No fist pump­ing. No face-con­tort­ed, tri­umphal­ist screaming.
When the penal­ty kick sealed the dream, Lionel Mes­si looked up, raised his arms, fell to his knees and was swamped by his team mates. When they final­ly untan­gled, he salut­ed the rap­tur­ous Argen­tin­ian fans with open arms and his sig­na­ture boy­ish smile: a les­son in class for the many who lack it, in sport and elsewhere.

There will always be debate over whether Mes­si is the great­est foot­baller ever. But I doubt there can be any­thing but admi­ra­tion for the exam­ple he set in the moment when he had every right to cel­e­brate any way he chose.
Think of it this way: Who would you rather have your kids look up to and aspire to emu­late, Mes­si, or bling-draped semi-lit­er­ates who seem to think their prowess in a sport grants them the right to grandiose self-pro­mo­tion and immu­ni­ty from manners?
Par­ents might give some thought about whose exam­ple to fol­low, too.
It’s rare to see Mes­si in a referee’s face, even when he is marked, harassed and fouled by less­er play­ers who are assigned to do just that – usu­al­ly in vain – to counter his con­sum­mate skills.
Square that with a report that ref­er­ee abuse by par­ents in the U.S., has reached the point where youth sports has been labelled  “a caul­dron of yelling and hys­te­ria” ‚which 80 per­cent of ref­er­ees quit with­in two years.
Every­one wants to win. It’s why we com­pete. Every­one would like their child to win.
Young would-be ath­letes tend to find the old adage “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” hard to swal­low, but it’s part of the learn­ing process. 
It’s the dif­fer­ence between class, and crass.
At the world cup, the for­mer in the form of Mes­si dom­i­nat­ed on the field, the lat­ter pre­dom­i­nat­ed in the “VVIP” box.

                           THE VERY, VERY NOT SO VERY         

Chief among the self-des­ig­nat­ed “Very Very Impor­tant Per­sons” were the hosts, who didn’t quite grasp the dress code for football’s great­est cel­e­bra­tion.  Has­san Al Thawa­di, sec­re­tary gen­er­al of Qatar’s tour­na­ment organ­is­ing com­mittee, said the black silk robe, called a bisht, draped over Mes­si when he accept­ed the cup was “a dress for an offi­cial occa­sion and worn for cel­e­bra­tions.” Sor­ry to let you down, sheikh, but the icon­ic garb in this cel­e­bra­tion was the sweat-soaked blue and white-striped Argen­tin­ian shirt you cov­ered up.
But then, for guid­ance you had FIFA boss Gian­ni Infan­ti­no, who per­son­i­fies VVIP, if the “I” stands for “Igno­rant”. If that seems over­ly judge­men­tal, con­sid­er this ram­bling non­sense from the man who said being teased for hav­ing gin­ger hair taught him about the pain of dis­crim­i­na­tion: “Today, I feel Qatari. Today, I feel gay. Today, I feel dis­abled. Today, I feel like a migrant worker.”

                          LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD?

Also in the VVIP pond were the likes of Jared Kush­n­er (enough said, I think), and a Turk­ish so-called “celebri­ty chef” who pushed onto the field to grab Mes­si for a hand­shake. The Argen­tin­ian celebri­ty, who earned the sobri­quet, could rea­son­ably have pushed the nui­sance off. Instead, the chef got enough time to get a quick self­ie for his social media ego trip page.
It could be argued that social media is, if not classy, an elim­i­na­tor of class in the social hier­ar­chy sense. It lev­els the play­ing field, if you will. That didn’t keep Twit­ter own­er Elon Musk from hob-knob­bing with the great and the greedy in the VVIP box, however.
The jour­nal­is­tic beat­ing of breasts and rend­ing of gar­ments over what Musk is doing to the social media plat­form was enough to make those of us who aren’t now and nev­er have been Twit­ter account hold­ers, think the world as we don’t know it was about to end. But then, if your world view is lim­it­ed to what you see on social media, maybe the abyss does loom.
One piece cas­ti­gat­ed Musk for “Assum­ing his new toy was a tech­nol­o­gy company.”
Appar­ent­ly, the site “has always been a con­ver­sa­tion with seem­ing­ly every­one in it — which is the very rea­son every­one has felt they have to be in it.”
Well, not quite every­one. “Only 23 per­cent of Amer­i­cans, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly pro­gres­sives, use Twit­ter, and 25 per­cent of the 23 per­cent gen­er­ate 97 per­cent of the tweets.”
Nonethe­less, even the BBC – which pro­motes itself (cor­rect­ly in my view) as “the world’s radio sta­tion” — feels con­strained to use up air time by read­ing out tweets from lis­ten­ers that rarely clear the bar of mun­dane. Add in the dumb­ing down and poor grammar they and oth­er news net­works allow, and we have yet anoth­er exam­ple of lack of class in the exem­plary sense.
The net result of all that is messy.
How much bet­ter it would be if it was a bit more…Messi.

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