All aboard the Scaloneta. There is standing room only on the blue and white bus with Lionel Scaloni at the wheel, next stop the World Cup final: an entire country packed in, everyone right behind him, squeezed together, singing. It was not always this way but as Muchachos, the song that has become the soundtrack of the last month, puts it: Argentina, land of Maradona and Messi that cried so many years, has its hope back. They have come a long way fast, and so has he, leading them back to Lusail on Sunday evening.
Scaloni was in a hotel gym in Spain when the AFA called four years ago, his first senior squad drawn up that evening as he walked along the beach with Pablo Aimar. There to coach the under-20s in L’Alcúdia, his may not have been the first number they dialled but he answered. “Nobody wanted to take the national team,” admits Nicolás Tagliafico, among seven survivors from 2018.
