Argentina ride their luck again before setting up World Cup semi-final against England | OneFootball

Argentina, uh, find a way.

You do have to admire a team that really do now just refuse to get knocked out of major tournaments. They are on a run that has delivered back-to-back Copa America titles and they are now a mere two games away from becoming just the third men’s team to win back-to-back world titles.

But, and this does feel like it should be more important than it obviously is, they are deeply flawed and at times really quite strikingly bad.

And yet, it never, ever matters. They cannot be stopped by conventional methods.

Gary Lineker’s infamous assertion about football being a simply game where 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win applies more now to Argentina than it ever did to Germany.

What’s particularly fascinating about it all right now, is that this has become such a stark World Cup of two halves. On one side of the draw you’ve got the star-studded brilliance of France and the club-style cohesion of Spain proving themselves to be better football teams than everyone else.

On the other you’ve got England and now Argentina, who have been only sporadically, occasionally good, have often been downright bad, and have both on more than one occasion appeared about to descend into a generational bout of tournament-ending headloss before somehow finding a way through.

Their semi-final promises to contain genuinely dangerous levels of chaotic energy and it’s impossible to know what might happen, other than to note that whoever does emerge from that game will definitely be second favourite for the final. But whoever it is will hit that final with such absurd ‘name on the trophy’ energy they will take some stopping.

It did look, for once, like Argentina might get through a knockout game at this tournament without wild quantities of fuss and nonsense when Switzerland switched off at an early corner to allow Alexis Mac Allister to head home.

But no. Switzerland gradually grew into the game by half-time. And at the start of the second, they were bang on top. The equaliser had very much been coming for some time before Dan Ndoye slotted home smartly from a tight angle.

At this point, Argentina were in seriously danger of rattling themselves into oblivion. Their heads were going.

And then Breel Embolo decided to do one of the worst dives in the history of the sport. Just for every reason. He had already been booked. It was a nothing area of the pitch. It was minutes after an equaliser, with his team right on top against an Argentina side whose heads were now somewhere orbiting Mars.

We have no idea what on earth he was thinking and, it goes without saying, he thoroughly deserved the second yellow card that came his way. But we remain deeply unsure about the process.

As with the Tim Ream-Miguel Almiron incident right back on the first weekend of the tournament, this really doesn’t sit right with what we understood ‘mistaken identity’ to mean. The rule that allows VAR to intervene in such a situation is woolly enough that using it to stamp out dives because the wrong player has been booked is absolutely one interpretation.

But we can’t accept this was the intention of it all. For one thing, it means VAR can only give a yellow card for diving if the other player is initially booked to create the ‘mistakan identity’. But before this tournament, nobody had ever used the phrase ‘mistaken identity’ to mean wrongly booking the ‘fouling’ player in a diving incident.

It must be making PFM heads spin to see the dreaded VAR stamping out the dreaded diving via such an iffy process.

Because we undeniably ended up with the right decision here, in this specific incident. But the process by which we got there is going to be wildly inconsistent in when and how it’s applied, and when and how it can be applied.

We are certain that before this tournament is out there will be a player who takes a dive but cannot be booked because the player who ‘fouled’ him isn’t ‘mistaken identity’ booked themselves by the ref. “BUT EMBOLO…”

We’re also very certain that this is nothing more nefarious than a new and well-meaning rule being clumsily worded and carrying unintended consequences. It does suggest that maybe throwing brand new rules in for a World Cup might not be the best idea moving forward, but there’s nothing sinister about it.

But that does mean the fact it’s benefited USA and Argentina, the worst two teams possible for whipping up the tinfoil brigade, is another irritation.

More important is that this correct-but-curious decision shifted the whole game once again Argentina’s way.

They could not find a way to get it done in normal time as Switzerland locked in and played for penalties

Just when it looked like they might get them, with under 10 minutes remaining of extra-time, up popped Julian Alvarez with a stunning, curling strike from distance.

It was a goal worthy of winning any game and spectacularly on-brand for this Argentina side in every way apart from it not being Lionel Messi who did it.

There was even time for Argentina fans to have three minutes when it wasn’t unbearably tense as Lautaro Martinez added a third on the breakaway.

We’re already counting down the days, hours and minutes until that semi-final.