{"id":1852,"date":"2014-07-14T10:42:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T14:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/?p=1852"},"modified":"2014-07-14T10:42:55","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T14:42:55","slug":"maradonna-calls-messis-winning-of-golden-ball-a-marketing-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/2014\/07\/14\/maradonna-calls-messis-winning-of-golden-ball-a-marketing-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Maradonna calls Messi’s winning of golden ball a “marketing plan”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lionelmesi\"
\nTake issue with Lionel Messi winning the World Cup’s Golden Ball? You are not alone.<\/p>\n

Messi was awarded the Golden Ball, which gole to the World Cup’s best player, following Argentina’s loss to Germany. While Messi scored four goals in seven games, some feel he was not as strong in the later stages of the World Cup and in Sunday’s loss to Germany was no where to be seen.<\/p>\n

\u201cMessi? I would give him heaven if possible,\u201d said Argentina soccer legend Diego Maradonna, via the Guardian<\/a>. \u201cBut it\u2019s not right when someone wins something that he shouldn\u2019t have won just because of some marketing plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

For what it is worth, Messi down played winning the award.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now I don\u2019t care about the prize. I don\u2019t care about anything. I wanted to take Argentina to the World Cup for all the people,\u201d Messi told Spanish newspaper AS.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe deserved it a bit more after the game we played. It\u2019s very painful to lose the way we did because we were near penalties.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe this World Cup deserved another final because we had chances. We reached the final, while other Argentinians didn\u2019t get past the quarter-finals. But we\u2019re disappointed not to have won this game. There\u2019s a lot of anger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take issue with Lionel Messi winning the World Cup’s Golden Ball? You are not alone. Messi was awarded the Golden Ball, which gole to the World Cup’s best player, following Argentina’s loss to Germany. While Messi scored four goals in seven games, some feel he was not as strong in the later stages of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[105,128],"coauthors":[3],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-front","tag-lionel-messi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1854,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions\/1854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/backpage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}