sport news OLIVER HOLT: Image of Argentina goading Holland was ugly and opposite of what ... trends now

We walked with the tide of humanity surging towards the metro station at Lusail in the early hours of Saturday morning and were swept along with it, up the escalators and along the walkways. The Argentina fans, wrapped head to toe in blue and white, sang their songs of exultation and triumph. A drum was beating somewhere behind us, near the golden stadium that shone in the darkness. Beating, beating, beating, as if it would never stop.

At the top of the stairs leading down to the platform, volunteers stood waving the foam fingers that pointed the hordes of supporters towards trains heading for Msheireb, Doha’s central metro hub. It was nearly 3am by now but we were in the middle of World Cup rush hour. An army of mobile phones rose above the throng. Experience is nothing if it is not refracted through a mobile phone.

The volunteers got a chant going. It has become a small feature of this tournament. They turn their instructions to passengers into a rhythmic beat. They pointed their foam fingers and yelled ‘Metro’ through their loud speakers. And every time they chanted ‘Metro’, the crowd yelled back with ‘Messi’. And so we poured on to the train with that soundtrack ringing in our ears. ‘Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi, Metro, Messi’.

Lionel Messi rolls on, too, like the beat of the drum, like the chant in the metro. His pass to set up Argentina’s first goal in their quarter-final against Holland a few hours earlier was utterly bewitching. How did he see it through the crowd of defenders? How did he see what no one else saw? No one on that pitch, no one in that stadium, no one else on the planet, saw what he saw.

His genius refuses to be extinguished quite yet and his attempt to gild his beautiful talent and his astonishing career with the one prize that has eluded him, the World Cup, has become the dominant narrative of this tournament. Here in the desert, it is the narrative that irrigates this competition and helps its increasingly absurd ringmaster, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, to claim, like a five-year-old child, that this World Cup is the ‘best ever’.

Messi’s talent urges you to love him unconditionally and to glory in the swell of emotion that seems to be propelling him towards the final, back at Lusail Stadium, next Sunday. The antics of Cristiano Ronaldo in the last couple of months have made it easier to lapse into a lazy, easy interpretation that Messi is the saint the game deserves and Ronaldo its vain and egotistical sinner.

But if it is one thing above all others, this World Cup, which had such a murky cradling, and which has been the best ever for teaching us that money can buy most things and most people, has also taught us that nothing is quite what it seems here and that there is a dark side to almost everything at this tournament. That, sadly, includes Messi. And it certainly includes his Argentina team.

Like many fans of sport, I have always associated Messi with beauty. It’s a happy place. It was the same watching Roger Federer play tennis. It was sport’s escapism at its best. Grace and art and love for the game and creativity, all combined into something beautiful and, yes, something noble. They won but they won with style and elegance. They won well.

It was a shame Messi signed a deal to promote tourism to Saudi Arabia earlier this year but then I suppose we had already looked the other way when he joined PSG, a team owned by another repressive state, Qatar. There was still the football. That was still the sanctuary for everyone who admired him. His genius was still the sanctuary.

But then on Friday night, the thread that links him with grace frayed a bit more. By now, you’ve probably seen the startling picture of his team-mates goading the Dutch side in the moment of Argentina’s triumph in the penalty

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