Lionel Scaloni had barely sat down before he admitted the obvious.

Argentina had put its supporters through unnecessary “suffering”. Yet the manager was in no mood to apologise for the chaos. What he had witnessed, he felt, was something larger than a comeback win over Egypt, larger even than qualification. It was proof of the sort of team Argentina is, a side which never gives up.

“We made our people suffer even though we didn’t play a bad game,” Scaloni said after the 3-2 victory. “I am a coach for moments like this. The calibre of what we saw goes beyond just going through (to the quarterfinals). We would have been out if we didn’t fight.”

Scaloni insisted that Argentina had not been as poor as the scoreline at one stage suggested. Egypt, he acknowledged, was “an excellent team” that converted its openings well, but he pointed to the opportunities his own side had created long before the late surge. “We had three or four clear chances and if we had scored, nobody would talk about it. We had to dig in.”

Even when Argentina fell two goals behind, the chief coach never felt that the game had escaped it completely. “You feel concerned when you are not in control, but today we were. I saw the game going our way as we created chances.” It was, in effect, an argument that Argentina’s tough times came not from inferiority but from wastefulness.

The emotional centre of Scaloni’s night was Lionel Messi. The captain failed to convert a penalty and looked, for a while, like the tragic figure in Argentina’s elimination story. But he then became one of the authors of its rescue. “Messi is a role model for all the players,” Scaloni said. “He missed a penalty, but he still asks for the ball and goes on and on.”

He stopped short of placing the “epic” night alongside the World Cup final in Qatar but suggested that it belonged to the same emotional universe. Messi, he said, “lives football for moments like this”, and Argentina wanted him to keep enjoying them while he still could.

But Scaloni was careful not to let the story become only about him or his captain. “It’s useless to say we win because of my actions. We have these great players, and you use them when you need them. That’s not genius. The players are making the difference”.