“Where’s Messi? We beat him,” was the chant that circulated among Saudi Arabia fans at the Lusail that sat 88012 on Tuesday.
Over the past five days, banter of all sorts could be heard in Doha, at the Souk Wakif, Al Bidda fan park, buses and at the metro stations. At nearly 3 am on Tuesday, on the way back from the USA-Wales game, the metro to Al Wakrah station had Mexicans bouncing and hurling pejoratives at Robert Lewandowski. But abuses stopped immediately as some said “Messi.”
The two people liked by all so far have been Diego Maradona – even people in Brazil shirts were seen holding a flag aflutter with his image and the 1986 World Cup – and the inheritor of his No.10 shirt. That changed somewhat on Tuesday afternoon, ironically after a game where Messi became the first Argentine to score in four World Cups. At 21 games, only Maradona has played more World Cup games than Messi for whom this was the 20th.
According to goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez, Argentina “relaxed a bit” after scoring the first goal.
Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni said looking ahead they would have to do what they wanted to do anyway. “What comes ahead is to rise up, to face Mexico. They will be tough, as everyone is at the World Cup. Now we need to win two games to move on… regardless of the result today we would anyway try to win all the games,” he said after his first loss since July 2019.
Scaloni said “millimetric off-sides” made the difference and that in “two sudden moments” the game changed, referring to Saudi Arabia’s second-half strikes from Saleh Alshehri and Salem Aldawsari. “Today is a sad day but as we always say, head up and carry on.”
“We’re hurting, hurting a lot from our first defeat and on top of that at the World Cup,” said Martinez. The goalkeeper said the game against Mexico on Saturday would be their “first World Cup final.”
Saudi Arabia, it seemed, had already played one and midfielder Abdulelah Al-Malki attributed that to the coach Herve Renard. His speech, Al-Malki said, roused the Green Falcons to the point that they cried.
Trying to explain the result, Renard said: “All the stars in the skies were aligned for us. This is football, sometimes crazy things happen.” The French coach who gets underdogs to punch above their weight regularly in international football – he guided Zambia to the African Cup of Nations title in 2012 – accepted that had Argentina scored a second, “the game would have been finished.”
“During half-time, I wasn’t happy because the pressure wasn’t good enough, the determination wasn’t good enough and when you come to the World Cup, you need to give everything. We can’t play as we did in the first half,” he said.
Renard said Argentina may have taken Saudi Arabia lightly – “you can imagine that when you’re playing against Saudi Arabia, the motivation is not the same as playing against Brazil,” he said – but Scaloni denied that. “We respect Saudi Arabia as we do other teams,” he said, adding that they have good technical players.
Going into the game, Renard had said Saudi Arabia, unlike Argentina whose players got together last week, had prepared well. “We have not come here to have fun,” he said at Monday’s pre-match pre-match press conference. It showed.
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