If football is an ever-changing sport, Lionel Scaloni only needs to look at his forward line to see proof of that: Lionel Messi, the most influential, most prolific false nine of the modern era, helped bring a position from the past back into favour. Yet if football is an ever-longer game, it presents problems for Messi: his ambition of winning the World Cup could suffer a fatal setback at a point when matches tended to have finished, at a point when Argentina feel at their weakest and when Croatia could be at their strongest.
Argentina’s progress thus far has been a nervous, emotional, fraught affair. Having seemingly won games, an inability to see them out could have cost them dearly. They took two-goal leads in both the last-16 then the quarter-final. They required a 97th-minute save from Emi Martinez to stop the substitute Garang Kuol earning Australia extra time. They were pegged back by Wout Weghorst’s 101st-minute equaliser for the Netherlands, eventually prevailing on penalties thanks to Martinez.
