In reality Ligue 1 is a bruising place stuffed with ambitious players. There is a misconception this has been achieved in a kind of agricultural workers’ competition, that the French league is a gay, blunt, pastoral affair peopled by hobbits and ploughmen. He seems to have regained the ability to make those flea-like little lateral hops and springs. For the first time at a World Cup he is actually going to be fit, coming off the back of a half-season flush with goals and assists. In the middle of all these noises there is a decent case that it really may be Messi’s year. Or he may just be its most depressing element: embodying the end-to end propaganda coup that runs through this thing from bid committee to a winner’s podium populated, in all likelihood, by paid ambassadors of Qatar.
Either Messi is the saviour of Qatar 2022, a note of pure sporting beauty to illuminate even a horribly compromised spectacle.
Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/PSG/Getty Imagesįrankly this could go either way. Neymar, Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi could all be the star of this World Cup, and all three play for Qatar-owned PSG. The point about the mural is that it marks the fact Qatar 2022 will be the first World Cup in 44 years without Maradona either playing, out there as a living piece of tournament iconography, or popping up in the stands as he did at the last one, leaping about above the press box as Argentina struggled against Iceland.īy the end of that game Maradona had probably expended more energy than Lionel Messi, who seemed drained and mortal in Russia and who is all set to take part in his own final tournament and who already looks, a week out, like the single most poignant on-field presence at this World Cup. And yes, no one really wants to talk about that. Personally I even preferred the on-drugs version at USA 94, when Maradona at least looked (on drugs) a bit more himself, when he scored a brilliant (on drugs) goal against Greece, a startling rat-a-tat of flick-passes finished by easing (on drugs) the ball into the top corner.
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