World Cup Final view from Argentina: We all felt Diego Maradona’s presence as Lionel Messi joined pantheon

This was our first World Cup since Diego Maradona died, but it felt like he was here. It’s hard to explain, but it was like he was taking care of us.

Lionel Messi expressed it before the final, and the way things went yesterday was hard to comprehend, we all felt his presence.

The older generation will still say they love Maradona over Messi. No one has ever played as good as Maradona did in 1986. Maybe this generation around the world now love Messi more but, as I said in this newspaper on Friday, in Argentina, we have reached a point where we were not asking Messi to be Diego. We just wanted Messi to be Messi.

I think what he has done in Qatar is the best individual performance at a World Cup in the 21st century. Messi was better than Ronaldo Nazario in 2002, better than Zinedine Zidane in 2006 and I cannot recall anyone being as good as those guys. It was like a miracle.

Lionel Messi lifts the FIFA World Cup 2022 Qatar - In Pictures

This World Cup settled some of, what I think has been silly, analysis around Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. For me, comparisons between them both are unfair, because they are on different planets.

I am not saying Ronaldo is not a good player; he is a beast, a machine, he has won five Champions League and has scored more than 800 goals. But Messi was always destined to be in the pantheon of the greatest of all time with Pele, Maradona and Alfredo Di Stefano. Unfortunately, marketing, the media and people who do not understand football the way they should, put them both in the same place. But there is no place for Ronaldo.

We all had the feeling before the World Cup that Argentina was together for the first time in many years and something special could happen — not only with the fans in Qatar, but with the people back home and Argentinians living around the world. People identified with the team, we won the Copa America in 2021 and then there was Messi’s last dance.

We knew it could be beautiful but, in the back of our minds, we are all thinking, ‘What if Messi misses it again?’. It was going to be as beautiful as it would be painful.

But this time he was not going to be denied. I don’t remember the last time I cried, I hadn’t cried in a while, but after that last penalty from Gonzalo Montiel went in yesterday, that was it. It was like all the tears that had been building up over the years came out at once.