Doubting Lionel Messi? It borders on audacity – but the question has to be asked before Argentina’s quarterfinal against Switzerland: if they win a penalty, will Messi take it? The question arises because of Messi himself: at this World Cup he has taken two penalties and failed to score either.
Had he converted them, Argentina might not have been pushed to the brink against Egypt, nor come under pressure for a spell against Austria, and Messi would now reign alone at the top of the scorers’ chart rather than sharing it with Kylian Mbappe on eight goals. So if Argentina are awarded another penalty against Switzerland, will Messi take it, or someone else? It is not easy to put anyone else forward, because so much in this team depends on Messi.
Consider one statistic: in the very match in which he missed a penalty – against Egypt – Messi both scored and set up a goal, doing so at a World Cup for the fifth time, a feat no other player has managed more than three times since 1966. In that game he also set records for scoring in nine consecutive World Cup matches and six consecutive knockout matches. Telling a player like that not to take a penalty is itself a risk.
How Argentina’s other players fare from the spot also matters. Across club and international football, Messi has taken 148 penalties and scored 114, a success rate of 77 percent. Is anyone in the squad better? By percentage, yes – five players. Leandro Paredes leads on 92.9 percent, followed by Alexis Mac Allister on 91.7 percent, with Enzo Fernandez on the same mark; Julian Alvarez is on 89.4 percent, and even Nico Gonzalez’s rate, at 82.04 percent, is better than Messi’s. But there is no straightforward answer, because those higher percentages come from far smaller samples: after Messi, the most penalties taken by an Argentine in the squad is Martinez’s 27. The more penalties a player takes, after all, the more he is bound to miss.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report