Saying goodbye to this wonderful disaster of an Argentina team

It’s probably a little fresh at the moment, but in years to come we may look back at Argentina’s 2018 World Cup campaign with more appreciative eyes. Sure, they were a mess. They stumbled through the group stage, then got knocked out at the first punch. But as a general principle: if a team is going to implode, the least they can do is explode at the same time.

Okay, so the football wasn’t great. Croatia embarrassed them, as did France at times, and both Iceland and Nigeria caused them serious problems. What moments of quality there were seemed isolated and hard-fought, as though it were a constant struggle to liberate a clever pass or a cute move from the overall boggy morass of the team. And those were balanced out by some truly appalling individual errors.

Beyond that, this was an exemplary case of the cabin fever that tournaments such as this can induce. World Cups are closed-off things. A week or so before the tournament starts a representative of FIFA steps up to a big metaphorical door, turns a big metaphorical key, then tucks it away in a big metaphorical pocket. Each squad of 23 is locked in, with each other but more importantly with themselves. With their flaws and their weaknesses. Nobody gets out until they’re knocked out.

And so when things start to go wrong — when Iceland pinch a well-deserved draw, for example, or when Luka Modric does his thing — then this frustrated energy can only be directed inwards. Sometimes it serves as a catalyst for improvement; other times it explodes in briefings and counter-briefings, fistfights, coups, and all the other familiar signs of the recursive psychodrama that is World Cup Team: Civil War.

Argentina’s meltdown isn’t the most spectacular we’ve seen in recent years; that honour probably goes to France in 2010, and the agitations of Patrice Evra and Nicolas Anelka that brought the strange reign of Raymond Domenech to a close. By contrast, the coup-that-might-not-have-been against Sampaoli was a relatively quiet thing, immediately denied. A veneer of embattled solidarity was quickly established, and while it might not always have been convincing, it just about held. Even Javier Mascherano’s black eye faded in decent time.

But there is a weight to this meltdown. Perhaps that comes from the sense that beyond the big names, most of whom are 30 or older, there really isn’t much to rebuild with. The squad looked wildly imbalanced before the tournament began, great chunks of ordinary garnished with a little extraordinary, and nothing emerged to challenge that thought.

At half-time against France, Sampaoli took off Marcos Rojo, a central defender that isn’t good enough to cope with the best, and brought on Federico Fazio, a central defender that also isn’t good enough. That felt something like a cry for help. Or perhaps a state of the nation address — the nation, it is in a state.

Yet what made this catastrophe beautiful at the last was the way Argentina managed to find, somewhere in the rubble of their aspirations, just a little bit of scrappy momentum. They came back from the humiliation at the hands of Croatia to find two moments against Nigeria; they weren’t good, but they got through. And against a France team that looked capable of taking them to pieces they just about held it together. Well, no, they got taken to pieces. But the pieces made a surprisingly decent showing.

Indeed, France needed a breakout performance by Kylian Mbappe and an unrepeatable strike from Benjamin Pavard just to make the win safe. Even then, there was time for one last touch in the penalty area. One last surge of hope, for a heavy-legged team held together by bloody-mindedness and sticky tape.

Maybe one last twitch of the corpse would be more accurate. In the final count, Argentina ended up with the early exit they deserved, and are now walking forward into a crisis that could last a while. But they signed off by playing a full part in a barnstorming match that nobody really expected, and that stands as a favour to the World Cup, and to the world.