DOHA: "After the game is before the game." When Sepp Herberger, counted as among football’s earliest philosophers, first uttered this strange truism of the game, he would never have thought it would ring so true ahead of a World Cup final nearly seven decades later.
Add to that Lionel Scaloni's calm observation of the bedlam that followed Argentina's opening game loss to Saudi Arabia here, and you have two schools of thought going head to head into a thrilling finale. "It's hard to make people understand that the sun will rise tomorrow, win or lose." Scaloni would appeal for sanity in his typical restrained manner as chaos would reign, obits would be written, departure plans brought forward as another false dawn of Messi's shot at World Cup immortality would so quickly loom over the World Cup.
