Eloquence is a particularly gratifying trait. The ability to find the right words to suitably describe an event or an experience is both rare and self-rewarding. The process consists of gathering, organising, filtering, and then re-jigging thoughts and feelings in a sharp and succinct manner. The sentences must land with an effect without reading prosaic or verbose. It’s a fine art.It’s somewhat fascinating the written word manages to still retain its place and relevance in a world increasingly tilting towards audio-visual forms of content that requires lesser effort on part of the consumer. It perhaps has to do with the legacy status and thus a perception of higher credibility of the written form over the spoken one. Essays and long-forms are becoming more tedious to read but there’s still some prestige and status associated in flaunting your old-school preferences. Even if you may already have switched to podcasts or even AI summaries of written passages, there’s still value in keeping up the act and appearances. It’s a performance but it still buys you a seat in the right kind of rooms among the right kind of people.But to writers themselves, words continue to carry a distinct sanctity. To those cursed to do this professionally, it eventually boils down to a craft of repetition than an art of inspiration. You become a servant of your style. The obsession to ornately present that one sentence that sounded so persuasive in your head leads you to almost look out for events and experiences that match its brevity.It takes you time to fully admit to yourself that your pursuit for the right words carries no higher meaning than you allowed yourself to think it does. That all events and experiences are only that unique after all. That there’s only so much your verbosity may heighten the mundane. The illusions just about begin to shatter and the reality rears its ugly head. And right then you watch Lionel Messi play his one last World Cup in 2026 at the tender age of 39.§On that epochal day in December 2022, there was a moment when France’s Randal Kolo Muani had Messi’s destiny at his feet. A rather desperate half-line clearance from the French centre back Dayot Upamecano fell incredibly kindly in Kolo Muani’s path. Argentina’s Nicolas Otamendi was caught napping and in every other universe, in every mother moment, Kolo Muani would’ve likely hammered it home and moved a dagger through Messi’s heart.Not on that day though. Not in that universe. Not in that moment. Messi was left completely flummoxed to see how Emiliano Martinez had managed to save that shot and kept Argentina alive to die another day. Even the most radical rationalists would’ve probably allowed the reason to slide in that moment and taken it as a sign from the universe. The stars had to align and about 15 minutes and eight penalty kicks later, they did.Messi had shaken hands with the paradise as Peter Drury on the broadcast described. There was no higher peak left to surmount. The statistical scale of his individual accomplishments was anyway impossible to match for a lifetime or two. It was hard to see Messi sourcing the inspiration to carry on at the highest level.A rather swift move to club football in the United States – where the quality of the game can even in the kindest possible terms be called of compromised standards – sort of hinted towards Messi himself too wanting to plod into wilderness. The Copa America win a couple of years later added to the silverware but his presence on the field wasn’t quite the same. He in fact watched about a third of the final against Colombia from the dugout after having t0 leave the field with a swollen ankle and the heaviest possible heart.The legs were finally giving in. The pace on the ball wasn’t the same. The opponents were finding it increasingly easier to dispossess him in critical moments. There was every chance Argentina could find themselves bogged down by carrying him in another major tournament. It made sense he wasn’t committing to appear at the World Cup just yet. There was tentativeness and unurgency in his responses anytime someone would ask. Many may also have read it as reluctance stemming from exhaustion.Over the 20 odd years that Messi has spent at the highest level, he’s evolved from being a winger to a playmaker to a second striker and in phases even a false 9 with ridiculous scoring potential. The most standout feature on his resume that pretty much exceptionalises him as the greatest ever is each of these iterations individually qualifies among the greatest in that particular role. And it showed on the biggest of stages in the 2022 World Cup where he occupied large parts of the pitch, sprayed the ball in areas few could access, and still managed to sneak through to the spaces he could score from. Entering the tournament in 2026 in his bid to defend the title, it was amply clear that he’d all but run out of the fuel to match those levels. More than any of the opponents, he was set up against his own undeniable physical frailties.Lionel Messi (10) celebrates after scoring the opening goal during the World Cup Group J soccer match between Argentina and Algeria in Kansas City, Mo. on June 16, 2026. Photo: AP/PTI.The economy of movement required to be compensated by handpicking the moments to execute those short bursts of pace, a higher positional awareness, and finding a finishing touch more lethal than he’s ever had to. It took Messi only a game as he demonstrated each of these in what would rank among his greatest World Cup performances in the tournament opener against Algeria.A hat-trick comprising a long-range piledriver, a tap-in off a rebound from an opportune position in the box, and a classic No 9 shot beating the keeper at the near post was the loudest possible announcement of the ruthlessness Messi was going to operate with. From being the engine every forward move went through in 2022, he’d transitioned to being the final attacking outlet this time. And this teaser in the Algeria game proved to be thematic for the few weeks that followed.Unlike in their previous campaign, Argentina of 2026 were a fairly lackadaisical unit built on a midfield that was far from functional. And this turned out to be a major hindrance deeper in the tournament. Game after game, they found themselves in need of a moment of inspiration and invariably there was Messi at the end of it. Be it a corner kick delivered with surgical precision, or a shot taken at half-volley from an awkward angle, or a cross taken off the wrong foot that met Lautaro Martinez at that meticulously measured point beating six England shirts on its way, Messi found in him the capacity to manufacture a moment of magic every time his team desperately clamoured for one.For large parts of the games, he walked, barely trotted along, and remained steadfastly committed to conserving fuel. And that showed in how the moment he switched the hibernation mode off, it instantly spread panic among teams. The Egypt defence in the Round of 16 clash had thoroughly choked him for room every time he had the ball. But their discipline off the ball immediately fell apart once Messi switched to the right flank and started operating as the winger he used to be in his early days at Barcelona. It was one thing to refuse him the space he needed in a vertically progressing game. But he became an impossible menace for them to handle once it came down to cutting back from tight angles and executing those fast runs inside the box. The level of in-game tactical flexibility Messi showed that day has left coaches flummoxed for well over two decades.Of course, this kind of overdependence on a man testing the limits of his body was eventually going to run its course. And Spain ensured it did as they cut Argentina to their size in the final. The modest looking 1-0 scoreline won’t reflect fairly on Spain’s outright domination but Argentina could barely string three passes together and it showed most glaringly in their inability to take a single shot at goal for 90 minutes. Messi himself could barely find a touch inside the box and was left wanting as his teammates got technically outclassed and physically drained. But this humiliation could’ve come way sooner in the tournament for Argentina and got only pushed as far as Messi managed to. His influence on his team’s fortunes is of course reflected in every relevant metric – both the basic and the underlying ones.That he even gets spoken of among the likes of Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland, Vinicius Jr, and Jude Bellingham – players at least a couple generations his junior – today in itself should feel stupefying. But Messi has over the years normalised the impossible to the point, the thought itself feels like an overreach now. Is there anything truly out of the ordinary anymore?The announcement of his retirement from international football last week allowed that discomforting anxiety to creep in again. The career itself had definitely reached the right point to conclude. But what exactly is left of it to write about that may not read painfully dull? Are there words that one may still mine and put together without coming across as stating the most stodgily obvious?Writers of far greater pedigree than this one made an attempt in several publications over the last one week but every single piece read more vapid than the last one. And not necessarily for any shortcoming on part of the writers themselves.The one thing Messi resoundingly eliminated over the years is letting greatness feel momentous. He instead made routines out of it. In the end, shock and awe lost any real meaning for they became way too frequent. In the end, words no longer carried the same effect for they couldn’t be used scarcely enough. In the end, Messi frankly bored us. But not without showing up one last time to remind it was all worth it.Parth Pandya is an Ahmedabad-based freelance sports writer.