Franca learnt to speak English from watching Sesame Street. Later Franca worked as a volunteer in a school tuckshop with a woman called Eileen. One day, Eileen asked Franca if she followed footy. When Franca said, “I don’t understand it”, Eileen, a Collingwood supporter, explained the game to her. Franca became a Collingwood supporter. Recently, when she was unwell, I ran into Nathan Buckley who, at my request, wrote Franca a note wishing her a return to good health. It’s framed and on the kitchen wall now.

Nico, her son, is 29 now and a big Magpie fan. A gentle, serious man, he is also an ardent Socceroos fan. I watched last Monday’s World Cup final with the Villarubias and I could see from the way Nico’s big shoulders quivered with excitement and apprehension, how much the game meant to him. His girlfriend Laura wore a Messi No. 10 Argentinian shirt in support.  A few hours after the World Cup ended, I got an email from Nico:  “Heartache has now sunk in ... I dreamt of Messi lifting the World Cup. I think that hope has now been extinguished.”

The sense of drama that imbues a World Cup final comes precisely from the fact that it is a world title. It’s a distinction, a sense of honour, that boxing shared in the days when there were undisputed world champions. The winner is the best in the world. No one stands above them. They’re human but, in their area, they are superior to any other human being on the planet. That was the stage Lionel Messi stepped onto these past few weeks.

There is such a thing as sporting immortality and Messi was playing for it. There was a moment, near the end of extra-time of the final with his team trailing 1-0, when Messi had a free kick from outside the penalty box and his shot went high and wide. Messi smiled ruefully. It was as if he knew at that moment what his fate was to be. He was never going to be seen as Maradona’s peer, not around the world and, maybe more importantly, not in their homeland of Argentina.

Diego Maradona said the Golden Ball award for the best player of the tournament was only given to Messi for marketing reasons. It reads like a slight, and was reported in some places as such, but when I read Maradona’s comments I got the feeling he was speaking out of sympathy for Messi, that he shouldn’t have been used in that way, as a talisman of the tournament. Not at that moment. It just added to the unwelcome focus being fixed upon him as a player.

Franca Villarubia’s good heart has been upset by some of the things written by Argentine fans on Facebook about Messi since the loss. There’s a novel in Messi, the player with the ambiguous relationship with the land of his birth, in this World Cup. Because he failed to provide the final scene that everyone in the world could imagine, he will be deemed by some as a failure, but I thought he was a commanding player throughout the tournament. Every time he got the ball he engendered a sense of the possible.

His father said that by the concluding stages of the tournament he was exhausted and his legs were heavy. In the final, he watched a lot of the game pass him in both directions. He played like someone who knows he has less energy in his legs than he needs and has to time his runs, wasting nothing. He was still a major figure in the match, possibly the major figure. I never had the sense he dropped out of the game. He just had to wait, like a hunter. I also thought Messi’s brief summary of the game was correct – “they had more of the ball, we had the better chances”.

The World Cup absorbed me. I was interested to see how I would find AFL footy when I returned to it. I haven’t been disappointed. The game is vibrantly alive, gloriously active - each moment, players are being taken to athletic extremes. But Australian football is engaged in a battle for survival with the two rugby codes and soccer. To some extent, it is soccer versus the rest. Soccer’s popularity is such that it is becoming a new universal language.

The AFL club which is the canary in the mine as far as the future of the game is concerned are the Brisbane Lions. They share their home town with highly successful and well-entrenched examples of the other three codes – rugby league’s the Broncos, rugby union’s Queensland Reds and reigning A-league premier Brisbane Roar.

What struck me coming back from watching the World Cup is that Australian football is a world-class game. It is the duty of its administrators to ensure it remains one. Meanwhile, I’ll be returning to the Villarubias to watch a Collingwood game.