Messi Could Be Culprit Behind Basile Departure

Fresh off of one of the worst per­for­mances in decades, Argentina find them­selves in sham­bles.  As of Thurs­day after­noon, the local media were report­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of coach Alfio Basile step­ping aside due to inner con­flicts and lack of response from the team the news would be con­firmed hours later.   Basile’s irrefutable res­ig­na­tion had to be accepted by Julio Gron­dona and the rest of the Argen­tine Foot­ball Association.There is a lot of blame as to why Argentina is in the sit­u­a­tion they are in.   But the player that will  get the lion’s share of the blame is going to be Lionel Messi.   The Barca player is the one that embod­ies every­thing that the Albice­leste stands for.  Skill, tal­ent, explo­sive­ness.  He is the poster­child of this national team.   This is why he will also be the one that will have to receive most of the darts from the play­ers’  stand­point.   One of the biggest images that told every­thing about Messi’s role with the team.  He stood out on the pitch, with his hands on his hips look­ing at his team­mates bat­tle the Chileans in com­plete futil­ity.  If there is one knock on Messi’s game is that he is self­ish, very self­ish as a player.   Some­times for good, some­times for bad.  There are oth­ers involved in this fall­out, but Messi’s ulti­mate care– him­self got the team in trou­ble.   It was fine when he was the one scor­ing the goals and mak­ing the plays, but Argentina needed some­thing like a Chile game in order to really hit the point home.  Argentina are a team that were saved by their indi­vid­u­al­ism in many games.  So Messi’s tac­ti­cal dis­obe­di­ence, Tevez’ blow ups, Heinze’s mutiny, Riquelme’s bit­ter­ness, and Agüero’s fas­ci­na­tion with his father-in-law… all of those exam­ples  are just sam­ples of how a team began play­ing as eleven play­ers instead of one team.  They were play­ing for their own per­sonal inter­ests (spon­sors) and put them above their coun­try.  That´s part of the rea­son why there is such a dis­con­nect with the national team within Argentina now.  The fans see the lack of com­mit­ment and the feel­ing is rec­i­p­ro­cal.  So for years there has been a very tepid recep­tion towards the national team.     So now for Ser­gio Batista it will be time to start anew and estab­lish a new set of rules that will no longer treat these divas as such.  This is the ulti­mate result of going for the Euro­pean side play­ers.  They aren’t hun­gry or com­mit­ted to the jer­sey despite all the rhetoric that they might give to the domes­tic media.  It will be time to start all over again and remem­ber what it took some of the teams from the past to achieve the glory this gen­er­a­tion has not even sniffed.