Opening the Post-World Cup Mailbag
Just as in 2022, both of those finals had overarching narratives: England’s quest to win its first World Cup in the former; Diego Maradona’s attempt to prove his status as the best player on the planet in the latter. Perhaps the answer is time, and age, and circumstance: The World Cup, after all, means different things to different people. Lionel Messi has been the player of my lifetime; his triumph, his glory, resonates in a way that Bobby Charlton’s or Maradona’s does not, for me.
On the goal, there is less scope for mitigation and interpretation. Mary Loch may not even have regarded Di María’s strike as the best of the game — “I believe Mbappé’s second goal was the greatest goal of the final,” she wrote — but I’m inclined to go with the counterargument, as provided by Jurek Patoczka.
“I would challenge anybody to show me a goal, anywhere, anytime, that was scored after a sequence of six one-touch passes,” he wrote. “And this was on the grandest stage possible.”
Having relitigated all of that — and changed absolutely nobody’s minds in the process — we can move on, grumbling with discontent. Jacqueline Davis wanted to know if this would be the last time we see the World Cup take place in both the Arab world and the European winter.
“I heard Saudi Arabia was being encouraged to throw its hat in the ring for 2030,” she wrote. “Would that not present many of the same difficulties as Qatar? Did the experience of 2022 improve the Arab world’s chances?”
The answer, there, is unquestionably yes. If anything, Qatar has effectively provided a blueprint for what FIFA would like the World Cup to look like in the future. The nostalgic, romantic choice for 2030 is a South American bid that includes Uruguay, host of the first tournament a century earlier. The practical one, from FIFA’s point of view, is an impossibly wealthy autocracy that can provide the same sort of fantasyland as it enjoyed in Doha.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/sports/soccer/argentina-world-cup.html