The clock ticked into the last 20 minutes and Argentina was still trailing in its World Cup semifinal against England. Then the game lurched into the last 10—and still, Lionel Messi and his teammates weren’t worried.
With England penned inside its own box, Argentina could smell blood. They sensed an equalizer was coming, but not because of how much possession it had or how the Three Lions had retreated into soccer’s equivalent of the fetal position.
It was because Argentina had seen this movie many times before.
No one in world soccer has made more of a specialty of scoring late goals than the defending champions. Argentina doesn’t have the most talented team, nor is it the most athletic. But like that creature in a monster movie, they’re never quite dead when you think they are.
“We are unique, truly,” Argentina’s World Cup-winning head coach Lionel Scaloni said. “We are unique and it’s not arrogance. It’s heart.”
At this World Cup, Argentina has scored nine of its 11 knockout-round goals after the 75th minute. Twice, it has required extra time to find a winner—against Cape Verde and Switzerland. Once, it needed a flurry of three goals in 14 minutes to see off Egypt. And at no point in the knockout rounds was it ever ahead in the 90th minute.
On Wednesday in Atlanta, however, Argentina delivered its greatest milagro .
With five minutes to play, the team’s luck seemed to have run out. Trailing England by a goal and on the brink of a devastating elimination from Messi’s final World Cup, Argentina conjured another improbable late escape act to wriggle out from under its old enemy.
First there was a wonder strike from the edge of the box five minutes from time. Then came a close-range header two minutes into injury time. Just like that, Argentina had turned defeat into a spot in the final. In 96 years of World Cup history, it was the latest anyone had ever come back in a semifinal.
“This is so intense. It’s really so intense,” said Lautaro Martinez, who scored the winner against England. “This team keeps showing what it’s made of.”
Precisely what those ingredients are is hard to define. Beyond having the greatest player of all time on their roster—even at age 39—Argentina hasn’t distinguished itself for its tactics or its clever use of substitutes. Instead, the team has cultivated a mystique around Messi that has every player, coach, and fan with Argentina’s crest over their hearts thoroughly convinced that salvation will come eventually.
“This team plays better when they’re under pressure,” Scaloni said. “These players don’t feel the weight of responsibility.”
And no one sets that tone more clearly than Messi himself. In some ways, his whole international career has been defined by late glory. Until the age of 34, Messi had won precisely nothing in an Argentina shirt. His record of lost finals and World Cup catastrophes was so long that, in 2016, he briefly quit the national team.
Then, just as his team has done so often here, he sparked a last-minute comeback. In 2021, he willed Argentina to its first Copa America title in 28 years by playing a direct role in nine of its 12 goals at the tournament. Then, the following year, he scored in each of his team’s four knockout-round games in Qatar to carry it the third World Cup in Argentina’s history—and the first since a guy named Diego Maradona lifted the trophy.
At the time, Messi seemed ready to end his international career at the very pinnacle of the game. Actually winning the thing convinced him to stick around a little longer, even though he would be nearly four years older by the time the title defense rolled around.
Then again, no one conserves energy like Messi. Most of his time on the pitch is spent walking. His average speed clocks in at 13th on the team. But in those crucial situations at the end of matches, he is already ready to spring into action. Against England, he had enough left in the tank to claim the assists on both goals.
“If we were going to have a chance today, it had to be that way,” Messi said. “And we’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com and Jonathan Clegg at Jonathan.Clegg@wsj.com
