Messi and Argentina deliver again as this whiplash World Cup lurches back to magnificence | OneFootball

This is a truly whiplash-inducing World Cup, lurching relentlessly from the magnificent to the stomach-churningly awful.

In Atlanta we were right back to the magnificent in the penultimate clash of a genuinely unhinged and absurd last-16 stage. The best 3-2 in World Cup history since… well, since the early hours of Monday morning. That’s no good. How about… the best Argentina 3-2 win since, well, since four days ago. Sake. It was amazing, alright?

It’s another astonishing game in an astonishing – for good and bad – tournament. And another game that defied logic and any and all attempts to rationalise it.

Argentina looked gone. With 78 minutes on the clock, the champions looked absolutely gone. They were 2-0 down to an inspired Egypt and seemingly running out of ideas with the usually reliable ‘just give Him the ball’ not doing the job on this occasion.

Lionel Messi, for it is is he, had already missed a penalty – his fourth miss in eight non-shoot-out spot-kicks at a World Cup, both of which numbers are records.

He would eventually lash home the equaliser before a stunning stoppage-time Enzo Fernandez header completed the turnaround.

It was a comeback that began with a Cristian Romero header. It was wonderful to see that he is a man who still sometimes just throws his arms up and declares ‘F*ck this b*llocks, I’m going up front’ even when he’s playing with Messi and Julian Alvarez rather than, say, Richarlison and Brennan Johnson.

But he’s undeniably good at doing dramatic things in those moments, and he thundered a header past the previously infallible Mostafa Shobeir to give Argentina renewed hope and belief that would give way to rapturous celebrations, with Messi in tears and being tossed into the air by his team-mates, barely 20 minutes later.

Yet this wasn’t even a game just about the outrageous goals – and timing thereof – that were scored. We were treated to one of the all-time great disallowed goals too, play taken all the way back for a foul on Lisandro Martinez at one end of the pitch before a lightning Egypt counter appeared to have put them 2-0 clear.

VAR can take away the goal, but it can never take away the memories of the exquisite weight of pass from Mo Salah to play in Ziko. That’s the real quiz.

Ludicrously, Egypt responded to that disappointment by just doing it again nine minutes later. This time it counted and appeared to have won them a game they had led since Yasser Ibrahim’s early bullet header and through Messi’s latest spot-kick failure in which he couldn’t have put the ball more perfectly at the coaching-manual Nice Height For The Keeper if he tried.

There was an irony, though, in how Egypt collapsed after Romero pulled one back. Theirs was a generational headloss of a sort quite readily associated with the still-for-now Tottenham captain. He remains as compelling an agent of chaos as our sport possesses, and it felt fitting that it was his header from a Who Else But Him cross that triggered the madness.

By the time Enzo scored the winner it was a miracle anybody could head anything at all, because absolutely everyone’s heads appeared to be orbiting Mars at that time.

Egypt’s bench was apoplectic, believing play should have been brought back for a foul on Salah at the start of Argentina’s own counter-attack. Had it been given, it would also have been a penalty. It wasn’t without its similarities to the earlier foul, but with the crucial difference that it was not in fact this time a foul.

But it’s what VAR does. When it goes back as far as it did to overturn Egypt’s second goal – had they wound play back any further it would have been England 0-0 Argentina at the Azteca in 1986 – you inevitably invite howls of protest for any subsequent goal. Travel back in time far enough and you’ll find an infringement if you’re willing to look for it.

The ITV punditry panel took a brief detour to Conspiracy Town with some hints that the outcome for both those situations might have been different had roles been reversed. This is not a good road to go down.

Irritatingly, boringly, joy-sappingly, VAR got those calls right. We can argue all day about how far back the Egypt disallowed goal was pulled, but it was still the same phase of play. It wasn’t entirely egregious, and it was clearly a foul.

VAR is an easy target of course. A harder one is to point some fingers at an Egypt side at the end of a truly heroic performance. Harsh as it is, the keeper – who had been so, so good – gets a decent piece on both Romero’s and Messi’s efforts without keeping them out.

The third comes with Argentina allowed to have a two-v-two breakaway in stoppage time at 2-2 with Egypt wildly over-committed in attack again just moments after they’d got away with butchering a four-v-two counter of their own.

It was an astonishing, thrilling, all-or-nothing gamble from Egypt but surely not the pragmatic choice in a game where pragmatism had long since died on its feet.

What this game did do was once again remind us all, if anyone needed it, that knocking Argentina out of a major tournament has become a truly monumental challenge. They simply refuse to allow it to happen.

It is now over seven years since they have been knocked out of a major continental or global tournament. Think of that. Not since the 2019 Copa America semi-final against Brazil in Belo Horizonte have Argentina been eliminated from a major.

Since then they have been crowned world champions and won back-to-back Copa America titles.

Sure, there’s one obvious major reason why Argentina – and, crucially, anyone they play – know in their heart of hearts that no game is ever done. But it’s not just him. This is an entire squad built on a point-blank refusal to accept objective reality when it stares them in the face.

It’s absolutely absurd, but it absolutely works. They could absolutely do this again, despite all the reasons they shouldn’t.

Logically, the sheer extent of effort they’ve had to expend to defeat Only Cape Verde and Only Egypt should count against them against better teams in theoretically tougher battles to come. But logic leaves the chat with this Argentina team. Somehow, through it all, they’ve never seemed stronger or more inevitable.