That there are Argentines beginning to demand that Maradona is brought back as national coach while at the same blaming Messi for the failures of the nation’s team says something about a country, and a lot about a club.
Maradona was once probably the best player in the history of football but it’s also true that his personal and professional decline as a player began after the World Cup in Mexico 1986, and that in South Africa 2010 this overweight drug addict was entertaining as a coach but a disaster in tactical and strategic terms.
But Maradona was mythologized long ago, and came to represent the psychological and collective subconscious of a nation- the same country that proclaimed the macho gaucho Martin Fierro a literary hero and Cristina Fernandez a great and noble leader, just as Evita Peron was in her time. Messi was not born in the slums of Villa Fiorito nor was he nourished as a young player by the hooligans of Boca Juniors. He was sent to Barcelona as a young boy and decided to fix his residence and his footballing soul there. This was seen and continues be seen as treason by some Argentines. Diego also spent seasons in the Camp Nou, in Napoli, and in Sevilla but he always sweated the shirt, not like Messi who seems someone else when he plays for Argentina. This view, held by Argentines , is a false one, or at least is one of self-denial, since it is not Messi who is to blame but his national team and the conspiracy that surrounds it.
Messi plays better for Barça because he has a ‘Míster’ (Guardiola) who understands him better than anyone, and a team with which he is totally integrated, in its system of play and its solidarity, and because culés (the club fans) couldn’t care a toss that he is not charismatic outside the stadium, and the Spanish media values him.
Let me give as an example the commentary in today’s El Pais newspaper by the excellent Ramon Besa (one of the best writers on FC Barcelona that I know). Besa writes: “The Barça game consists in getting the ball to Messi in the best condition. Argentina, by contrast, doesn’t know how to give him the ball because it thinks that his boot is tied to the ball. And because he doesn’t speak, nor can count on his own fan club because he left his country when he was thirteen, nor has he got a press (in Argentina) who writes favorably about him, he is a victim of silence.”
