Times of crisis, times of opportunity, they say. But that didn't work out very well in Argentina, which lives in a state of endless crisis. Let's try this: time for euphoria, time for opportunity.
What if the coronation of the Argentine team as world champion and that of Leo Messi as king of the world becomes the impetus for Argentina to stop being a stupid country?
The idea came to me as a result of a message that my great Argentine friend Daniel received on Sunday night, with whom I watched the final in Sant Pere de Ribes. Santiago sent it, a great friend of his in Buenos Aires. He says the following:
"I loved. What team! The sacrifice team. A Messi winning from sacrifice, honesty in the game and so on. The antithesis of the above (the hand of God).
I hope they continue on this path. It's going to be good for the people."
I read it when I woke up on Monday morning, hungover with happiness – reviewing in my mind the images of Messi lifting the World Cup – and my reaction was: “Eureka! Daniel's friend hit the nail on the head!”
He had taken for granted that the Argentine triumph in the World Cup would be an ephemeral triumph. He thought that joy and the feeling of national union, which in Argentina is only inspired by the soccer team, would give way to cold reality in a few days. You know: 100 percent inflation, 48 percent poverty, rampant child malnutrition and a polarization that makes politics feel like a permanent cold civil war.
So why my "eureka"? Because the example of Messi's selection offers another path to follow. It offers a vision not of a failed, atomized country, in which the spirit of "every man for himself" reigns, but of a truly united nation in which everyone is rowing in the same direction. And that it moves away from that other sport in which Argentina is world champion: the grotesque waste of human quality and natural resources that fortune gave it.
This was not the Messi of individual goals that we met in Barcelona. This was the mature Messi, aware of his limitations, the one who understands better than anyone else that the sport in which he shines like no one else has the original name “association football”.
He did not have Andrés Iniesta or Xavi Hernández by his side, but rather willful boys like Mac Allister and Julián Álvarez, and a soldier, De Paul, whom no one would accuse of being a Mozart of baseball. And, speaking of soldiers, how about the porter Martínez, the Spartan who stopped the final French offensive in his particular battle of Thermopylae?
Do you want God's hand? There was the hand of God, which blessed the rest of the team and led them to victory, with a bit of luck, yes, but without the cheers that decided previous victories. Being alive will have its charm from time to time, but in Argentina it has risen to the status of a great national virtue, which in the long run leads to the triumph of the few and the ruin of the majority.
Let's compare Maradona's goal that defined the 1986 World Cup with the one that defined the 2022 World Cup, the best individual goal "in history" and the second Argentine goal against France on Sunday, a toast to the association game. There were seven touches, five players participated, Messi among them, brilliant in detail, but as a supporting actor, nothing more. And then Mac Allister, the goal pass to Di María, an example of generosity and vision, just the two values that Argentina needs to emerge from the hole into which, through his selfishness and blindness, he got himself.
The lesson of this champion team for Argentina is that it is time for it to stop playing the fool in the world and start being what it should be, what some want to imagine they are but are mistaken: a prosperous country of adult people. , not a country of children who continue to believe that a redeeming idol, a Maradona, an Evita, a Kirchner, a Santa Claus, will solve everything. Will the opportunity be seized? Hard. But the Argentine friend is right: what that wonderful and desperate country needs is to replicate the spirit of solidarity, sacrifice, honesty and willpower that led Captain Messi and his worker soldiers to be crowned world champions.
