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Argentina and Austria face off this Monday at the AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Texas, in the second round of Group J of the , with the group leadership and early qualification for the Round of 16 at stake for both unbeaten teams.
The match is scheduled for 1:00 PM Cuba time (12:00 PM local time) and will be the first encounter between these two nations in World Cup history, although the only previous matches between them —two friendlies held in Austria— favor the Albiceleste: a decisive 5-1 victory in Vienna in 1980 and a 1-1 draw a decade later.
That encounter in 1980 is etched in the memory of world football because it was the only time that Diego Armando Maradona scored a hat-trick with the Argentina senior national team.
The Albiceleste enters the match in exceptional form: eight consecutive victories across all competitions, with 24 goals scored and only one conceded, a streak they haven't achieved since the period between November 2015 and June 2016.
The engine behind this overwhelming start is Lionel Messi. In the debut against Algeria, the captain scored the 61st hat-trick of his professional career —50 with clubs and 11 with the national team— and reached 16 goals in World Cups, equaling the all-time record of Miroslav Klose as the top scorer in the competition.
If the player from Rosario scores again against Austria, he will become only the third footballer to score in six consecutive World Cup matches, a list that includes only the Frenchman Just Fontaine (1958) and the Brazilian Jairzinho (1970).
Argentina also has a strong track record against European rivals in the group stage: it has only lost one of its last eight World Cup matches against teams from the Old Continent, a 3-0 defeat to Croatia in Russia 2018.
Austria, however, does not enter the match as a mere participant. The team led by Ralf Rangnick defeated Jordan 3-1 in the first round, marking their first victory in a World Cup since Italy 1990, and returns to the tournament after a 28-year absence since France 1998.
One of the Central European team's strengths is their effectiveness in set pieces: seven of their last ten World Cup goals came from strategic plays, including corners, penalties, and free kicks.
Another distinctive feature is its tendency to grow over the course of the minutes: 15 of their last 17 goals in World Cups were scored in the second half.
The match also has a personal incentive for Marcel Sabitzer: if he plays, he will reach 100 international caps with Austria, equaling Aleksandar Dragović as the fourth player with the most appearances in the country's history, trailing only David Alaba, Andreas Herzog, and Marko Arnautović.
The calculations are clear for both sides: an Argentine victory mathematically secures their ticket to the knockout stage and could even guarantee the top spot in the group, depending on the result of the other match of the day between Jordan and Algeria, scheduled for 11:00 PM Cuban time at Levi's Stadium.
Austria, for its part, would also secure its qualification with a victory and would position itself to take the lead in Group J, a feat that few imagined before the start of the tournament.
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