With Lionel Messi on the field and Lionel Scaloni on the bench, Argentina dominates the football horizon.
The Lionel duo led the team to third-time world champions at the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. The synergy between the coach and the captain played a key role in Argentina’s victory.
Argentina beat France in the penalty shootout in a thrilling final.
Scaloni, sitting on the bench, knew well how to handle the pressure of France leveling the match twice.
The French team, with the help of their 23-year-old superstar Kylian Mbappe, equalized Argentina twice in the match.
The strategy of 44-year-old coach Lionel Scaloni was brilliant. They did not allow France to score for the first 79 minutes.
France had to resort to their ‘magician’ Mbappe each time to get back into the game. At one point, Scaloni and Messi’s alliance seemed to be falling apart.
In such situations, when a player looks to the bench for guidance, his expectations are high.
But every time Messi, who was having the best World Cup of his career, looked to the bench for guidance, he was faced with a slightly inexperienced coach who even the great Diego Maradona didn’t like.
Journey to Scaloni
It had been a year since Scoloni retired as a player. He felt a void in his life that was hard to ignore.
Lionel Scaloni started coaching children and adults in soccer in 2016 at an amateur soccer club in Mallorca, Spain.
His compatriot Sampaoli, then the coach of LaLiga’s Sevilla football club, saw something in him and hired him to train junior players at his club and then included him in the club’s first-team staff. took
Lionel Scaloni’s duties included analyzing the opposing team.
Spamauli’s stint with the Argentina team was short-lived and Argentina failed to progress beyond the quarter-finals at the 2018 World Cup held in Russia. Then there were also reports of differences between the players and the coaching staff and thus Sampaoli’s tenure came to an end.
When the Argentine Football Federation was looking for a replacement for Spamoli, they appointed Scaloni as a coach. That is, a man who had only two years of experience coaching children was made coach of the Argentine national team.
‘Scalonita’
Scaloni’s appointment drew strong criticism from all sides. Even the great player Diego Maradona said that ‘with this coaching staff, Argentina will only go to the motorcycling World Cup, not football.’
“Scaloni is a very good boy but he cannot direct the team,” Maradona said.
In the qualifying round of the Qatar World Cup 2022, Argentina qualified very easily unlike in the past. The team achieved 11 victories in the Qatar World Cup qualifying round. Six matches ended in draws and Argentina did not lose a single match in the qualifying round.
The Argentine team had already qualified for the World Cup four matches earlier.
Same team on and off the field
Unlike what has happened in the past, Messi and his team look to their bench with confidence and consider it their own.
It was important to win the World Cup again. The team and the fans had blind faith in their coach.
“We have a coaching staff like Scaloni and other former footballers like Pablo Aimar, Roberto Ayala, and Walter Samuel, who have done a lot wearing the Argentina jersey,” Lurcher Gonzalez told the BBC. They know what it represents.
A young coach has only one principle and that is unity. When they are together, all the players should be able to sit at the same table and talk to each other eye to eye.’
‘And then it’s very clear in our group, working happily together. We also have the best player in the world, the team has to make him feel good but the team does not depend only on that player. This was the main point of the whole process.
This seems logical. After many failed attempts to win the World Cup, Argentina believed that they could win this World Cup this time.
When Lionel Messi was at the top of his game and had a coach on the bench that everyone believed in, he succeeded. Thus, Argentina lifted the World Cup trophy for the third time.
