Lionel Messi Saves Argentina’s World Cup
This is the third installment of our World Series, a series of articles going over the World Cup in Brazil. Starting off before the group stage ended and continuing until just after the knockout rounds, we’ll take a look at some of World Cup’s most impressive teams and players, as well as any surprises. As always, this preview will focus on the action on the field, as well as analyzing the tactical and tactical-tactical facets of each game in order to gauge how well each team did.
World Series 3: Argentina vs. Brazil
This was the final game of a very interesting group that included Portugal, Uruguay and the United States. Portugal was the only team in the competition that we had heard of and perhaps most of Brazil’s fan base had heard of or seen of. Uruguay is the only other nation that was familiar and yet completely unfamiliar to the rest of the world, for the most part.
The only team that was in the World Cup from our country was the 2011 group stage that produced a very close and entertaining match against the United States, who had lost twice in a row coming into this final.
So our tournament, which had three games in less than a week, was much more than just a competition between two teams from our country. It was a competition between two players who were playing for their countries, Brazil and Argentina, in a tournament that had already produced a win for each of them and two losses for the other, with the first a draw against Uruguay while the second was a loss against Portugal.
But in the end, it was Argentina and Brazil who would have the opportunity to play each other in what should be their final game at a World Cup, a rematch of the 2014 final that was marred by many of the same issues that plagued the first one.
The biggest issue of all though was the team that Messi had to replace. With Luis Suarez