Premier League

Messi magnificent, Mbappe magic, Di Maria dazzling in the greatest World Cup final ever

Lionel Messi celebrates with the World Cup trophy

The 2022 World Cup final was spectacular. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe surpassed the hype, Angel Di Maria shone and Argentina eventually put France down.

1) What a f**king game.

2) The champion. The Golden Boot winner with six goals. A scorer in every knockout tie. The Golden Ball winner as the tournament’s best player.

“We went to the World Youth Cup in 2005 and came back talking about a player who would be better than Maradona. He’d just turned 18,” Carlos Mac Allister, father of world champion midfielder Alexis and among the billions to have realised at some point that “Messi’s the best of all time,” told The Guardian in a recent interview.

It was 17 years ago in the Netherlands when Lionel Messi started to properly attract those comparisons which would define and frame his stunning career. ‘His rip-roaring form in Holland was arguably the most individually influential since ‘Dieguito’ left fans gasping for air at Japan 1979,’ reads the official FIFA line, frozen in time as a sort of shrine to the genesis of unimaginable brilliance.

Messi always seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of Diego Maradona. But the heartbreak of 2014 made fate feel futile. Only one of La Albiceleste’s two pillars would be able to drag their country to World Cup glory. Only one of La Albiceleste’s two giants would be able to single-handedly end decades of hurt and disappointment. Only one of La Albiceleste’s two icons would complete their preordained journey to immortality without any corners being cut.

A teenaged Messi marked himself out as a budding genius with goals against Egypt, Colombia, Spain and Brazil at the 2005 FIFA World Youth Championship. He then scored twice in the final to beat Nigeria, crown three weeks of dominance and match Maradona’s total tally in the same competition 26 years earlier.

The champion. The scorer of six goals – albeit without the Golden Boot – including one in every knockout tie. The Golden Ball winner as the tournament’s best player. Nearly two decades on from winning his first trophy representing Argentina, Messi bowed out with his last.

Little has changed. Time is a flat circle and time will remember Messi as the absolute greatest to ever do it.

3) Kylian Mbappe did make some compelling counter-arguments. When matches of such magnitude are reduced to a contest between two sublime players who are otherwise unlikely to share the same 30-yard radius at any point, the result is…

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