Argentina managed to avoid repeating Brazil’s mistakes in beating the Netherlands, but they did so narrowest means manageable when they didn’t need to.
When Marquinhos’s penalty at the end of the Brazil vs Croatia shootout thudded off the base of the post with a boom so loud it echoed, it was a shot heard round the world.
In the blink of an eye, the top half of the draw for the 2022 World Cup opened up. That it would end with a Brazil vs Argentina semi-final had been treated as an inevitability, but Brazilian dancing had stopped quite suddenly and expectedly earlier in the evening and nothing looked quite as certain as it had before.
Well, Argentina are there now, finally and by the skin of their teeth at the end of an evening during which we saw glimpses of their best but also a degree of defensive skittishness which future opponents in this competition may well have noted.
Lionel Messi doing Lionel Messi things looked like being enough to see them through with a degree to spare, before Louis Van Gaal decided to go long, with surprising and dramatic results.
For 45 minutes, the Netherlands seemed to play within themselves, sitting deep as a scrappy half of football played out in front of them. By the time half an hour had been played, it was starting to feel as though both teams might have just decided to take their chances with a penalty shootout very early indeed. Except for one of them. Yeah, that guy.
Lionel Messi has pulled this trick before, the old pedestrian bystander routine. And he’s pulled the one which led to the first Argentina goal before, too. There was no obvious pass. There was no clear danger. But having shuffled inside from the right, his reverse pass through the eye of a needle threaded the ball inch-perfectly through for Nahuel Molina to slide in and score his first goal for Argentina.
It was a goal the previous 34 minutes hadn’t really deserved. It was certainly a pass from out of nowhere, as unexpected as it was inventive. True enough, Messi had essentially been a spectator for the rest of the half, but that doesn’t really matter when you can pull something like that pass out of your back pocket roughly every half a game or so. There may well be no better assist throughout this entire tournament.
If the Netherlands did come out for the second half on the front foot, Argentina didn’t really give them anywhere to go other than sideways and backwards. By the midway point, they still hadn’t managed a single…
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