Messi: “I don’t like what I did”
The Argentine star gave his first interview after the World Cup and admitted he made a mistake during one of Argentina’s games in the competition.
Lionel Messi finally won the only title he was missing in his amazing career. La Pulga won his first World Cup title in Qatar with the Argentina national squad after defeating France in one of the best soccer finals in recent times.
The path for Lionel Scaloni’s men to the trophy wasn’t easy at all, especially at the start of the tournament, as they surprisingly lost to heavy underdogs Saudi Arabia in their opener, which added some extra tension to a squad that already had had to deal with lots of expectations from the Argentinian fans and media.
However, La Albiceleste bounced back to defeat Mexico and Poland to advance to the qualifying rounds as Group C winners.
However, before advancing to the final, Argentina were quite close to being kicked out of the tournament. It was the game they played against the Netherlands, where Louis Van Gaal’s men came back from a 2-0 scoreline to tie the game.
From staring at Van Gaal to the “Qué miras, bobo” message
Argentina vs Netherlands quarterfinals game was full of tension, even before the Netherlands scored their first goal.
In the 2-0 goal for Scaloni’s pupils, Messi, who didn’t like the comments Van Gaal previously did about his teammate Ángel Di Maria, started looking defiantly at the Dutch coach and imitated former player Juan Román Riquelme’s goal celebration, with whom Van Gaal had issues in the past too. Later on, Messi engaged in an argument with the former FC Barcelona coach.
“I didn’t like it. It came out at the moment and yes, I knew what had been said before the game, what he had said. Some of my teammates told me ‘did you see what he said’ on purpose”, Messi said in his first interview after the World Cup to radio show Perros de la Calle.
Undoubtedly, one of the images that fans remember the most is when Messi sent a message to Dutch forward Wout Weghorst after Argentina ended up progressing on penalties during a post-game interview.
The Qué miras bobo sentence [What are you looking at, you fool] to the forward was something he wasn’t proud of either.
“I didn’t like what happened with Weghorst either. These are moments of great tension, and a lot of anxiousness, everything happens very quickly and you don’t have time to think about anything. Actually, nothing was planned, it happened like that and as I say, it isn’t an image I like to give off”.
Messi also said in his interview that he would have loved to see Diego Armando Maradona watch the final and that his Instagram account was blocked after receiving one million messages after Argentina’s win over France in the final.