‘A really beautiful moment’ – Messipublished at 07:14 BST<\/p>\n
07:14 BST<\/p>\n
Argentina 3-0 Algeria<\/p>\n
Twenty years ago to the day after Lionel Messi’s World Cup debut as an 18-year-old at Germany 2006, one of the game’s greatest superstars looked as sharp as ever in delivering another spectacular performance on his 200th appearance for his country.<\/p>\n
“To enjoy this with my family, with my team-mates, the ones who are always there, is a really beautiful moment,” said the 38-year-old Inter Miami forward after scoring all the goals in Argentina’s opening 3-0 win over Algeria in Kansas City.<\/p>\n
“The squad, it’s a very united, very strong group. I feel good; we were lucky enough to win a tough match. It’s important to start off with a win in the first game.<\/p>\n
“I’m grateful to the fans, because once again they’ve shown that Argentina is crazy about this – we packed the stadium again.”<\/p>\n
Media caption, <\/p>\n
Messi scores hat-trick to equal Klose scoring record<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘A really beautiful moment’ – Messipublished at 07:14 BST 07:14 BST Argentina 3-0 Algeria Twenty years ago to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-643108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}