La Pulga secured his place at the absolute pinnacle of football history, netting a spectacular brace to fire Argentina to a 2-0 victory over Austria and become the all-time leading scorer in FIFA World Cup\u2122 history. The legendary Argentine maestro has now amassed 18 goals across his World Cup career\u2014building on a sensational hat-trick in the tournament opener against Algeria\u2014to officially surpass Miroslav Klose\u2019s previous record of 16 goals.<\/p>\n
The historic breakthrough at Dallas Stadium did not come without drama as Messi saw an early penalty saved. However, the Argentine captain refused to be denied, opening the scoring by smoothly stroking the ball into the bottom corner after capitalising on a clever dummy by Thiago Almada that allowed Facundo Medina\u2019s pass to find him in the box. Deep into stoppage time, Messi struck again to put the game to bed, securing a thrilling victory for La Albiceleste.<\/p>\n
This dynamic double catapulted Messi to the top of this tournament\u2019s Golden Boot standings and safely guided Lionel Scaloni\u2019s defending champions out of Group J and into the Round of 32.<\/p>\n
Adding to the magic of the occasion, Messi\u2019s historic feat occurred exactly on the 40th anniversary of Diego Maradona\u2019s legendary \u2018Goal of the Century\u2019 against England.<\/p>\n
As he has done in seven of Argentina\u2019s last nine World Cup appearances, Lionel Messi proved to be the ultimate difference-maker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
La Pulga secured his place at the absolute pinnacle of football history, netting a spectacular brace to fire Argentina to a 2-0 victory over Austria and become the all-time leading scorer in FIFA World Cup\u2122 history. The legendary Argentine maestro has now amassed 18 goals across his World Cup career\u2014building on a sensational hat-trick in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25139,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25135\/revisions\/25139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressreleasenetwork.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}