Messi the Child
For me there are two enduring images from the Nou Camp last night. Lionel Messi returning from one of his goals, smiling and shaking his head from side to side and Lionel Messi, when the game was over, clutching the ball in his hands, another huge smile on his face, while surrounded by his similarly joyful team mates.
Pace, strength, control, vision all contributed to Messi’s four goals, but so did the spirit of this little big man who plays his best football when he enjoys it, like a child his favourite toy. In Messi’s presence, the gravity of Wenger and Pep Guardiola seemed almost out of place, the suffering of the labouring, outgunned Gunners all the more striking.
Messi was confirmed as the (current) World’s best player, but has he surpassed Maradona? Diego was always at his happiest on his pitch, making up for the demons that encroached upon him off it. He could also inspire a whole team while single-handedly defining the character and outcome of a match. But he did all this when he was older than Messi is.
Mercifully, Messi’s young adult hood has not been tainted by drugs and other excesses (the only exception a period of wild partying with Deco and Ronaldinho in the pre-Guardiola era.) When Messi is at the top of his form as he was last night, Barca is poetry in motion and also a team in which everyone is inspired to win back the ball. And yet Messi’s greatness will be tested this summer when, with Maradona as his coach, he will need to prove that he can inspire Argentina just as Diego did in Mexico 1986.
But there is a while to go before South Africa and an old ghost from Maradona’s past haunts Messi’s path to glory: that of Andoni Goikoetxea. It was in September 1983 that Goikoetxea, the Atletico de Bilbao defender caught Maradona from behind and hacked him with one of most brutal fouls in footballing history. No matter that Cesar Menotti, the Argentine Barca coach at the time, accused the Basque of belonging to a ‘race of anti-footballers.’ The result was that Maradona suffered a severe injury to his left ankle tendons and was unable to play for another three months.
Against Real Madrid this coming weekend, and later this month against Mourinho’s Inter, Messi will face tougher opposition than Arsenal, with players not only capable of ending his season, but happy to do so, for the sake of victory. Never has the child Messi looked so vulnerable in an adult world.
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