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Coach tells of first encounter when Messi was 16‘I took man-marker off and Messi scored four’Luis de la Fuente says he will not man-mark Lionel Messi in the World Cup final, even though the Argentina captain has scored eight times and provided four assists and the Spain coach’s own experience suggests it might not be a bad idea.In the buildup to Sunday’s final in New Jersey, De la Fuente told the story of the first time he encountered Messi, 22 years ago, when the Argentinian was a 16-year-old coming through at Barcelona, he was the youth-team coach at Sevilla and the under-19 cup draw brought them together in the last 16 in May 2004 at the Miniestadi.“I’m going to tell you something funny about Messi,” De la Fuente said. “Look, I met Lionel Messi when I was coaching at Sevilla in division de honour [the national under-19 league] and we played a Copa del Rey game against Barcelona. We went to Barcelona. They had spoken very well about a boy called Messi. So, we put a man-marker on him. In the 70th minute it was 0-0. When they gave a yellow card to the player who was marking him, I took him off. And in 15 minutes, Messi scored four goals.”De la Fuente continued, laughing: “Does that mean we are going to man mark him? No. Does it mean we will pay close attention to him? Yes, but in exactly the same way that they are going to have to pay attention to our players.”Asked whether Lamine Yamal was the nearest thing that Spain had to Messi, De la Fuente replied: “Lamine has to be Lamine. Messi can never be repeated. He is an extraordinary talent and above all an example for young players in his attitude, his behaviour, the spectacular World Cup he is producing and the age at which he is producing it. It will be a great show between two super teams. It will be a game of talent, brilliance, great play.”He pushed back against suggestions Argentina might employ dark arts, challenging the image of them as a dirty team. “Please,” he shot back. “I respect everyone’s opinions but no, I do not [accept that portrayal]. I have extraordinary admiration for a team that is Copa América [2021], World Cup, Copa América [2024] and Finalissima champions. No one has done that in history. And they are coached by a friend of mine [Lionel Scaloni]. Admiration, admiration, admiration. We will all use our footballing weapons.”De la Fuente also dismissed suggestions this final was “all or nothing”. “What is important is to be in the position to win it,” he said. “Let’s enjoy it, play our way, value this. If you said we could play a World Cup final every year and lose, I would sign up for that.”He said he was afraid of only one thing: the fact that Fifa had made him take a helicopter over from New Jersey to the pre-match events in Manhattan and that he still had to go back again. Nor was he impressed by a bombastic, chaotic Fifa event which Scaloni, visibly irritated, described as “surreal”. During the event, De la Fuente had struggled to speak over the noise of the audience shouting over him and cheering for Messi, who was also on the stage.“Since I was little, I was taught to be respectful of everyone; we should learn this lesson,” he told the crowd.

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The little maestro has hitherto lived in the shadow of Maradona who has for so long coloured the soul and defined the passion of football in ArgentinaIt is time to consign Diego Maradona’s Hand of God to a museum piece. For 40 years that moment and Maradona’s unforgettable “goal of the century” coloured the soul and passion of Argentinian football. Today things are very different, and the main reason is Lionel Messi. By asserting himself over the memory of Maradona, Messi is establishing a new Argentina.An impressive 2–1 semi-final victory over England showcased a revitalised Argentina who go into Sunday’s final against Spain relying on a simple, powerful weapon: excellent football.“For English football, this is more painful than the Hand of God,” Tomás Abraham says. He has dedicated his life to writing, studying philosophy and analysing society and the human condition, although his greatest passion lies elsewhere: football.At 79, Abraham organises his daily schedule around Champions League and Premier League matches, which he follows from his spacious flat in Colegiales – a trendy neighbourhood in Buenos Aires – or from his book-filled office, where he shuts himself away for hours to write.“The English consider the Hand of God to be illegal, a cheat,” Abraham says. “And this hurts all the more because they were defeated by a superior team that they were particularly keen to beat. The wound runs deeper.”For many years, a large proportion of Argentinians looked down on Messi, clinging to the Maradona myth. Messi couldn’t be Messi; he had to be Maradona. While the rest of the world dreamed of having their own Messi, a staggering number of Argentinians maintained that he would dissolve like a sugar lump in a cup of tea the moment he came up against a couple of tough defenders in the Copa Libertadores.Which is why Messi’s greatest triumph is that he has ceased to be viewed through the prism of Maradona and earned the recognition – and unanimous affection – of his people.Maradona was more than a footballer; he was also the essence of Argentinidad, or at least a certain kind of Argentinidad. For a long time, it was impossible to understand Maradona without first understanding Argentina, but there came a point when it became impossible to understand Argentina without first understanding Maradona, so intertwined and similar had the two become.Maradona embodied the brilliant and haughty Argentina, the Argentina convinced of its destiny as a superpower. That is also why Maradona felt entitled to express his opinion and pass judgment on everything: on George Bush and the pope, on Fifa, on his idols Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. He could say one thing and its opposite, loving and hating the same person in a matter of months.A tremendous talent in many respects and often kind-hearted, Maradona was also adept at disparaging, hurting, attacking and provoking. Ultimately, he resembled his country too closely, with its great lights and inevitable shadows.As the product of a good state education, Maradona was a man who understood the meaning and weight of every word. He had a talent for expressing himself, despite having been born and raised in very humble circumstances.Messi, a child of a somewhat more spineless Argentina, lacks that talent; his vocabulary is limited, his sentences are short and lack depth, although they have improved markedly in recent years. This is how he feels comfortable, and this is how he has shaped a different kind of Argentinian football identity (and Argentinian identity).Carlos Mac Allister played alongside Maradona for Argentina. He is also the father of Alexis Mac Allister. He has been in the US for weeks watching his son at the World Cup and will be at the final.“The difference between Diego and Leo is their private lives,” he says. “And that’s not to speak ill of Diego. I’m not going to explain what he himself has already said. Thanks to Diego being Diego, Messi is Messi today. With an understanding of what happened, Messi was able to work out how to take the game to the next level.”Another explanation for why the Hand of God is in a symbolic museum lies in the inquest seeking to establish why Maradona died on 25 November 2020 and whether his death could have been prevented. The inquest was not front-page news here, nor did it generate sustained public interest. It was as if Argentinians, ashamed of the harsh circumstances in which Maradona died, preferred to subtly turn the page. And what better way to do so than by embracing Messi?After the victory over England, Messi expressed moving words for Maradona, who had once criticised his lack of leadership: “I’m sure Diego is enjoying this immensely from up above. Let him enjoy it, because it’s a gift for him too.”To dwell on the Hand of God is to delve almost into football prehistory, to talk about something no longer possible, as the columnist Héctor Gambini pointed out in Clarín, Argentina’s most widely read newspaper.“None of the players who took part in this Argentina v England match had even been born when Maradona scored his immortal goals,” he wrote. “Goals that VAR would have disallowed: the first for a handball by the Blues’ No 10. The second for a foul by the Blues’ No 2 [Sergio Batista] on the Whites’ No 4 [Glenn Hoddle], following which Argentina regained possession, the ball ended up at Maradona’s feet and, 13 seconds later, in the English net.”Mariano Israelit, one of Maradona’s closest friends, says Maradona is no longer No 1. “Diego was the greatest of all … up to a point. But Messi has now surpassed him; what Messi has achieved is unsurpassable. Diego played for a team like Napoli, which was basically 10 donkeys and Diego. Messi played for a Barcelona side surrounded by stars. We have to be realistic and honest; I take my hat off to Messi.”Israelit criticises the English stance on their 1986 game by harking back to the 1966 World Cup final. “An Englishman has no right whatsoever to say that Maradona scored with his hand or that he cheated, because the only tournament they ever won, they won with a goal that wasn’t a goal.”What can we expect from the final? Abraham does not look favourably on the European champions. “They ignore everything we’ve contributed to Spanish football: Alfredo Di Stéfano and Lionel Messi,” he says.Argentina has enriched Spanish football, and Spanish clubs have helped Argentinian players develop. The list of Argentinians who have played and managed in Spain is dizzying: Di Stéfano and Messi, yes, but also Mario Kempes, Maradona, César Luis Menotti, Carlos Bilardo, Lionel Scaloni. The country’s greatest players and managers. And thousands more.Mac Allister highlights that Argentina are no longer just Messi, as they were at the start of the World Cup. The team have woken up. “I see an Argentina team that had been playing at 60% of its capacity, but which played at 90% against England,” Mac Allister says. “Against Spain, it will need to play at 100%. One thing is clear: we were playing with heart and soul, but we were lacking a bit of finesse. Not any more – Argentina dominated England.”Or, as the Uruguayan journalist Emiliano Hernández Pereyra puts it, fed up with many of his compatriots – frustrated after a very poor World Cup – criticising neighbouring Argentina: Argentina make them jealous.“These lads have everything I want for my country, but there are a lot of stubborn Uruguayans. Do you think Argentina are just lucky? Please … It’s an extraordinary team; they’ve got a certain something that no other team has.”

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The boy in the baby bath has unbelievably become the successor to Messi at Barcelona and now, maybe, on the world stage too“Maybe Lionel Messi has picked up lots of babies, maybe it’s chance, but for those of us who have faith, who believe in something beyond, ‘chance’ is God’s pseudonym when he doesn’t want to sign his name,” Luis de la Fuente says. “In life, everything happens for a reason. Sometimes it’s true that the circle isn’t closed, but in my view there’s something else, something … I don’t know, mystical, spiritual.”Contemplate the scene, gaze upon the image of this World Cup, and you may be inclined to agree with Spain’s coach, to reach out and touch faith. How else to comprehend this? You will have seen the picture and will certainly see it again, and still it won’t make sense.The man who took it, the photographer Joan Monfort, says he didn’t believe in destiny before but does now. In it, Messi, the greatest footballer of all time, bathes an unknown baby with a cherubic smile. The child, chosen at random and surrounded by bubbles, is Lamine Yamal. The footballer De la Fuente says was “touched by God’s wand” was baptised by him too.On Sunday they face each other in the World Cup final.The photograph was taken around Christmas 2007. Sport newspaper was putting together a charity calendar on behalf of Barcelona and Unicef, a studio set up in the away dressing room at the Camp Nou. Each player had a month and appeared with a child. Ronaldinho, the star, was July. Messi was January. Lamine Yamal was four months old. His mum, Sheila, had put him into a draw to take part. Monfort got the idea the night before when bathing his daughter, taking a plastic tub and a rubber duck with him. Although the baby was tiny and Messi was timid, with Sheila’s help he got a shot he was happy with.And then, well, everyone forgot about it. Monfort left it in a drawer, another photo among thousands, no idea of a significance it didn’t yet have. The image was lost and then it was found. During Euro 2024 Lamine Yamal’s father, Mounir, posted it on social media, with the tag “the beginning of two legends”.Wait, what? How had this happened? How had that baby, chosen by chance, become Lamine Yamal? How, in fact, had Messi, a shy 19-year-old, become Messi? Of all the people in all the world how had they ended up together? How had no one seen this sooner? How on earth, why on earth, had Mounir not shared it before? Where did he suddenly find it? How had Lamine Yamal not known? When Monfort was introduced to him a while later, Lamine Yamal said he didn’t remember it. Well of course not, he was four months old.“What if it’s not actually Lamine?” Monfort had worried at the time, suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Which was understandable: there was no way this could be real. Stop for a moment and it messes with your mind. Mounir’s timing, it turned out, was perfect. Four days later Lamine Yamal scored that goal against France which took Spain to the Euro 2024 final and announced his arrival. It’s like the creation, Monfort reckoned, although one day in Rocafonda, where Lamine Yamal grew up, Mounir later joked with him that maybe things were the other way round, maybe it was Lamine giving Messi life.Unicef too posted that, yes, this was real. It was July 2026, and still it felt the need. Then on Wednesday when Argentina beat England, it got even more absurd: this was the first portrait of the poster stars of the biggest sporting event on the planet, and Monfort’s phone rang off the hook again.Not long ago Lamine Yamal was shown the photo. “God willing, I can face him in the final.” It still felt unlikely but if God had willed it this far, why stop now? So much had happened; some things had needed to not happen too: Spain and Argentina were supposed to play the Finalissima in March. How much better that they play here instead. Lamine Yamal smiled as he looked at the picture. “I’ve grown a little bit … and so has Leo,” he said.They had done so in public, under pressure, the weight of expectation. The next time Lamine Yamal appeared in a photo with Messi it was at Barcelona’s training ground. He was still small, barely 11 or 12; and by then Messi was, well, Messi. Although this was a fan meeting the planet’s best footballer, Lamine Yamal was no longer just a kid from Catalonia who had won a draw. Spotted playing for CF La Torreta in Mataro, he had joined La Masia. He recalls the first time he felt something like fame, exposure coming one day when he was down the park, aged 13 and already that kid from Barcelona.Messi knows that well, and it is not all they share. He had come from Argentina to Catalonia aged 12, famously “signed” on a napkin in the Pompeia tennis club. Lamine Yamal’s dad is from Morocco, his mum from Equatorial Guinea. Born in Catalonia, he signals Rocafonda’s 08304 postcode when he scores. It is a barrio where half of the population is at risk of poverty and about 20% are Moroccan, where he played on the gravel plaza of Joan XXIII. He could have represented Morocco, but had no doubt choosing Spain. Messi could have done too but chose Argentina, clinging to a country that took longer to truly embrace him than they might have and now couldn’t love him more.“Messi is the best,” Lamine Yamal has said. Listen to him talk about Messi and the first thing you may notice is how rarely he does, the answers a little evasive, almost formulaic. When he does talk there is respect, admiration, no doubt that the Argentinian is the finest footballer there has been, but not the excitement awoken by Neymar. In part that is strategic, seen perhaps in choosing the same sponsors – you can’t compete with Messi, can’t go up against him; but there is something simpler: Neymar was his idol, the player he identified with most.In Lamine Yamal’s character, his background, even in elements of his play, there’s more of Neymar than Messi: in the fun, the flash, the mischief, the glint in his eye. “Life is for living,” he says. He was seven when he first saw Neymar at the Camp Nou; yes, Messi was there, but Neymar was different, captivating. That was the football that came to him, a player who sees in himself the ideal between the street and the school. It was Neymar he watched on videos, Neymar he tried to emulate, Neymar he visited last summer in Brazil.No pressure, kid. “Pressure? No, Lamine Yamal said before the semi-final, inviting the world to his 19th birthday, enjoying the spotlight. Earlier this season he had celebrated his goals by performing his own coronation and if he has stopped now, if there have been moments when he has revealed the weight of responsibility, if he has mentioned his “internal abyss”, he has embraced the pressure, faced it, owned it. “Ego Yamal,” his headband reads. Above all, he has met it.“I would like to be everything that everyone wants me to be,” he said in the spring. “Thing is, people want you to score 100 goals at 16. I would like to as well.” He has more than 50. He is the youngest debutant at Barcelona, their youngest goalscorer too – a record that once belonged to Messi. “I want to follow my own path, that’s all; I have no intention of playing like him or anything like it. There is mutual respect; we both know I don’t want to be Messi,” he told CBS, noting: “I knew that [comparison] question was coming” – yet there are echoes there.If there’s a Lamine Yamal goal, and there is, one he keeps on scoring, it looks a lot like the goal that was Messi’s once. “I didn’t like comparing Messi to Maradona, but Messi didn’t make it easy; I don’t like comparing Lamine to Messi but Lamine doesn’t make it easy either,” Jorge Valdano, the former Argentina international, said. Xavi Hernández, who gave Lamine Yamal his Barcelona debut, didn’t want to either but also couldn’t help it. De la Fuente says: “There are geniuses, those who are touched by God’s wand and there are few of those: Lamine or Messi.” Lamine Yamal scored his first World Cup goal aged 18, wearing 19. Twenty years earlier, so had Messi: same age, same number.There is an evolution that awaits too. In a fascinating recent interview with El País, Lamine Yamal noted that Messi, like him, always finds himself marked by three men and that he will surely follow the Argentinian into a different part of the field. “The only place where three men can’t mark you is in the middle and I will end up there: they can’t defend me there,” he said.Messi turns 40 in June 2027 and Lamine Yamal insisted he would not be playing at that age. That lies a long way ahead, and who knows what he will think then. What lies behind has happened so fast, faster even than Messi. You can’t help taking a flight of fantasy, wondering where it will deliver him, and them, whether this era that opens before him will belong to him. Once Spaniards might have wondered what would have happened if Messi had chosen Spain, if on top of it all they had the planet’s best player; now they can’t help wondering if they may actually have him anyway. Even , if only out of respect, they have to wait until the day Messi departs. Until then, Messi has shown at this tournament, no one compares.Lamine Yamal, likened by De la Fuente to Michelangelo or Salvador Dalí, has played 151 games for Barcelona and won three league titles. This isn’t supposed to be possible. At his age Messi, who also wasn’t supposed to be possible, had played 34 and scored nine. Lamine Yamal has won a European Championship with his country, secured the day after he turned 17, a schoolboy sitting exams while leading Spain to glory. Messi took until he was 34 to win an international trophy with Argentina, but he hasn’t stopped since. The 2022 World Cup was supposed to be his last, a man on a mission, a cause, the greatest story ever told. But somehow here he is again, the tale taller all the time: this is his third World Cup final and he seeks another title, a fourth international trophy in a row, at an age when he might have walked away years ago.And Lamine Yamal stands before him, a winner already when he is still only starting out: a passing of the torch for Messi to put on hold, if only for a day. “There is a new generation of players that’s very good and has many years ahead,” Messi said. “If I had to choose one, it would be Lamine. Without doubt, he’s the best.” Lamine Yamal said: “If we meet on the pitch there will be mutual respect because for me he is the best in history.” For the first time and surely the last, on Sunday, in the most global city of all, they will. In the World. Cup. Final. Where to even start with the symbolism? Where to find an explanation for the impossible?Spain versus Argentina. European champions versus South American champions. Lionel Messi versus Lamine Yamal. The 19-year-old at his first World Cup, the age Messi was when they first met, versus the 39-year-old at his sixth and surely last. The teenager then who went on to mark a generation, now a father, against the teenager called to mark the next, his anointed one. The boy handed Messi’s No 10 like Messi was handed Maradona’s, the boy handed to him almost 20 years ago, unknown then, an icon now, the boy in the bath.

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It was a statistically weird game for Argentina’s talisman against England, full of outliers. It didn’t matterThomas Tuchel will have prepared for every eventuality before England’s match with Argentina. He will have considered how his team could prosper in attack while remaining solid in defence. What to change if they scored first or if the opening goal went against them and, like so many managers before him, he will have put plenty of thought into how best to deal with Lionel Messi.For the first hour he was largely peripheral, with the data showing how England were limiting his involvement in dangerous areas. Messi’s only possession in the centre of the penalty area was snuffed out by an Elliot Anderson tackle shortly after Anthony Gordon had scored. The proportion of the distance he covered that was defined by Fifa as sprinting speed (at least 20km/h) was 4.3%, lower than against Switzerland (4.6%) or Egypt (5.4%) in the previous two rounds.The 39-year-old’s relative lack of shots will have heartened Tuchel. The only effort Messi had was from long range and blocked before it had reached the England box. In only one of his other 19 World Cup matches in which he played the full 90 minutes did he have so few shots in normal time, though he also played 120 with one effort (on target) against the Netherlands in 2014. Against Croatia four years later his only shot came from very close range. He has arguably never been so blunt from this perspective in this competition. So far, so good for England.Messi’s heat map also burned brightest where it usually does: in the right half-space in front of the opposition’s penalty area. It would be foolish to claim England had him where they wanted him, but at least Argentina’s captain was operating where they would have expected him to be. That can be planned for, which helps.A heat map for a whole match obscures subtle shifts that occur. Picture the flank between the edge of the penalty box and the touchline, running up to the halfway line. Messi’s only touch in this zone in the opening 45 minutes occurred close to the centre circle, when he passed forward to Giuliano Simeone, who was offside.But it was from this flank that the talisman took the game away from England. Messi attempted six open-play crosses in this region in the second half. It’s a ridiculously high number for a player who has averaged 2.3 crosses (including set plays) per 90 minutes across league football since 2015. In only two World Cup games has he attempted more, though interestingly both occurred in the preceding two rounds.One of Messi’s deliveries from wide led to the Nico González header which Jordan Pickford did well to save shortly before the second hydration break. Perhaps it was this moment that firmed up Tuchel’s plan to bring on Ezri Konsa immediately after, the head coach later supplementing him with Dan Burn after switching to a back five. The strategy worked against Mexico so why not here too?Because Messi is rather better at crossing than Roberto Alvarado and Jesús Gallardo. Those two Mexico players attempted 25 open-play crosses between them at the Azteca for the reward of once chance valued at 0.05xG. Messi, with his cross for Lautaro Martínez’s winner, generated 0.53xG, more than England mustered all night. It was only his second World Cup assist with his right foot and far harder to pull off than the cutback from the byline he provided to Julián Álvarez in the semi-finals in Qatar.It was a statistically weird game for Messi, full of outliers. It didn’t matter. Wherever the space happens to be, the greatest of all time will be there to torch your best-laid plans.

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While England shrank away in Atlanta, Argentina’s No 10 was not finished making his mark on the biggest stageTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Well, not to this lot anyway. On a day of ceaseless rolling noise under Atlanta’s vast refrigerated dome, England reached the end of the road, the end of their own capacities at this World Cup, the end of the gears within this team. Mainly they ran into Lionel Messi, who wasn’t ready to be done just yet. Not like this anyway.With 55 minutes gone England were actually winning this game, 1-0 up thanks to Anthony Gordon’s goal, the only real moment of clarity they produced all match. At which point they simply disappeared as an animate entity from the stage.England played poorly here. The substitutions had no effect. Harry Kane basically did some light cardio quite close to a World Cup semi-final. But it was the change that really did for them, one of those moments where the clock starts to tick backwards, the skies darken, the cow really does appear to have jumped over the moon, and the energy inside the stadium is suddenly revolving entirely around that slouching, mooching figure in dark blue, who from a walking start had begun to do strange, painful things, to draw the spaces together, to make the objects around him revolve in his favour. And feeling also the lack of resistance coming the other way. Suddenly everyone out there was in the Messi space.Fast forward to 91 minutes, the score somehow still 1-1, a scoreline that looked by now like a glitch, like temporary signage, and it was of course Messi who produced the final cut. By that stage England were strung like shipwrecked mariners around their own box, scurvy-ridden, desiccated, a single skinny hand somehow still fixed on the tiller.Alexis Mac Allister had just struck the post with a low shot. Djed Spence, who chased the day to the end here, managed to nip in front of Messi for a second and nick the ball away. But it was only ever on loan. Facing two full-backs now, Spence and Nico O’Reilly, Messi simply eased into the space where a third should have been, all alone in that portable little patch of green.The cross from his right foot was perfectly, tactfully floated into the only logical area, like somebody very slowly and patiently explaining a maths problem. For a moment the ball just seemed to hang there, a lovely soft white orb, the day stretching out, as everyone in the stadium became Messi, seeing the moment before it happened.Time clicked forward again, Lautaro Martínez nodded the ball past a splayed Jordan Pickford and into the England net. And that was it, the outcome that was always coming from the moment Messi began to see the end of this game, to feel the snags, the subplots disappear, to see that it was time to apply his full force to the shapes in front of him.There were some final spasms from the corpse of England’s tournament, although this was like watching a hackneyed stage-show version of England football, Dan Burn hurling his body around the Argentina box under the high ball, flopping to the turf like a double mattress hurled from an upstairs window.But the game was done. England had shrunk from this occasion, had failed to press when they might have, had ultimately been aura-mogged, erased by a form of sporting genius that even on its quieter, more muddled days will eventually find its shape.The final whistle brought an endless rolling wave of noise. Although even here Messi kept on walking, finding space, dipping away from the prone bodies of his teammates, both fists pumping the air in the middle of all that heat and light.England were undeniably poor here, a semi-final that they basically tossed away. They produced almost no threat, no energy, no sense they had the capacity to seize the day. There will be time to assess that entropy, to find the faultlines, to wonder what might have been different, from selection to the deeply familiar sense of blinking in the light.But this was Messi’s day, and Messi’s moment. He will now play his third World Cup final, the oldest outfield player ever to appear on that stage, as well as the greatest. It has been different this time too. There had already been something new in Messi’s appearances through that edgy run to the final. He looked at times on the brink of something, like a man waking up with a start.Messi has always had one key advantage over every other player. He gets to play with Messi every game. And Messi makes every other player in his team better. He brings a separate gravity field, bathing teammates in that borrowed light, And he always has the best time, because every game is a Messi game. Think about it: this is a man who has literally never played a game of football where Messi is not in it. Every day is a Messi day. No wonder he loves football. As a spectator there are times when you feel like tapping him on the shoulder and saying: “You do know it’s not always like this, don’t you?”How would England approach this, because Messi will always be schematised, planned for, played around. Thomas Tuchel went for power and speed generally, with Morgan Rogers in on the right. For the Messi detail at left-back, Spence, the form horse, spirit animal, and cultish hero of this England team.Atlanta Stadium is a proper, city‑centre venue, appearing out of the grid of high rises and glass hangers like a huge jagged silver meteorite crash-landed in the urban incline.The colours and shapes were mesmeric at kick-off, those blocks of deep blue, white, red gold so perfectly matched. The anthems before kick-off were just energy, indistinct electricity.With a minute and 20 seconds gone Jude Bellingham was chopped down by Leandro Paredes, and it felt like a necessary formality, like Black Rod announcing parliament is now open.Messi’s first act was to wriggle through a crush of bodies, moving as always in his own plane of space and time. He fell. No foul. Outrage. Almost immediately Paredes hacked down Anderson and was booked. The first crush of shirts the coming together, the formal dance.From there, the game didn’t really start. England had their moment in that first half to apply pressure, to push with greater energy. Messi kept on walking, playing at the edge of things, a man for whom the game is so often waiting.But they failed to rush into the space when it was there, took the lead, then almost immediately collapsed as Messi began to twitch on the threads, to glide past white shirts, to release those malevolent, dipping passes.By the end this felt like two things at once. An England team that blinked, that failed to respond to its manager’s urgings; but which was also swallowed by the inevitability of Messi, and a grand, all-time talent that is somehow out there walking across this stage, shrinking it to his size, and which isn’t ready to be denied just yet.

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The Argentina captain conserves his energy for bursts in key moments and his top speed compares favourably with his contemporariesEngland’s defenders will face an extreme challenge when they come up against Lionel Messi in their World Cup semi-final. It is not just that he is the greatest player of all time but the almost unique way in which he plays.The 39-year-old is renowned for ambling around for much of a game, saving his energy for when truly required. It makes him incredibly difficult to defend against. Messi finds pockets of space that appear harmless when the ball is not in his orbit, but he springs to life when an opportunity to produce presents itself.It helps explain why no player at this tournament has ended their ball carries of at least five metres with as many shots and key passes combined. Messi has delivered 22 such moments through knowing exactly when to step up a gear.Although he did not score or provide an open-play assist against Switzerland in the quarter-finals, running statistics from that group of matches provide a good snapshot of how Argentina’s captain differs from other elite attackers.It represented 64.8% of his total distance. This proportion was way above the figures that Harry Kane (40.5%), Lamine Yamal (45.4%), Kylian Mbappé (52.6%) and Erling Haaland (55.7%) recorded in their matches.However, far more of their movement was made in the speed categories covering 7 to 20 km/h. There was little difference between Messi and his peers for their percentage of running classified as a sprint by Fifa (at 20 km/h or more).Although a similar proportion of sprinting as younger forwards looks impressive, Messi does not record as many in total. Yet the margin is not always huge. The veteran made the equivalent of 85 sprints per 90 minutes in the quarter-final, more than Haaland (74) and not too far adrift of Mbappé (97).And when Messi hits top speed, he can still go at a decent pace. Data on Sofascore shows his top sprint at this World Cup was 30.9 km/h. That is faster than any run Lautaro Martínez (30.5) or Alexis Mac Allister (30.2) has made for Argentina, despite their being more than a decade younger. It is not far behind the best Kane (31.4) or Jude Bellingham (31.1) have offered either.A positive for England is that their top speed was recorded by Nico O’Reilly (35.6 km/h), one of the players likely tasked with keeping Argentina’s talisman at bay. But being fleet of foot isn’t the only challenge. Monitoring Messi and judging when best to move are much harder tasks.