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We walked with the tide of humanity surging towards the metro station at Lusail in the early hours of Saturday morning and were swept along with it, up the escalators and along the walkways. The Argentina fans, wrapped head to toe in blue and white, sang their songs of exultation and triumph. A drum was beating somewhere behind us, near the golden stadium that shone in the darkness. Beating, beating, beating, as if it would never stop.
At the top of the stairs leading down to the platform, volunteers stood waving the foam fingers that pointed the hordes of supporters towards trains heading for Msheireb, Doha’s central metro hub. It was nearly 3am by now but we were in the middle of World Cup rush hour. An army of mobile phones rose above the throng. Experience is nothing if it is not refracted through a mobile phone.
The volunteers got a chant going. It has become a small feature of this tournament. They turn their instructions to passengers into a rhythmic beat. They pointed their foam fingers and yelled ‘Metro’ through their loud speakers. And every time they chanted ‘Metro’, the crowd yelled back with ‘Messi’. And so we poured on to the train with that soundtrack ringing in our ears. ‘Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi’.
Argentina reached the semi-finals of the World Cup on Friday with a dramatic win over Holland
The sight of Argentina players goading Holland after the penalty shootout was ugly
Lionel Messi rolls on, too, like the beat of the drum, like the chant in the metro. His pass to set up Argentina’s first goal in their quarter-final against Holland a few hours earlier was utterly bewitching. How did he see it through the crowd of defenders? How did he see what no one else saw? No one on that pitch, no one in that stadium, no one else on the planet, saw what he saw.
His genius refuses to be extinguished quite yet and his attempt to gild his beautiful talent and his astonishing career with the one prize that has eluded him, the World Cup, has become the dominant narrative of this tournament. Here in the desert, it is the narrative that irrigates this competition and helps its increasingly absurd ringmaster, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, to claim, like a five-year-old child, that this World Cup is the ‘best ever’.
Messi’s talent urges you to love him unconditionally and to glory in the swell of emotion that seems to be propelling him towards the final, back at Lusail Stadium, next Sunday. The antics of Cristiano Ronaldo in the last couple of months have made it easier to lapse into a lazy, easy interpretation that Messi is the saint the game deserves and Ronaldo its vain and egotistical sinner.
There is a dark side to almost everything at this tournament including Lionel Messi and Argentina
There was a lot ugliness, hatred and a lack of respect looking at the game from the press-box
But if it is one thing above all others, this World Cup, which had such a murky cradling, and which has been the best ever for teaching us that money can buy most things and most people, has also taught us that nothing is quite what it seems here and that there is a dark side to almost everything at this tournament. That, sadly, includes Messi. And it certainly includes his Argentina team.
Like many fans of sport, I have always associated Messi with beauty. It’s a happy place. It was the same watching Roger Federer play tennis. It was sport’s escapism at its best. Grace and art and love for the game and creativity, all combined into something beautiful and, yes, something noble. They won but they won with style and elegance. They won well.
It was a shame Messi signed a deal to promote tourism to Saudi Arabia earlier this year but then I suppose we had already looked the other way when he joined PSG, a team owned by another repressive state, Qatar. There was still the football. That was still the sanctuary for everyone who admired him. His genius was still the sanctuary.
But then on Friday night, the thread that links him with grace frayed a bit more. By now, you’ve probably seen the startling picture of his team-mates goading the Dutch side in the moment of Argentina’s triumph in the penalty shoot-out. There’s nothing beautiful about that. It’s ugly. Really ugly. That picture should fill everyone who sees it with disgust and disdain. It’s the opposite of what sport should be.
Messi ignored the Holland goading after the penalty shootout as he went to hug shootout hero Emi Martinez – before he did go on to taunt someone from the Dutch camp during an interview
It is still possible to cling to the idea that Messi is looking the other way as he runs. Almost alone among the Argentina players in the picture, he is not taunting the stricken Holland team. He is already looking over to Emi Martinez, Argentina’s goalkeeper, who had made two stunning saves in the shoot-out. Later, though, Messi broke off a television interview to taunt someone from the Dutch camp. ‘What are you looking at, you fool?’ he said.
By then, tragically, there was something more important to mourn. As the game went into extra time, Grant Wahl, a US journalist, who was widely respected and who loved the game passionately, and the people who play it, and who loved fairness and who was an evangelist for the sport and who had been detained by Qatar authorities at the Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium earlier in the tournament because he was wearing a shirt with a rainbow emblem on it, collapsed in the press box at the Lusail Stadium and died later in hospital.
It was the most dramatic game of the tournament so far but most people in that press box were too shocked and distressed to care a jot about the result. Then you look down at the pitch and the players and all you see is ugliness and hatred and a lack of respect and a lack of compassion and a lack of brotherhood and a lack of grace and a lack, actually, of humanity in the midst of a stadium already tainted by the suffering of the people who built it. Bleak doesn’t really cover it but I know this much: the joy in the idea of Messi and Argentina winning the World Cup has flown away into the desert.
Joyful Brazil will be missed in Qatar
I was sitting high in the stands at Stadium 974 when Brazil trounced South Korea 4-1 in the last 16 of the World Cup. It is not the done thing to applaud from the press box and I usually make a point of abiding by that convention.
Not this time. Richarlison’s goal had me up on my feet, clapping. I couldn’t help it. It was beautiful. It felt as if we had been taken back in time 40 years and were watching the great team of 1982 again and that Zico, Socrates and Eder were working their magic once more.
The dancing the Brazilians did after each goal seemed like an extension of that beauty to me. It was an expression of the joy we all feel in football when it is played with such freedom and such abandon. And it felt particularly beautiful here in Qatar where so much of life seems to be predicated around what you can’t do, what you can’t wear and what you can’t say.
Brazil’s football, and their dancing, was the antithesis of that repression. It was the essence of freedom. I’ll miss it now that they’re gone.
Brazil played beautiful football in Qatar and it will be missed now they’re out of the tournament
Choosing Qatar still a betrayal by FIFA
ON Friday afternoon, I went to a Pakistani bakery in the Old Salata area of Doha to buy a loaf of the bread they make freshly in an oven sunk into the floor.
A man introduced himself and started talking about the football. He said he was from Jordan and was a doctor at a local hospital. He insisted on paying for my bread and then went on his way.
There are lots of beautiful things about Doha, mainly the hospitality of the people you meet, which usually means migrant workers, given that Qataris number only 11 per cent of the population. The architecture is stunning and the call to prayer is haunting. The metro is efficient and clean and the fact alcohol is less readily available means there is less aggression in the air.
There is much beauty but that hasn’t changed the opinion the World Cup shouldn’t be in Qatar
The football has been great, the competition has been organised brilliantly by FIFA, the working facilities for the media are first class and at one level, it seems right that the Arab world is hosting the tournament. I have enjoyed all these things but none of them change the fact that migrant workers died in their hundreds, probably in their thousands, building the stadiums for this World Cup.
None of them change the fact that gay men and women are not welcome here, which means a whole section of society has been disqualified from watching this tournament, which is supposed to be a festival of football for all, but is not.
So even though there is much beauty, the experience of being here has not changed my mind: the World Cup should not be played here. The fact that it is, is a betrayal of much that FIFA claims to stand for.
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