Lionel Messi takes Inter Miami to League Cup quarter-finals

Lionel Messi continues to conquer America with a chic game. The Argentine has already brought his new club Inter Miami a big breakthrough by his standards. He advanced to the quarter-finals of the League Cup with a 4-4 draw on penalties against Dallas, thanks in large part to an outstanding rookie who scored a double.

Reaching the quarter-finals of the League Cup, a rather prominent tournament by regional standards, in which representatives of the US and Mexican championships compete for the prize, is a serious breakthrough by the standards of Inter Miami, a club with a modest list of achievements. In fact, until recently it was impossible to imagine that he, an outsider of the American League MLS, would penetrate there, having coped with four opponents with a much richer background – Cruz Azul and Atlanta United in the group stage, Orlando City and Dallas. – in the starting rounds of the play-offs. But everything was possible thanks to the miracle of the summer breeding company, which sent the best football player of this century, Lionel Messi, to Florida from PSG, and the tone in which he arrived there.

The level of North American football, of course, is inferior to the level of European football. But in any case, the acceleration that Messi took at Inter looks fantastic.

Actually, the fact that Inter Miami will certainly receive from the acquisition of the Argentine not only financial and image in the form of ticket prices jumping into space and a huge increase in the demand for club social networks, but also purely sports dividends, was obvious even before this weekend. In each of the League Cup matches, Lionel Messi was good, in each he scored goals, accumulating half a dozen of them before the 1/8 finals. But his performance in the away clash with Dallas was especially impressive.

Lionel Messi, as in the previous two matches, scored twice in it. But the circumstances added value to the next double. They, unlike the meeting with Orlando, with which Inter dealt with quite confidently, were terribly difficult.

Messi very quickly opened the scoring in the match when his former Barcelona teammate Jordi Alba, who did not forget how to interact with a great partner, rolled the ball back from his left flank, and Messi delivered a perfectly accurate shot from two dozen meters.

But then things went badly for Inter. In the middle of the second half, Dallas led 4-2, and it seemed that the guests would never get out.

They got out in the end when Lionel Messi turned on again. Inter’s third ball was sent by Dallas player Marco Farfan with his head into the net of his own goal, but he sent it there, interrupting the Argentinean’s serve. And then Messi performed a branded free kick from a point just to the right of the gate, circling the wall and screwing the ball into the top nine. This is how Inter escaped in regular time, then taking the upper hand in the penalty shoot-out – also with a well-aimed shot on target from Lionel Messi, which most of the two tens of thousands of people in the stadium, like his free kicks, filmed on mobile phones, forgetting that that one is supposed to root for one’s own. But some football principles in recent years in American football, because of his newcomer, have been thrown into the trash.

Alexey Dospekhov