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The greatest triumphs sometimes follow the greatest downfalls. Ten years ago, a 29-year-old Lionel Messi — with eight La Liga titles, four Champions Leagues and five of his eight Ballon d’Or awards in the bag during his time with Barcelona — decided he’d had enough of living with the pain.“It’s over me, that’s it. I’ve tried so hard, but it’s just not working,” declared Messi, dejected and broken-hearted, as the ‘end’ came with his missed penalty in the Copa America final defeat by Chile in New Jersey, extending his personal misery to four lost finals with the national team — at the 2014 World Cup against Germany and three at the Copa America (2007, 2015 and now 2016). “It hurts not to be champion with Argentina”, he let everyone know his frustration, and his face revealed the melancholy of a tormented soul.The world received the news with shock and awe, with some calling it ‘Mexit’ and many calling for him to stay as social media was immediately flooded with the hashtags #NoTeVayasMessi and #QuedateMessi. Diego Maradona he also came to the support of his protégé, urging him to “fight against all those who abandoned him”.By the time La Albiceleste assembled two months later for World Cup qualifiers against Uruguay and Venezuela, he was back in the mix, saying he loved Argentina “too much” to stay away from the team. The rest, as they say, is history. He finally entered the story of the 2022 World Cup — crowning his mental composure in the colors of La Albiceleste — between two Copa America titles (2021 and 2024), and the legend of Messi was born in his hometown of Rosario, elsewhere in Argentina and everywhere in the world.Yet the burden of being Messi in the Argentine psyche has always been complicated and nuanced. His fate has remained intertwined with Maradona since the kid from Rosario decided to leave Argentina and leave his legacy as a Barcelona player. What has come out of it is a rich portrait of the relationship between the two World Cup-winning captains, always revolving around the axis of its inherent fragility. As England re-emerges on Argentina’s horizon at the World Cup, the question remains: how much Maradona can Messi and his legacy be?Four decades ago, when the two nations clashed, it sent seismic waves through world football as the game, national identity and the lingering shadow of war came together in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup at the Azteca Stadium. It was a match where Maradona’s magnum opus was played out with every bit of Argentine magic and mischief. The ‘Hand of God’ goal was laced with deception, foregrounding the rivalry and prevailing distrust between the two teams four years after the Falklands War. Maradona’s second came as a moment of catharsis.Yet the 1986 quarter-final may not be as wild and emotionally turbulent as what Messi, born three years after the Falklands War, would be prepared to endure on his way to fulfilling his destiny in Lusail in 2022.Messi’s march toward becoming the master of his legacy is essentially devoid of Maradona’s paradox, and so he may find it easier to reconstruct the second part of his mentor’s Aztec magic.It is true that the second semi-final at the Atlanta Stadium does not now deal with some tangible concept of Malvina, but it comes with its own tangible psychological space. It’s a “special” one for Messi as it’s his first against England, giving us a glimpse of how an entire generation hasn’t seen La Albiceleste cross swords with the Three Lions since 1986.For the Argentine, Maradona will always be a rebel and a savior. The unknown and haphazard manager Lionel Scaloni inherited a team in a phase of evolution after the 2018 World Cup and forced Messi to shed his ‘savior’ complex and unleash a whole host of new players with hunger and a prevailing let’s-play-for-Messi mentality. The other day, Leandro Parades said: “We also play for him, because we don’t want the day to come when this will be his last game with us.“Pablo Aimar, Scaloni’s assistant, was also hailed as the next great No. 10 after Maradona and failed to win the nation over the line.They suffered together and made Argentina great again. Perhaps in a rather un-Maradona way.
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