After Argentina’s 2-2 draw with Paraguay Lionel Messi could not sleep. He roamed the corridors of the squad’s base in La Serena, turning over and over in his mind what had happened, how Argentina had managed to turn a position of dominance and a 2-0 lead into a point that places enormous pressure on them in the Copa América game against Uruguay on Tuesday, local time.
At Sunday’s team meeting he was unusually vocal. That in itself seems telling. At the World Cup last year he was the silent captain, a distant, enigmatic figure whose armband seemed to denote his primacy but not any gifts of leadership. Before extra time in the last-16 tie against Switzerland he was the last to join the huddle; by the time he got there, Javier Mascherano was already giving a team talk. This Messi, the re-engaged, refocused, fitter Messi of 2015, the Messi whose cheekbones bulge from his face, whose genius has somehow found an even higher level, perhaps now feels ready for a responsibility that last year he was willing to leave to others.
Hosts Chile draw with Mexico in six-goal Copa América thriller
Read more
“After the draw,” he said, “I go forward not with concern but with bronca.” Perhaps it has become a cliche but the use of the term resonated. Bronca is a favourite word of Diego Maradona, a coinage from the lunfardo dialect of Buenos Aires that inverts the syllables of “cabrón” – “bastard” – to create a term that means a spirit of anger or bitterness. All Maradona’s greatest triumphs were, in his mind at least, fired by bronca; he never just scored great goals because it was good to score great goals: he scored them to make a point to a coach who had slighted him, to fans who had abused him or to the world about the Falklands War.
“Now we have to beat Uruguay,” Messi went on, “although that was something I always had in mind. We have to improve.” The issue is not so much whether Argentina will go through – with the two best third-placed teams as well as the top two in each group to advance to the last eight, the chances of Argentina failing to make it are minimal; the issue is whether they go through top of the group and so face a third-placed side, or whether they go through second and play the winner of Group C – probably Brazil – in the quarter-final.
The biggest worry must be what happened after half-time. Nelson Haedo Valdez’s goal on the hour stemmed from three mistakes: possession needlessly squandered, the centre-backs split wide open and the goalkeeper, Sergio Romero, oddly positioned. After that Argentina panicked and ultimately conceded a last-minute equaliser as Paulo da Silva headed down for Lucas Barrios to rattle in a shot from the edge of the box.
“We started to lose the ball,” said Mascherano. “After the first Paraguay goal we tried to defend in a block but we were pressed until we conceded an equaliser. We couldn’t do it. We can’t make excuses. We played with fire and we were burned.”
If that really was Argentina trying to defend in a block, looking to drop deep and kill the game, then the problems are extremely serious. The exact opposite happened and the game became more and more stretched, particularly after Gerardo Martino’s baffling 75th-minute substitutions, when he took off Javier Pastore and Sergio Agüero for Carlos Tevez and Gonzalo Higuaín. Ángel Di María dropped back into the midfield three but balance was lost and, worse, Argentina were left without a valuable source of pace on the break.
Higuaín, who does not look fit, lumbered about, haplessly; Tevez buzzed about haplessly and missed a great late chance. The familiar problem of Tevez and Messi replicating each other’s runs surfaced again, which is all the more mystifying given how well they played together as a pair in front of Juan Román Riquelme in the latter stages of the 2007 Copa América.
The suggestion has been raised in Argentina that Tevez came on only for political reasons, to keep him and his supporters in the Argentinian press quiet. On Monday, the sports paper Olé ran a story describing how he scored three times in training but noting that he understood his role was as back-up for Agüero. That may not be true but that such a thought could be taken seriously suggests how dangerous the decision to recall Tevez after his four-year exile was.
It is understood that the collapse of the midfield and the bifurcation of the team into attack and defence with a void between was the subject of late-night meetings between Messi, Mascherano and Martino. There had been talk before the tournament of the pressure this generation feels to end the 22 years Argentina have gone without a trophy, particularly given all their success at youth level, and Martino has said he feels an obligation to look beyond the tournament to World Cup qualifying and how the team may evolve before Russia 2018. For now, however, the focus has narrowed simply to beating Uruguay.
Martino has said that he feels “there is no need to change much” before the second game and perhaps, in terms of personnel, he is right. Once again, though, this was an Argentina who seemed to struggle to come to terms with their glut of attacking prowess and lacking balance as a result. Until they get that right, the drought and Messi’s sleepless nights will continue. |
