Emiliano Martinez had to save Argentina from a third Cape Verde equaliser, and Ian Wright would have recognised the pattern: a lead, a lapse, and a goalkeeper left to tidy up the mess. Argentina won the match, but only after switching off twice and making a routine night look anything but.
That left Lionel Scaloni blunt after the final whistle. “We received many tough blows tonight,” he said. “Everyone thought the match would be a walk in the park — we didn’t think it would be.”
Martinez holds the line
Argentina took the lead against Cape Verde, conceded, took the lead a second time and conceded again. When the game opened up for a third time, Emiliano Martinez had to ensure they did not concede again. That was the difference between a messy win and a result that might have slipped away completely.
Lionel Messi put the problem in practical terms. “We couldn’t press them well, and our lines were a bit too far apart,” he said. “They always had an extra man because we couldn’t match them.”
He added that Cape Verde were able to keep the ball and force Argentina into longer stretches without it: “And, well, that’s why they had the ball and made us run, because we couldn’t press them properly.” The issue was not one bad moment. It was repeated spacing problems that kept turning control into recovery work.
Scaloni and Messi on the warning
Scaloni’s comments made the broader issue harder to miss. Argentina were not surprised by the resistance, and they were not spared the effort required to survive it. Their starting XI had been rested for the final group game, a 3-0 win over Jordan, yet the Cape Verde match still dragged them into the kind of scramble they had hoped to avoid.
The pattern is familiar. Argentina lost 2-1 to Saudi Arabia in their opening game at the last World Cup after leading 1-0. They led the Netherlands 2-0 in the quarter-final before conceding twice to Wout Weghorst. They led France 2-0 in the final before Kylian Mbappe’s quickfire double changed the game, then Messi put Argentina 3-2 up before Mbappe equalised again. Even their first knockout tie in 2022, a 2-1 win over Australia, came with a late scare.
Egypt in three days
Scaloni said there were only three days off before the next game against Egypt in a run that can include five knockout matches. That schedule leaves little room for repeated defensive resets, especially when the same late-game stress keeps showing up.
Argentina are the reigning World Cup champions, but the cleaner version of their title defence keeps getting interrupted by the same problem: they lead, then invite pressure back in. Cape Verde did not finish the job, but they showed how quickly that opening can appear when Argentina stop pressing and the gaps between their lines grow too wide.
