2 hours Ago
Finding Space on the Right
For much of the first hour, Messi struggled to break through a crowded England midfield. He still managed a few flashes of brilliance, including a dribble that left Harry Kane trailing and another surge past Anthony Gordon, before Elliot Anderson eventually brought him down with a rough tackle. Despite those moments, England found a way through on the counter and took a surprise 1-0 lead.
That's when Messi did what he has always done in tight matches: he drifted out to the right flank to find room to operate. It's a habit head coach Lionel Scaloni has grown used to seeing, and one he doesn't try to control. Rather than instructing Messi where to play, Scaloni simply reshapes the team around him, something he did again here, bringing on Nico González for balance on the left before adding Rodrigo De Paul and Gonzalo Montiel for extra thrust on the right. From that point on, even with England ahead on the scoreboard, Messi was clearly dictating the rhythm of the match.
Breaking Through the Cage
England had talked before the game about the challenge of containing Messi, and it showed in how many players were used to track him throughout the night. The general football wisdom, often repeated by rival coaches over the years, is that Messi cannot be handled by a single defender; he needs to be boxed in by two or three at once, because in a straight one-on-one duel, he almost always wins.
As Messi kept pulling defenders toward the right side, that containment became harder to maintain. His delivery from wide areas was landing with pinpoint accuracy, and England's height advantage in the box stopped mattering much. To cope, manager Thomas Tuchel pushed Nico O'Reilly into a more defensive role to help Djed Spence deal with the danger, essentially assigning two markers to shadow Messi at all times.
That setup was tested in the 85th minute, when Messi played a short corner and got the ball straight back. Both Spence and Anderson, who had been tracking Fernández, rushed over to close him down before he could cross. In doing so, they left Fernández unmarked at the edge of the box. Messi spotted it instantly and slipped the ball across to him for a clean strike that levelled the score at 1-1.
The King Delivers Again
Argentina almost lost their footing again in the 91st minute when Alexis Mac Allister struck the post for a second time in the match, and Spence cleared the loose ball away from a charging Messi. For a moment, it looked like the danger had passed. But Messi turned and sprinted back onto the play, chasing the second ball down with O'Reilly and Spence both positioned to stop him.
On paper, it should have been a mismatch. Messi is 39 years old, had already played through two periods of extra time earlier in the tournament, and was competing in humid, 30-degree heat in Atlanta against two much younger defenders. Spence held his position centrally, expecting Messi to either cut inside or slip a pass to the near post, a reasonable read given how the first goal had unfolded and given the number of tall England defenders waiting in the box.
But the read didn't account for one thing: Messi still had a one-on-one opening, and history shows that's rarely a fair fight. A quick shift of his hips left O'Reilly grasping at air, and Spence was too far away to recover in time. Rather than cutting inside or trying his stronger foot, Messi whipped a cross in with his right foot while still on the run, sending it not toward the crowded near post but to the far side, where Lautaro Martínez had quietly found space between John Stones and Ezri Konsa. The ball reached him at head height, and Martínez didn't need to do much more than nod it home from close range to make it 2-1.
That finish sealed Argentina's place in a second consecutive World Cup final, and a third overall for Messi, continuing a night that many are already calling one of the defining individual performances of the tournament. As one former player turned television analyst put it while breaking down the match afterwards, the moment belonged to Messi, not to some of the other big names many expected to shine, because performances like this are exactly why he remains the game's benchmark.
