In school, Julian Alvarez never missed his mathematics class. Whether he had a match the next day, or if he had returned from a long tournament, he never skipped the maths lessons of Luciana Alvarengue in the tiny Argentina town of Calchin in the Cordoba province. “He had a gift of solving problems, in his own ways, not always as it was in the textbook,” she told Argentina outlet Sports Pulse last year.
In Kansas, Argentina had a problem. They couldn’t beat the cussed red wall of Switzerland, fuelled by the perceived injustice of a red card brandished at their forward Breel Embolo, which distorted the game’s equilibrium. Down to ten men, the Swiss fought a battle they were always doomed to lose. Yet they strove, taking the game as deep as possible, annoying Lionel Messi and his troops, who were yet again made to endure a range of vivifying emotions. Both teams were drained, emotionally and physically, before Alvarez found the perfect equation.
Only eight minutes remained until the tiebreakers. The game was played on an endless and directionless loop in the Switzerland box. Suddenly, Alvarez found the ball on his feet, from Manuel Lopez’s pass on the penalty area’s border, on the left side of the field. The box was a congregation of red shirts willing to shed blood and blue and white stripes who just wanted the match to end. Argentina would wish they could do without the heart-pounding drama, the hysteric fluctuations of fortune. Alvarez put an end to their labours of the days. He found himself in an unusual space. His eyes lit up, he took a couple of touches and let the ball rip to the top right corner from his right foot.
The improbability of the goal could be measured by the number of people inside the box. Five Argentines and eight Swiss plus the goalkeeper. How the ball flew unscathed and untouched to nestle in the nets is not a mystery, but a reflection of Alvarez’s gifts, the man touted to be Argentina’s figurehead after Messi’s departure. There was maths in the shot, the weight of the shot, it’s made-to-measure angle, the revolutions, the curve and the parabola, and the drop.
Drag force, equation of motion, Magnus force he had applied all the principles maths and physics could teach. He could feel the gravitational pull too. When all his teammates clambered on him he plunged to the ground. When the game restarted, he seemed disoriented with the frenzy and frolics around. Not every day does Messi plant a kiss on his forehead, as though handing over a legacy. Lautaro Martinez would embellish the goal tally, but Alvarez’s goal had killed the game. Martinez merely flogged a dead-horse. On cue, the crowd began to croon: “El que no salta es un ingle.” The one who doesn’t jump is an Englishman. The semifinal match-up with one of their historic rivals, England, cannot wait