Dreams can endure only so long before they are overwhelmed by reality – and there are few realities quite so brutally uncompromising as the pace and finishing of Kylian Mbappé, who scored twice and won a penalty in France’s 4-3 win.

After a grim trudge through the group stage, France, finally, are off and running and looking like potential champions. They will meet Uruguay in the last eight. Lionel Messi, for all the hopes freighting his slight frame, will not be winning the World Cup this time.

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Quite how Argentina have ended up as this strange botch-job of parts that do not quite fit together, bound by nothing more than the magic of Messi, is a question that cannot straightforwardly be answered. But the fact is they are and, as such, they were never likely to survive a meeting with a side that looked into their eyes and were not cowed by their self-romanticising will to progress.

That will, though, remains ferociously strong. It was embodied by Javier Mascherano who, at 34, announced his international retirement after the game. As Jorge Sampaoli kept reiterating, Argentina fought and fought and fought. Until the midpoint of the second half, when France opened up a two-goal lead, the game was underpinned by the question of how Didier Deschamps’ team did not already have it won.

There had been talk of Argentina conjuring a repeat of 1990 when defeat by Cameroon inspired a defiant spirit that carried them to the final and, in some of their cruder challenges, it felt they might be following that template rather too closely. But the difference between then and now is that team could actually defend; this side can merely struggle.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lionel Messi and his teammates look dejected after the match. Photograph: Michael Dalder/Reuters

The deployment of Messi as a false nine as Sampaoli – or whichever cabal of senior players picks the side these days – opted for a fourth different formation in four games, served only to deny the wide men a target when they got the ball in crossing positions. Certainly it did nothing to add a defensive stability. “We tried many different tactics, surrounding him, creating situations for Messi,” said Sampaoli. “We tried to use everything we had to allow him to do what he can do. Sometimes we managed to do so, sometimes we didn’t.”

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Well, perhaps. It is all very well to play, as the coach promised they would, with a knife between their teeth, but only if you can actually catch your opponents to use it. Argentina’s lack of pace is a problem that will never easily be resolved, and certainly not by playing the sort of high line they attempted early on. Perhaps Deschamps’ France have become a fluent attacking unit; perhaps Argentina just made them appear so.

Mbappé’s pace terrified Argentina, provoking the 13th-minute penalty from which Antoine Griezmann opened the scoring. There was something of the Brazilian Ronaldo about his surge, a comparison acknowledged by Deschamps. “Ronaldo was very, very quick,” he said. “But I think Kylian is even quicker.”

Quite why Argentina had tried to play so high, against such pace, with such slow defenders, was mystifying but that divergence between Sampaoli’s instincts and his resources is an issue he has never quite reconciled. He was reluctant to accept the excuse but it cannot help that he took over the side only last June. “We adapted to necessity, maybe,” said the coach, speaking of his reign as a whole, “rather than having a clear identity. We had a clear need, and we had to win. That was our main goal, so that was maybe stronger than our football concept.”

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Yet for all their flaws, Argentina were level at half-time, Ángel Di María scoring with a 30-yard drive. Having scored one brilliant goal, Argentina, as they had against Nigeria, then added a second with the least implausible body part available to them, as Messi’s ball back into the middle was deflected in by the left foot of Gabriel Mercado. Could they cling on? They could not, and did not even come close.

It took only nine minutes for Benjamin Pavard to conjure a goal the equal of Di María’s, cuffing a volley from the edge of the box into the top corner. Then it was Mbappé’s time, with two goals in four minutes around the midpoint of the half, a neat turn and finish and then a slick breakaway. At 19 he is already a wonderfully efficient footballer, the first teenager to score two goals in a World Cup knockout tie since Pelé in 1958.

Yet still Argentina were not quite finished, Sergio Agüero heading in a late third. From the grave, the hand thrust up through the soil but it got no further. Argentina, at last, were done.

France have been criticised for their ungainliness and caution, for being too much about substance and not enough about style. On the day Deschamps became the longest serving manager in France’s history, he could perhaps reflect that a little planning and a little stodge goes a lot further than a slow and shambolic defence and a nostalgic faith in a bastard spirit.