Maradona's Parallel History... Scenes You Missed From The Qatar World Cup Final: A 12 Years Old Hug

The first scene that you missed from the World Cup final ironically did not happen in the World Cup final, but rather preceded it by twelve years, specifically in the quarter-finals of the 2010 edition in South Africa between Argentina and Germany, when Diego Armando Maradona was coach of Messi and his companions. That iconic moment in which Maradona coaches his successor is what determined Argentina's relationship with Messi for the entire following decade.

After the match that ended with the crushing and humiliation of Argentina by a clean four, Maradona went to greet his players, including Messi of course, but all the pictures that were taken of this embrace did not show any emotion on the part of the latter, on the contrary, he avoided eye contact with his coach, shrugged his face, and did not move a muscle in his body to receive Maradona's arms, as if he was embracing him against his will.

All teams lose in the World Cup, and all the great players have moments they want to forget, but perhaps the main reason for Messi's body language at that moment was the fact that he knew exactly what was going to happen after the match.

A few days before the tournament, journalist Paul Hayward of the English Guardian announced a shocking surprise. Maradona did not want to include Diego Milito, the Champions League champion in Inter-Mourinho's treble, and the best striker in Europe at that moment, because he was not impressed with the Portuguese coach's playing style.

In fact, Inter had four Argentine stars among its ranks in the starting line-up that achieved the treble, including Scaloni's current assistant Walter Samuel, historical leader Javier Zanetti, and Esteban Cambiasso, the best player in the tournament, and Maradona did not want to include any of them.

Of course, no one paid attention to Howard's shocking surprise, neither in Argentina nor abroad, simply because Maradona's assumption of the leadership of the national team itself was not a shocking surprise; This is a man without experience worth mentioning as a coach, and he has not been on the line for the last 13 years, and his information about training is less than your information about the Slovenian league, and despite that, he took charge of one of the most talented generations of Argentina, to lead it in the World Cup. If the Argentines saw this as justified, how could Milito's exclusion shock them?

On the day of the match against Germany, the Argentine squad caused a lot of angry grunts, but that was the least of it; Just angry grunts. The man is treated like a god in Argentina and abroad, so he can field five strikers and a lone midfielder against Germany in the World Cup quarter-finals without worrying about the reaction of the press, the media and the fans.

In a poetic justice moment, Muller, of course, opened the score tally, because Maradona did not fail to insult him before the match at the press conference, after he refused to share the hall, claiming that he thought he was a ball-gatherer on the field and swore in front of the whole world that he had never heard of him before.

Forget about this attempt to insult because - despite its lowliness - it is not the worst thing in the scene, but rather the fact that there was a man who was going to face Germany in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals, and hours before the match he had not heard of Muller before.

Ponder for a moment and imagine the degree of blindness with which the whole world should have dealt with the situation, to turn it into another nice joke of Maradona's well-known jokes, such as the time he pointed to the Nigerians with obscene fingers from the stands, so the scene automatically turned into a sincere expression of madness, passion, spirit and all these terms which were decimated by the vulgarity of the man and his audience, and many shared the shot under idiotic headlines trying to claim depth along the lines of: “This is real football!”

Now go back to the hug and try to imagine what Messi had in mind at that moment; Maradona is not only an Argentine legend, but rather he is closer to the embodiment of identity for Argentines, and some of them worship him in a literal sense, to the point of establishing a church bearing his name that considers his date of birth as Christmas, followed by tens of thousands, while Messi does not represent much to Argentines at that moment. That was his first full real experience with the national team, while Maradona was in the national team, he was the state, and he was the people.

So when the usual guillotine was erected after the defeat, the expected result was that it squinted, falling on Messi's neck instead of his coach, simply because he was an easy target at that moment, and escaping from the truth that the Argentines did not want to admit; Maradona publicly insulted their country's national team, with the utmost recklessness and insolence, and with premeditation.

This was probably what Messi thought of the moment of the embrace; The fact that he is about to become a sacrifice to the bloodthirsty masses after the defeat, and the fact that his coach will hide behind him, is nothing but the fact that he was the weakest link in the national team at the level of popularity and masses in Argentina, and the worst thing is that any attempt to defend himself will mean nothing but suicide, and that's where Messi's hell began.