Napoleon and his invincible Grande Armee suffered their heaviest defeat in history on the Russian soil and that unsuccessful mission gradually led to his fall and the subsequent exile
Lionel Messi
The heartland of Russia has been traditionally and historically harsh, rude, unpredictable and, often, ruthless to many of the all-conquering commanders from outside. Napoleon and his invincible Grande Armee suffered their heaviest defeat in history on the Russian soil and that unsuccessful mission gradually led to his fall and the subsequent exile. An overambitious Adolf Hitler's extravagant Operation Barbarossa suffered a disastrous fate just outside Moscow and gradually paved the way for the fall of the Third Reich.
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The world's one of the most decorated players, Lionel's Messi quest for the elusive World Cup glory suffered a 'catastrophic' fate inside the Russian territory as well. He might not have faced the unkind winter like his all-conquering predecessors but Messi's Argentina bit the dust in a typical Russian summer.
No poetic justice in Gorky's city
The master inspirer of dreams saw his own ultimate dream of winning the golden silverware being shattered in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. For Messi, it was rather not a poetic justice in the city once named after a legendary Russia poet, novelist and playwright. The city, situated on the banks of Volga, is the birthplace of a certain Alexey Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as literature icon Maxim Gorky. Later, the Communist regime of the erstwhile Soviet Union renamed the city after Gorky from 1932 to 1990.
Hopes shattered in city of hopes
Interestingly, it was in Gorky, which once permanently shut the door for the foreigners during the Soviet era, where former Soviet nuclear physicist-turned-peace activist and a staunch critic of the Soviet regime, Andrei Sakharov was kept in exile since his arrest in 1980. The city which dashed Messi's hopes of bringing back his team to winning ways once germinated new hopes for a better post-Cold War world with a single phone call. Soon after unveiling his path-breaking policies of Perestroika and Glasnost, the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev rang up the phone at Sakharov's non-descript apartment in one of the farthest corners of the city and conveyed the Nobel Peace laureate that he was free. The rest, as they say, is history.
Friendly backdrop, unfriendly opponents
On Thursday, the newly-built Nizhny Novgorod stadium, which is standing on a spit of the Volga and Oka Rivers in the city center and was completed on a war footing at the eleventh hour, had an ideal backdrop for the Albiceleste resurgence. The white, blue and azure colour scheme used to design the stadium, symbolizing the nature of the Volga region and the elements of water and wind, was quite similar to the iconic sky blue and white jersey of the Argentine team. Just about a couple of hundred metres away from the stadium was the imposing Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. But Messi and his boys didn't receive blessings neither from the almighty nor from their opponents, the clinical Croatians.
The Argentine applecart eventually got outpaced and upset in the so-called 'Detroit of Russia' as Messi lost out of steam in the almost make-or-break game. Unless some miracle happens in the last round of games in Group D, Messi is likely to return from Russia, like many in the past, unconquered and fallen.
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