Are You Still Smiling?

I am still smiling. It’s been over half a day, and I’m still smiling. Posting Insta stories, done. Sharing GIFs and videos on Twitter, done. Forwarding ‘Why is Messi the GOAT’ memes on WhatApp, done. And am still smiling. That final left me drained, emotionally. To some extent physically as well. Nicholas Otamendi turned my Bruce Banner into The Hulk, and Kylian Mbappe almost pushed me off the sanity cliff. It was billed as the Messi versus Mbappe final. It became the Messi versus Mbappe final. The hype was real and the madness left us all as a slushy, sloppy ball of emotional mess. But I am still smiling.

My first tryst with World Cup football was in 1990. Italia 90 will always have a special place in my heart because of two people. Toto Schillaci and Diego Maradona. Schillaci came out of nowhere to win the Golden Boot that year, I had never heard of him before, and I never saw him again. But Maradona destroyed me, for life. He turned me into a football fan. I signed up for the Albiceleste for life. That fandom did me dirty in 1998, when Dennis Bergkamp did his thing! What in hell was Roberto Ayala doing? Just tackle the damn guy. He didn’t. The Dutch went mad shouting, “Dennis Beercummm…Dennis Beercummm…Dennis Beercummm….” – and north London became home for a kid from north Kolkata. Since then, my happiness was, for the lack of a better word, fucked! But today, I am still smiling.

I wasn’t much of a Messi fan. I wasn’t because Barcelona was like an ex-girlfriend who just won’t leave Arsenal alone, and Pep’s robots would do nasty things in every Champions League knockout. Then, I could never become ‘Team Ronaldo’ either, because…Eww! It took me time to join ‘Team Messi’ as well. He was great in Barca colours, but for Argentina, he always tried too hard. He was Messi for Barcelona, but he tried to be ‘Diego’ for Argentina. He tried, he failed. After the 2016 Copa America, he even called it quits, and perhaps that was the end of him trying to be ‘Diego’.

Argentina always needed him to be Messi. Messi always needed to be Messi. Perhaps that’s when a bit of Catalonia scraped off to add a fresh coat of Buenos Aires, a bit of Argentine doggedness stained his classy Barcelona attire. And he didn’t mind. The innocent complaining genius gave way to a scruffy, brooding man. In this World Cup, he became angry. Remember Maradona abusing the Italians who booed the Argentine national anthem? Messi’s moment arrived against Louis van Gaal. This was his World Cup, it was also his personal revenge trip. He wasn’t going down and so after Saudi Arabia, he became relentless, pissed, and angry. It wasn’t Messi like but it made me smile, heck, I am still smiling.

It’s a rare phenomenon for a proper football fan to be happy. They are inherently a sadist bunch. They love pain. They thrive in sadness. It’s difficult for a football fan to be happy for more than an hour. At times, you curse yourself for being happy. So what if you were 2-0 up? So what if the opponent can’t even string two passes together? There will always be a certain Kylian Mbappe, who will inject some magic potion in his veins and wipe that grin off your face. And boy! Didn’t he take the roof down!

That was a once-in-a-lifetime game and it’s difficult to find words to explain an experience. When you’ve waited for 32 years to see a bunch of white and blue-clad men lift the World Cup, your mind goes into a flashback of sepia-tone images. You want to say a lot, but all you can come up with is a fist pump and a ‘Yussss!’ You dive deep into your vocabulary but struggle because words can only describe an event, but elucidating emotions that were bottled in for years…well, good luck with that! So, you either fall back on Instagram reels of Peter Drury’s magical monologues or sit back, scroll your feed, and keep smiling.

Yes, I am still smiling!