four played serious football anymore, and neither did the third greatest midfielder of all time, Diego Armando Maradona. In a way, it is believed that it is not even decent for old people to do acrobatics. The essence of the game, like the essence of music, is youth. Mozart is moreć was dead, buried in a pauper’s grave, before he was thirty-five. That’s how the greatest players, real football creators, leave young. They stay to be team captains, seniors and keepers, stoppers and last midfielders, and especially goalkeepers. Their members are of a lower order. No goalkeeper will ever be as great as Pele…

All this, therefore, sent Messi to America, never to return there again. And then this summer it appeared on our screens, in some distorted version of the game, divided into four quarters, between which the three-time taffeta is divided between the games, and commercials for universal happiness are broadcast on television. Nothing in that football could be good anymore – in football under Trump and the bald Swiss idiot, nothing could be good – then Messi appeared. While the first game with Alžira could still be written off as a lucid interval of genius on a long journey, against Austria they played seriously. Ralf Rangnick, namely, intended to destroy Argentina, in which his players followed him in an exemplary manner. And it could have turned to this side, or to the other side, because it is no longer that untouchable group of South American grandmasters, nor, on the other hand, are they the provincial and guest laborers that the Austrians used to be. It could have turned around, we say, if it hadn’t been for Lionel Messi.

At first he was afraid of the goalkeeper, so he missed the entire goal. There was some embarrassment in that penalty shootout. But that’s what every Penaldižija has to agree to. If he is not able to do that, let someone else shoot. A goal scored from a penalty kick is never counted as a great credit to the scorer, because it is normal to hit a penalty kick, it is not normal to miss it. And every such failure is more or less embarrassing. For the one who misses the penalty, the commentator will say that he is a tragiar. But there is hardly anything tragic about that failure. It is more dilettantish than tragic. And only geniuses can bear to be seen as dilettantes in what they are otherwise geniuses at.

After that miss, he scored two goals by the end of the game. And in the last seconds, he still took a free kick from a distance of thirty meters, by which he almost scored. And everything else in between was wonderful. Lionel Messi played so that those of us who watched him in those ninety minutes were ten or fifteen years younger. He put us in a time machine, took us back to some past time, where we met our loved ones, those who are no longer dear to us, because they are no longer there, they died, or they left us. While Messi played against Austria, we had time to say goodbye to them, to do everything we didn’t get to do before, to get back to this

the time that has been assigned to us, and to once again attend čud. To see him, the dead rose from their graves that evening.