Canada will face Argentina in the Copa America semi-finals at 7am on July 10. This is the first time a North American representative has reached the last four of the Americas championship. Argentina are the reigning world champions and have lost only three of their last 61 matches.
This is also the rematch of the two teams after the group stage match. Argentina won 2-0 in that match thanks to goals from Lautaro Martinez and Julian Alvarez. However, Canada coach Jessie March still said that Messi is a “problem that needs to be solved” in the next match.
“We will not just defend. We will play our own way. Negative defending is not the way to solve the problem. However, we need to do a good job of containing Messi. In the last game, we gave him too much space. That is very important.”
Argentina’s TyC Sport made the point clear with a video analysis of Messi’s performance against Canada. It was easy to see that the Canadian players did not know how to mark the Argentine superstar. M10 often dropped deep into the middle of the field, causing the players tasked with keeping close to Messi to hesitate.
If they leave their positions, another Argentine player will occupy the space. Meanwhile, if they don’t mark. For Alvarez’s opening goal, it was M10 who passed the ball to Mac Allister to run down. Not a single Canadian player was marking the Argentine superstar in this move.
In fact, if Messi had finished better, the Argentina captain would have scored at least two goals with his runs behind the opposition defence. The Argentine players know Messi so well that even goalkeeper Martinez knows what to do when the opportunity arises.
After 3 matches at Copa America, Messi has no goals and only 1 assist. Hopefully the Argentine superstar has at least one goal in the remaining tournament. Previously, Cristiano Ronaldo left EURO 2024 without scoring any goals.
