Argentina finally beat Australia in a World Cup match by very good margins

Argentina were the better team against Australia, but they did better than they would have liked after appearing to hold their own easily.

At the end of the day, football is a game of thin margins. Much of Argentina's clash with Australia was a pedestrian affair of misplaced passes and the ball moving mostly sideways.

But in the end, there were four distinct moments that widened the gap between these two teams, and the end result is that Argentina continue their slightly disappointing progress towards the final stages of the 2022 World Cup .

The first of those moments came, of course, from Lionel Messi. Messi had been an anonymous figure for much of the previous 34 minutes, but with ten minutes left in the first half he received the ball at the edge of the penalty area from Rodrigo de Paul and put it through a thicket of legs and beyond the grip of Australian goalkeeper Matt Ryan.

Was this Messi threading a camel through the eye of a needle, or did he have a lucky little? Could the Australian defenders have shut it down quicker? It doesn't really matter. Facts are facts. Argentina had a lead that their previous efforts as a team had failed to justify, and the mountain that Australia had to climb grew higher and higher.

He didn't participate in the second moment that made this game spin. That belonged to Ryan. It has now been over thirty years since the backpass rule was introduced, but there remains a tendency for some goalkeepers to treat the ball as if it were a hot potato. It's written big in their body positioning when it happens. The outfield players redouble their efforts to close them. Fans of the goalkeeper team find their hearts in their throats unexpectedly.

On this occasion, Ryan was truly the architect of his own literal and metaphorical downfall. Receiving a back pass shouldn't have been a major problem for the goalkeeper, but De Paul was straight on his back and as he spun in front of him he fell on Julian Alvarez, who managed to turn and shoot. through and into the empty goal. That kind of smarts, that instant switch to a razor-like press, is why these guys make a lot of money.

Australia had some luck, and they had it with 14 minutes to play when a shot from substitute Craig Goodwin that would have otherwise flown comfortably away from Enzo Fernandez and crossed the face of goal with the Argentine goalkeeper Damian Martinez rooted in his place. It was their fourth shot of the game. All four were off target until Fernandez's unplanned interaction.

But with this lens, something has changed. Argentina had been comfortable defensively all night and their second goal threatened to kill the game, but this chance was not going to be seen as mere consolation. With this goal, Australia began to develop some teeth. Their confidence seemed to visibly grow with the knowledge that, willy-nilly, they were back in the game.

Six minutes after the goal, they came desperately close to what might otherwise have been one of the the great goals of the World Cup, the third of those very fine margins, and it would have come from one of the most unlikely source. Australian left-back Aziz Behich took off on a run that saw him slip past four before a last-second block from Lisandro Martinez prevented what would have been a stunning equalizer.

But the rigid structures that govern football so much tend to melt away in the last ten or twenty minutes of my...