“Not been a classic this,” a friend said reasonably enough on WhatsApp after 76 minutes. Three minutes later, France’s Randal Kolo Muani was fouled by Argentina’s Nicolás Otamendi as he surged into the box, and Kylian Mbappé scored the resulting penalty. What followed gave this match a reasonable claim to being the greatest World Cup final ever played.
What a game. What a game! First a procession, then a knife fight, and finally, for Lionel Messi, a coronation. All kinds of people with no interest in football found themselves caught up in it, seduced by the generational significance of the confrontation between Mbappé, who scored a hat-trick, and Messi – Paris Saint-Germain teammates at opposite ends of their careers. World Cup finals are normally turgid, terrified affairs, won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes. In this one, two great players rose fearlessly to the occasion, lifted by their teammates’ wild commitment to their cause. Nobody who watched will forget it.
