Copa America 2021

[Barozi]

mZuzek said:

Hiku said:

Neymar was understandably pretty torn up about it. In the 2014 WC which was also held in Brazl he got injured really badly and could no longer play the rest of the tournament.

He only missed the 7-1 defeat if I recall correctly, which would have happened had he been on the pitch anyway. More importantly, he was injured for the entirety of 2019's Copa América, meaning he still doesn't have a winners medal with Brazil.

Barozi said:

Exactly. It's not his fault that most of his team members were little more than average.

Nobody is blaming Ibra for not winning anything with Sweden (or Bale with Wales, or Salah with Egypt etc.).

Football isn't a game where it's enough to have the best player in the world in your team to win a trophy. The others need to be at least good as well.

Well, nobody would blame Ibra, or Bale, or Salah, because no one has ever expected those nations to perform anyway. Argentina has a lot of history in football and that creates a lot of expectations, especially when a player like Messi's involved. But they also had a fantastic team, at least on paper. The country had a fine generation of footballers coming through at a similar time, with the likes of Di Maria, Aguero, Higuain, Lavezzi, Pastore - all still playing alongside other established players like Mascherano, Tévez, Zabaleta, Diego Milito and so on. It was at least reasonable to expect that this Argentina team would've done better, and it was especially pathetic how they lost two back to back Copa América finals against Chile.

Yeah, some of these players never quite reached the levels we expect of them, and truth be told, on an international level they all flopped except for Di Maria and Messi. Just saying this wasn't a case of Messi playing in an otherwise useless team, or at least it shouldn't have been.

Comparatively, Argentina's team nowadays looks on paper much worse. But as you see, football isn't played on paper.

Egypt is the record champion of the African Cup of Nations. The last time they won it was in 2010. Salah had his national team debut in 2011.

Since then Egypt competed in 5 African Cup tournaments and couldn't win it once. They failed to qualify the first three times, were the runner-up in 2017 and only made it to the round of 16 in 2019.

Yet that doesn't make Salah a meh-ish player. (especially considering he scored 45 goals in 70 appearances for Egypt).

All I'm saying is that maybe Argentina as a team just wasn't good enough to win something until now despite having some good players. But there's no reason to blame it on a single player everytime and not question the team as a whole.

I mean even back in 2014 when Argentina made it to the final of the World Cup, they only scored 8 goals in 7 games. Messi scored 4 of those goals. It's clear that the team would've performed far worse without him despite all these other players you've named.