World Cup: Messi tells Argentina to make most of ‘luck’

Sao Paulo: Lionel Messi said he was nervous during Argentina’s “lucky” World Cup win over Switzerland on Tuesday but urged his team to make the most of their reprieve.

The captain and talisman finally prised open the Swiss defence deep into extra-time, two minutes from penalties, and picked out Angel Di Maria for the game’s only goal.

And he said the nail-biting win, in front of tens of thousands of Argentine fans, could stand his team in good stead later in the tournament.

“Suffering, suffering that’s what I felt, but now we know we can go through times like this,” said Messi.

“We were lucky, we had luck on our side and now we have to take advantage of it and move on.”

Argentina will now play Belgium or the United States in the quarter-finals on Saturday, as they go for a third World Cup title on the soil of arch-rivals Brazil.

“Just like everyone else, I imagine, at times I was nervous because we couldn’t score a goal and any mistake would have put us out of the World Cup,” Messi said.

“We didn’t want penalties and so we wanted to win it in extra-time.

“For the goal I thought maybe I should take a chance. And then I saw Angel on the right and I passed to him and fortunately we were able to score.”

The Barcelona star was named man-of-the-match for the fourth successive time by online voters, ahead of Di Maria who had 10 shots on target — more than the entire Swiss team.

“I don’t know whether I deserve this one (award) or not but what’s important is that we’ve made it to the next stage, which is what we wanted,” Messi said.

Meanwhile, Argentina coach Alejandro Sabella congratulated his team on their tactical discipline and declared the win “well-deserved”.

“It was a game that we deserved to win in 90 minutes,” Sabella told reporters.

“It was even during a first half in which they had two clear chances to score, but in the second half we were clearly superior, we had five or six shots at goal and in extra time we also had more chances.” It was a fraught match that neither side was able to dominate, with Switzerland defending intelligently and shackling Argentine talisman Lionel Messi.

When Messi finally got some space to run at the Swiss defence he laid a perfect pass into the path of Di Maria who neatly stroked the ball home from just inside the box.

“Just a few minutes before the end there was this pass from the midfield to Messi and he was in a very advantageous position and a player like him getting the ball in an advantageous position can cause a lot of harm,” Sabella said. “And there you go, he found Di Maria.

“It would seem he was running more and more [and] the more time went by the more he was on the attack. So we brought two players together and that’s how we came up with the goal.” Sabella said discipline was a crucial factor and singled out two unsung heroes for their individual performances.

“Marcos Rojo had a wonderful match once again, a player that was highly debated,” the coach said.

Goalkeeper Sergio “Romero played a wonderful match, people talked about him as well so I congratulate everyone who played in our team because of the effort they made.

“They never lost their balance and this is really important in these matches because that anxiety in wishing to win (can) lead you to open up spaces for the opponent.” One downside though was that Rojo got his second yellow card of the tournament and will miss the quarter-final.