Slightly off topic: I dismissed Messi for a long time because I had heard all the same stuff about Ariel Ortega and figured people were just desperate to find “the next Maradona”. Maybe I was right. 
Well, you know aside from his club level performance 
You weren’t.
I have made a point of not reading Silver’s World Cup stuff because soccer just isn’t a US-style bundle of statistics… but that’s pretty fascinating.
Referee: Kramer forgot it was Final
Apparently he went up to Rizzoli and asked him if it was the World Cup final. Rizzoli thought he was joking, but then Kramer asked him again, so he said “Yes.” Kramer then said, “Thanks, that’s important to know.” Rizzoli then alerted Bastian Schweinsteiger that something was seriously wrong and Germany substituted him. Scary stuff.
Kramer’s expression when he was being led off the field was frightening. He looked like he was at the end of a particularly grueling pub crawl.
This post is kind of interesting to me, because, you’re right. Soccer isn’t US style statistics.
But then I thought, wait, there is no such thing as US-style statistics. Sure, there are fantasy baseball and football leagues, and who wins and loses in those fantasy games is determined by the statistics of the various players. But… there’s fantasy leagues for soccer too!
People are unfair on poor Lionel. Fact is, this Argentine team (like Germany in 2002) overachieved, through a combination of relatively easy second round path and some brilliant play by Messi. If it had been anyone else in the same position, you would have said “of course give him the Golden Ball, he got them this far on his own”. But, with Messi we (and the Argentine squad) expect him to win games on his own. Maradona had other players to support him, he was marked out of both finals by the Germans, but the had other players too.
They would not have gotten as far as they did without Messi.
I have one! They started selling them again a few years ago. No idea if they still do.
Whoops.
It’s almost certainly true that they wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did – he’s Lionel Messi, I certainly hope he made a contribution – but this is Argentina he’s playing for, not Costa Rica. If you took a poll before the World Cup they’d probably have been the consensus #2 or #3 team in the world. That’s not a one man team. They weren’t trotting out a bunch garbage next to him, unless Barcelona, Real Madrid and Man City have all been suckered.
They also didn’t allow a single goal in the knockout stages until Gotze’s. And Messi didn’t score any. So it’s an overreaction to put Messi’s legacy into question just because he ran out of gas and had nothing to give them in the second half of the final, but it’s also a super-overreaction to the overreaction to suggest that he dragged them through the group stages on his back. He just didn’t do that. He was OK, and they defended like motherfuckers against four really good teams.
Bombshell coming out of Germany this morning: Philipp Lahm has retired from international football.
Didn’t see that coming at all.
Wow. He’s only 30. Sorry to see him go; he’s been a credit to German and World football in every way.