England continue their ghostbusters tour as Argentina semi-final looms

This is going to hurt. The idea that anyone will escape Atlanta physically or mentally unharmed feels vaguely preposterous, a World Cup semi-final as bar fight and battle and revolution, an exhibition of astonishingly elite sport amid a sea of flailing limbs and failing minds. This is also the next stop on England’s ghostbusters tour – first the Azteca, then “a hell of a beating” and now the Hand of God, Batistuta clapping off Beckham in Saint-Etienne – a reckoning with, and reconciling of, its history and identity. 

This match will constantly be one bad refereeing call from mutiny, from a genuine diplomatic incident, a game that dunks you in a centrifuge and won’t open the lid. England are better man-for-man, Argentina a more established, if not more coherent, team, with a clearer modus operandi. These are probably the two best set-piece international teams, in part because Lionel Messi, Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice are the ones delivering the balls. England have the more experienced and tactically intelligent manager, but it’s not entirely clear if that matters. Elliot Anderson has never lost any of the 10 competitive matches he’s started for England, as positive if meaningless an omen as any other. But then again, Argentina have Messi, playing England for the first time, a new world to conquer for the man who has conquered everything.

Some will opine about How To Stop Messi – even famed managerial mind Phil Neville has weighed in – but what are you actually trying to stop here? This isn’t imperial-phase Messi, but there is still no obvious comparison. The list of players who spend so much of their matches walking (47% to date, 63% before the quarter-final) and are still capable of scoring seven World Cup goals starts and ends with Messi. His late-era brilliance is his ability to analyse and react, to see the space you can’t see you’re leaving, to create it himself. Switzerland swarmed him – and stopped him scoring or assisting from open play – but lost all the same. You don’t really want to man-mark him because that entails leaving a defender or defensive midfielder wandering around seemingly aimlessly for most of the game; leaving you automatically one step behind. Thomas Tuchel has never previously faced Messi as manager, saying “we need to be brave around him, we need to stop the support and we need to take care of all the movements that happen when he’s on the ball,” while mentioning his team’s success in managing Erling Haaland.

The last time Messi played a team with England’s individual excellence, if not their quality as a team, was either Brazil in November 2023 or, more realistically, France in the last World Cup final 11 months earlier. Are there really lessons to learn from the New England Revolution keeping him out in a 1-1 draw in April for Inter Miami? We know he’s too good for MLS, but also that he has lost something at 39. Is it the ability to thrive at the outermost edge of the world, against some of the fittest footballers alive? He hasn’t played a Mikel Arteta-era Premier League side, and although this has been true for a decade, he doesn’t track back, partially why Argentina’s matches are quite so giddy and chaotic, perhaps the most obvious tactical pressure point between the two teams. He creates an exploitable weakness. 

Argentina got this far by beating Algeria (pre-World Cup Fifa ranking: 28th), Austria (24th), Jordan (63rd), Cape Verde (67th), Egypt (29th) and Switzerland (19th). By basically every metric, that is the easiest World Cup semi-final run ever, a team which could easily have fallen in the last 32 against the wrong opposition but could also win this thing. Their midfield includes two 32-year-olds – Leandro Paredes and Rodrigo De Paul – who play for Boca Juniors and Inter Miami respectively. Nicolas Tagliafico has always been a nice idea poorly executed, and is now 33. Lionel Scaloni will almost certainly name the oldest team in a World Cup knockout match since 1962, a record his team have broken in their last four matches. 

But then everything around Argentina makes so little sense and evokes so much of the incomprehensible and ineffable that conspiracy increasingly fills the gaps. What are England facing here? A football team that believe they exist to serve and augment a footballing deity, that think God is on their side and wearing No10? A deep-set nationalism and generational trauma? Fifa and an attention economy that demands and decrees more Messi, endless Messi? Argentina requested to play in their away kit because that’s what they wore in 1986 and 1998 (they would have had to anyway), a sign they believe this will be decided by something beyond tactics or logic, by something bigger than themselves.

England have not won a match this vaunted and meaningful in 60 years. The potential to effectively end Messi’s international career, his career outside the MLS, feels preposterous, simply something England teams don’t do, moments they never make their own. Spain would lie ahead, chaos meeting excruciating control, a potential fourth consecutive men’s or women’s World Cup or Euros final between England and Spain. How many more ghosts can this team vanquish?

Photograph by Ryan Pierse/FIFA via Getty Images