“You can stop Messi getting the ball - stand next to him!”

Apparently, had England “just man-marked” Messi, the team would have woken up on Thursday morning as World Cup finalists. “Stand next to him,” went the explanation, and you stop him.

It was said that “flooding the zone” out on the right wing, where the 8-time Ballon d’Or winner had decided was his patch of the Atlanta Stadium on World Cup semifinal night against England, would be enough. More than two decades of brain-bending skill and talent for Newell’s, Barcelona, PSG, Inter Miami, and Argentina is not enough for Gary Neville to realise what should have been clear at kick-off: you can’t mark Messi.

Thomas Tuchel said it himself in England’s pre-game press conference ahead of the game, saying that he “was thinking about it... it crossed my mind, but I’m not sure." In the end, England didn’t try to man-mark. They allowed him to float between the lines, choosing instead a plan of hacking at his legs and cutting him off before getting into the danger zone. The Messi zone. You know the one.

“How can you not just go and man-mark him?”

Only yesterday, Messi hadn’t told anyone that he had moved it. That square foot of green carpet - the piece of the pitch that is reserved solely for him and nobody else - was picked up and dragged out onto the right flank for the second half. England went 5-3-2 and crammed in, white shirts knotted together like a prison escape rope, and Messi simply moved away from it. He clearly wasn’t finding success cherry picking electrons from Messispace to pull off dimension-bending runs through brambles of legs, so he took his tiny football pitch and moved it to somewhere he could play freely.

“Messi saw the space, he started to drop out,” Neville said on his Stick to Football podcast as he analysed the game. Out of the trio of him, Roy Keane, and Ian Wright, Neville was the only one with a supposed answer to stopping la pulga. Genius or madness. You choose. “[Tuchel] then corrected it, and put four players in midfield with O’Reilly on the left. But for some reason he didn’t tell him: ‘stay with Messi, do not let him go’. If he stays central, he can’t cross it... But how can you not just go and man-mark him in that channel?”

Neville, and I almost apologise for saying this, was Valencia manager when Los Che lost 7-0 to Barcelona in 2016. That was a vintage Barça side, with Neymar and Luis Suárez up front. They also had Leo Messi, the same one that destroyed England in Atlanta, and they couldn’t mark him on that night in Spain either.

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