Thank you, Messi: Fans reduced to tears as football great plays final match for Argentina

BENGLAURU: THE Estadio Monumental is, technically speaking, a building in Buenos Aires. But to reduce it to just that would be to miss the point.

It's an Argentine institution, an indescribable emotion. For almost 90 years, the Monumental - in its various forms and shapes - has housed the country's national football team.

In its current avatar, the Monumental is one of South America's biggest sporting cathedrals. The Stadium's walls and pillars have seen and heard things people will keep talking about a millennium later.

On Tuesday, the stadium's walls and pillars witnessed another memory, one thousands of Argentines will protect like a family heirloom. Over 85000 people crammed into the Stadium to see a sporting deity - their principal sporting deity - for one final time.

In isolation, an international football friendly between Argentina and Benin would hardly move the needle. But this was a national celebration fit enough for the visit of the current Pope.

Buenos Aires decked itself nice and early, fireworks lit up the night sky as if to mark the beginning of a new year and when it was finally time to bid goodbye, grown men and women wept together. Strangers hugged each other, the opposition learned Spanish to convey their thanks and the referee stopped play after the ninth minute to allow the catharsis of the fans to play itself out.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house as sadness engulfed one of the continent's most well-known amphitheatres. Nobody died, but the overwhelming feeling, even for the ones watching it on TV from a different continent half the world away, was grief.

In the end, three words felt sufficient. Just like those Benin players had mouthed, 'gracias, Lionel Messi'.

**** "It's hard to talk," said Messi, whose family watched him from the stands alongside some of the nation's WC winners of 1978, 1986 and 2022. "There are a lot of emotions, a lot of things going through my head."