Editorial: Full circle for destiny’s child

As the Qatari skies rained down confetti and tributes, at once, on a beaming Lionel Messi who was cradling football’s most prized possession, inane comparisons and perpetual debates had ceased to exist.

It shouldn’t have come to this in the first place. We didn’t require a once-in-a-lifetime football World Cup final for Messi to receive the world’s stamp of approval or serve as a reminder of the place he inhabits among the pantheon of the all-time greats.

Blame it on the obsession we have with numbers and records or our inherent desire to engage in puerile arguments as a means of chewing the fat, his coronation as a footballing immortal did call for a truly extraordinary finale in what ended up being his World Cup swansong. And what a ‘final’ game it turned out to be.

Nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat thriller, humdinger, cliffhanger — throw in any number of superlatives, they will fall short of doing justice to the epic that unfolded in Doha on Sunday.

Even a picture by the world’s pre-eminent shutterbug would have come nowhere near capturing the drama that was being enacted by 22 gladiators absolutely giving it their all, pushing their worn out bodies to the limit in their own manic pursuit of destiny at the footballing Colosseum.

Those privileged mortals fortunate to have gained access to the inner sanctum of the stadium, and the not-so-lucky ones resigned to watching the riveting action on their TV sets, would have had their minds saturated with a whole gamut of emotions that would be bequeathed to their offspring as a family heirloom.

And even in a team sport such as football, one man hogged all the limelight, not out of avarice or nepotism, but because of his heroic deeds that had gloriously enriched his occupation and further enhanced his reputation to unattainable heights.

Having long since been earmarked for greatness when he first rose to prominence as a gawky teenager, and widely thought of as destiny’s child, Messi, clad in the white and blue jersey of his team’s colours, finally secured affirmation as the blue-eyed boy of destiny and the apple of football’s eye.

World Cup finals often end up being damp squibs, invariably failing to meet the expectations of the demanding public, but the one between Argentina and France was unlike any other.

It had to be seen to be believed, lived to be experienced and even after a good 48 hours have elapsed since it was consigned to history, football connoisseurs all over would still be pinching themselves and rubbing their eyes in disbelief wondering whether what they had witnessed was indeed real or if their powers of imagination had betrayed them.

Messi, with his legacy now firmly cast in stone after winning his first World Cup, and his successor-in-making Kylian Mbappe of France, went toe to toe literally and figuratively in an enthralling battle for one-upmanship that ended with Messi having the last laugh.

It was a game where both the protagonists made a telling impact and the higher the stakes, the better their performance was, and if ever there was a World Cup that deserved to have two teams as joint-winners, it was this.

Alas, it wasn’t to be for France, but across the Atlantic, the celebrations that erupted on Sunday afternoon in Buenos Aires will not die down anytime soon.