Emiliano Martínez thinks Argentina would beat Spain if they played today. He said it himself: "I feel that if we played against them today, we would beat them." He's a brilliant goalkeeper and a serial winner, and on this one he's dead wrong.
Start with what actually happened in East Rutherford on July 19. Argentina didn't manage a single shot across the 90 minutes of regulation. Not one. Spain had the ball most of the night, piled up chances, and the only reason the score stayed close until extra time was the man now doing the talking. Ferran Torres settled it in the 106th minute, off a Nico Williams pass, and Spain were world champions for the second time. Argentina spent two hours pinned inside its own penalty area. Swagger doesn't erase that.
Spain didn't just win the tournament, they barely let anyone touch them. They conceded one goal the entire competition, the fewest ever for a champion, and became only the fourth World Cup winner never to trail at any point. You don't walk off a performance where you couldn't create a single opening and announce you'd win the rematch. It's a goalkeeper mistaking his own highlight reel for the team's performance.
Martínez's night really was extraordinary: his 11 saves broke the previous record for a World Cup final, and he did it carrying a fractured ring finger he'd dragged all the way from the Europa League final. He has every right to be proud of that. What he doesn't get to do is take 11 personal saves and launder them into "we'd beat them." The saves are the evidence Argentina got dominated. If you're making that many stops in a final, your team is drowning.
He made a better version of this argument himself, about the shootout. Martínez also said, "If we had reached penalties, we would have won, I felt it was my day." Fine. Penalties are a coin flip and he's one of the best flippers alive. Argue that all you want. But a shootout never arrived, and "we'd beat Spain today" is a different, far bigger claim about open play, and open play is exactly where Argentina had nothing.
Yes, the night was a mess for them. They lost both starting center-backs in the final, Lisandro Martínez before the break and Cristian Romero after 70 minutes, and Enzo Fernández got sent off for a second yellow in the 93rd minute. Months later Messi admitted the semifinal against England had left them "running on fumes." All true, and all reasons they were depleted, but none of it supports the fantasy: Spain was strangling a full-strength Argentina long before the injuries and the red card ever mattered.
Back in March, before any of this, Martínez reportedly said of a scrapped Spain match, "Good thing it wasn't played... If we played like that, we would have lost." He was right then, and he got the proof in July. The rematch he's dreaming of already happened, and he spent it making saves.
