World Cup semi-final: England v Argentina, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, Wednesday, 8pm Irish time – Live on RTÉ 2 & BBC OneOn Wednesday night, the children of the 21st century get their first experience of one of the historic World Cup classics. England and Argentina – fear and loathing, hatred and envy, fire and fury, magic and madness.The bookmakers have England as slight favourites – why? Maybe this reflects a flood of patriotic bets from England. Or maybe it shows how we cannot resist thinking about football in the most simplistic terms.Joe Cole summed up this line-of-thought as well as anyone on Gary Lineker’s Netflix show, when he said: “We’ve got too much pace for Argentina . . . and we’re gonna beat them. I feel it in my bones.”England clearly do have more pace and power than Argentina. There is nobody remotely like Jude Bellingham in the Argentina team. They don’t have a fast winger like Anthony Gordon, they don’t have midfield warriors like Elliot Anderson or Declan Rice . . . and therefore . . . England should win?How do we keep forgetting that a football match is not a race? (And that even a race is not always to the swift . . .)Yes, England have the speed and the strength . . . but Argentina have Messi! France were the stronger and faster team in the last World Cup final but it was Messi that made the difference.Declan Rice (left) has not been at his best at the World Cup, but Jude Bellingham (second from left) has been outstanding for England. Photograph: Richard Pelham/Getty Images And are we at risk of overstating England’s physical advantage? On paper, they had more pace and power than Norway, but it wasn’t much in evidence in Miami on Saturday night. Clearly, Rice is a horse of a man. But the Rice we have been seeing in the World Cup is not the Rice who stars in a current L’Oreal body spray ad, gazing admiringly and almost curiously at his own rippling torso, like an alien inhabiting an earthling avatar for the first time. The actual Rice of the World Cup has been reduced by injury and illness and pain. How much of the English power and pace is currently theoretical?England’s centre backs, John Stones and Marc Guéhi, are not renowned for power and pace – and both have struggled for full fitness. Reece James certainly has pace and power but we know his hamstring could disintegrate at any moment. Noni Madueke was picked for pace and power against Norway and hardly managed to control a single ball in the 45 minutes he spent on the field. Even half-fit Bukayo Saka was much more dangerous.Bellingham is fully fit and in magnificent form: he will be the player Argentina most fear. But Argentina, for all their manifest vulnerabilities, have also shown they have ways of figuring games out.Lip-readers decoded the footage of a discussion between manager Lionel Scaloni and midfielder Leandro Paredes which took place at 1-1 during the Argentina-Switzerland game. Paredes was explaining that the Swiss centre forward kept forcing him to go to the right, making it impossible for him to control the centre of the field. Scaloni asked him what he needed. They agreed he would put Nicolas Otamendi on to deal with the Swiss forward and free up Paredes.Do the England players have this kind of two-way discussion with Thomas Tuchel? It doesn’t seem like it. At half-time in Miami on Saturday night, Bellingham came off the field having scored one brilliant goal and set up another that was disallowed for offside in the last three minutes of play.Tuchel chose that moment to tell him: Okay Jude, now you’re moving to left eight, Elliot, you’re six. Realising some minutes later that he had made a mistake, the England manager announced: Jude, you’re back to right ten, Reece you’re in at six. Elliot, back to left eight.England manager Thomas Tuchel issues instructions to Jude Bellingham during England's World Cup round-of-32 win against DR Congo. Photograph: Michael Reaves/Getty Images Tuchel was doing what he felt the team required, but Bellingham was understandably seething at being moved out of the position in which he had just done so much damage. This frustration surely played into the shots he fired across Tuchel’s bow in the post-match interviews.With Tuchel, you get the sense of the coach moving players around his chessboard to find solutions – and making it look more difficult than it perhaps should be, given that the obvious solution for England is always: get Harry in the box and Jude running in there and get some crosses in.With Argentina, you see players and coaches collectively finding solutions to the problems they face. And this team is led by the greatest problem solver in the history of the game.Against Egypt, Lionel Messi went out to the right when Argentina were facing elimination and humiliation at 2-0 down, not because Scaloni had told him to go there but because he felt in that moment that was where Argentina needed him to be.No coach has told Messi what to do since Pep Guardiola at Barcelona when Messi was in his early 20s, and even Pep had to stop doing it after a couple of years. Any coach since then who has tried to give him instructions has not lasted long. Suggesting to Messi what he ought to be doing out on the field is a bit like leaning over Leonardo’s shoulder and telling him, “this is good, but she’d look prettier if you had her smiling a bit more”.By Messi’s standards, his performance against Switzerland was a no-show. Has the 39-year-old finally run out of energy in the last week of five?Somehow, you are reluctant to bet against him finding a little bit more in the tank.World Cup Wallchart