What’s the matter?
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Look, I’ve had a confrontation over this boy, Messi, and I believe that Argentina could end up losing a great deal in this situation.
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Let me go and talk with Tocalli.
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It might be worth taking the kid training with us, he said. The national side would often bring the youths along to train so they became accustomed to the dynamic that they would encounter later in their careers.
A bit later, Hugo Tocalli received ‘advice’ from those above him in the federation that he should have a look at the tapes. And act upon what he saw.
Tocalli was just about to leave for Finland to take part in the Under 17 World Championships with some of the players who would later win the Under 20 World Championships (Biglia, Ustari, Garay). He had a look at the tape. ‘The video was only five or six plays on synthetic pitches and you could see that he was a special boy with a tremendous change of rhythm and the ball stuck to his body. He went from zero to 100 metres in three seconds. I was surprised by the way he took off,’ remembers Tocalli.
Tocalli called the Argentinian coach José Pekerman, at that time sporting director of Leganés in Spain, and asked him for information about Leo. ‘A genius,’ was the answer. At the same time Tocalli met up with Julio Grondona, the president of the AFA, to whom they had already spoken about the boy. It wasn’t necessary to call Leo along to train with Bielsa’s side. Grondona and Tocalli decided to organise immediately two friendly internationals, against Paraguay and Uruguay, so he could put on the Argentina shirt, both matches with international referees, so that they could sign an official form that would then be sent to FIFA, thereby preventing Spain from taking Messi from them. They had to make discreet and urgent contact with the Messis.
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Right, lads, you find a place for him or I will, but one way or another we are going to sort this out, said Grondona.
An administrator at the AFA started to look for Jorge Messi’s telephone number. He tried ten numbers before he got the right one.
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Are you Jorge Messi, Leo’s father?
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Yes, that’s right.
Found him. Tocalli spoke with his father, and then with Leo. They both said yes in seconds; there was no question, Leo wanted to play with Argentina. Thanks for the call, you have made us very happy. Tocalli explained that he couldn’t call him up for the 2003 Under 17 tournament because he had already named his squad, but that he could count on playing for the Under 20s very soon.
Leo wrote about the episode in a letter to a friend on 17 November 2003: ‘Hi, Fabi. I’m writing to you because I told you when I heard from the national side I would let you know. A couple of hours ago, Tocalli called me and my old man and he congratulated me for everything that had happened so far and that they were going to call me up for training with the kids from the ’85 and ’84 generation. For the next South American tournament. He told my dad that he had seen many videos of me but he hadn’t called me for the Under 17 World Cup because he thought I was too small (so he said). But he said that he saw me recently and now he thinks I’m okay. Okay, Fabi, I send you a big kiss. Ciao.’
In the Finland Under 17 tournament, which took place in August 2003, Argentina lost in the semi-finals to Spain, for whom Leo’s team-mates in the junior Barcelona side were playing, with Fàbregas scoring twice in a 3–2 win. The two sides were sharing a hotel and after the match Tocalli asked Cesc about the ‘dwarf’. ‘Leo? He’s a monster. Extraordinary. They wanted to put him in our side,’ said the Catalan midfielder. ‘If he had played today, you would have scored loads of goals against us and come out as champions. We wanted him to play for Spain, but he says he wants to go with you.’
Claudio Vivas never mentioned anything to Leo about his battle, the video, the doubts. He didn’t think it was right to. Messi, Vivas believes, would have played for the national side, sooner or later. Maybe it would have been delayed a bit, but …
He would never have looked good in a Spanish shirt … or happy.
‘Hello, Fabi, how are you? Well, I’m writing to you to answer all you asked me. The truth is at first I was very happy, appearing in the paper and having the radio call me. But now they’re breaking my balls. I can’t wait for when all this is over and they’re not talking about me all the time. Anyway as far as this dressing room is concerned, I can tell you that everything is really “super-cool” and I have loads of things to tell you, but I’ll tell you them when I’m over. I’ll explain how everything has gone, step by step. I think everything has gone really well, but now I’m thinking about the next match on Saturday, hoping that I play well and we win. That’s what my old man and Coloma tell me.’
(Email sent by Lionel Messi after his debut for Barcelona against Oporto, dated 20 November 2003)
He was coping with a season in which he was achieving all his objectives well ahead of schedule. He made his debut for the Barcelona first team after changing his levels no fewer than five times. He was called up by the Argentina national squad for a couple of friendlies. And he was making friends in Barcelona, if only a few.
The 17-year-old Leo travelled to Buenos Aires a week before the first friendly, against Paraguay, and was presented to the group before the first training session.
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Lads, this is Lionel Messi who has come over from Barcelona, said Tocalli.
Leo stood to one side, head bowed.
This is how Pablo Zabaleta remembers it: ‘We started to warm up, a little game on a small pitch and you could see it. This bloke is different.’ The truth is, Leo was skinning all of them. ‘In the first session he left us all with our jaws dropping. With his change of pace he left all of us defenders nailed to the floor.’
Leo was one of only two foreigners in the group along with Mauro Andrés Zanotti, who played with Ternara in Italy. And just as with that first trial organised by Charly Rexach, his team-mates were a couple of years older than him. In addition to Zabaleta, in a team hastily thrown together so that he could put on the Argentina shirt, there were also Ezequiel Lavezzi from Estudiantes of Buenos Aires and recently signed by Genoa, and Ezequiel Garay. The players had no inkling of the reason for the friendlies.
‘When he walked on for the warm-up, he did so with the usual humility that characterises him,’ says Gerardo Salorio, the team’s physical coach known as ‘the Professor’. ‘And the first thing I said to him was: “if you want to play here the first thing you’re going to have to do is take off your ring and get your hair cut, maestro.” He half looked at me … he didn’t say anything.’ At that time Salorio was working with the senior teams and was asked to help out with the new technical staff of the Under 20 side. He wanted to set the ground rules from the first day, what he called bajado de linea duradura, which effectively translates as ‘my way or the highway’. Leo was irritated.
‘I went in too hard, as if they were senior players. I shouldn’t have,’ Salorio remembers now. ‘A few minutes later, I looked at him and said in front of the whole group: “Leo, I need to apologise to you in front of everyone, I went too far with you, I was out of order. I shouldn’t have done it, you didn’t know the rules, I apologise in front of everyone.” And then he looked at me and smiled as if to say: “he’s human, this bloke.” And that was my first meeting with him. He isn’t one to talk much.’
The 29th of June, the day of the friendly against Paraguay, arrived. It was a cold night at the recently revamped Argentina Juniors stadium, renamed the Diego Maradona after the famous number 10 who had made his debut there in 1976 against Talleres. The admission charge for the game, of little interest to fans, was a newspaper, and it would finish up at the Garrahan Children’s Hospital that was collecting paper to raise funds. Only 300 people were present to see Messi’s debut.
‘Now, you would think that the whole world was at the stadium that night if you believe everybody who says they were there,’ says Salorio.
Argentina�
��s starting line-up was:
Nereo Champagne; Ricardo Villalba, Ezequiel Garay, Lautaro Formica; Pablo Zabaleta, René Lima, Juan Manuel Torres, Matías Abelairas; Pablo Barrientos; Pablo Vitti, Ezequiel Lavezzi.
Manager: Hugo Tocalli.
Before the game it started to drizzle and in the first half Argentina were an overwhelming 4–0 ahead. It was time to bring on the boy.
‘He was a few metres away and I said to him: “Let’s go,”’ Salorio recalls. ‘He is sitting looking at me, as if to say: “Is it my turn then?” And I said. “What? Don’t you want to play, then?” He warmed up and started the second half.’
At half-time, Lavezzi and Abelairas came off, and Franco Miranda and Leo, with number 17 on his back, came onto the pitch.
‘They couldn’t stop him,’ Zabaleta says today. Leo made two assists. In the eightieth minute, with the score 6–0, he picked up the ball unmarked on the edge of the centre circle, in the opposition’s half. ‘It was an extraordinary piece of play, then and now,’ ‘the Professor’ recalls. ‘He dribbled past everyone. And I said: “we’ve got a star here.”’
Messi had set off in double-quick time, then, face to face with the keeper, wrong-footed him with a feint and found himself in front of an open goal. His first goal for Argentina.
In the end it was a convincing 8–0 victory. The match was shown on TyC Sports, but the recording was lost for many years. It was recently found and returned to the Argentine federation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrEF6Gnjgs
From that starting eleven, Ricardo Villalba was to make his debut for River Plate’s first team but he only played once for them. He tried his luck in the second division (with Rafaela, Defensa and Justicia) and later lower down (with Defensores de Belgrano in the Metropolitan B), before returning to the second division (with Aldosivi). René Lima, who came out of the junior ranks at River, went to Israel for a few months, and then jumped from club to club in the first and second divisions in Argentina before moving to Chile, where he now plays at Cobreloa. Franco Miranda played in Sweden and Scotland (with St Mirren) and now plays for Sportivo Belgrano. Matías Abelairas, who was replaced by Leo, plays for Puebla de Mexico, having moved there from Vasco de Gama. He was rejected by Glasgow Rangers after failing a trial with them. The road to the summit is littered with obstacles; for some, they are insurmountable.
The team then travelled to the Estádio Suppici in Colonia for the next friendly, this time against Uruguay. Leo came on at the start of the second half with the score at 1–1, thanks to a goal from Pablo Vitti. Messi scored twice (47th and 56th minutes) and played a big part in the fourth goal, as Salorio explains. ‘The keeper gave the ball to the left-back, Leo was about ten metres way. He got there first! Then he went past one, past the goalkeeper and he was left with a tiny space between the post and the goal line and so he just touched it back so Lavezzi could come in and stick it in. I said: “Whoa, we’ve got something amazing here …”’
The final 1–4 scoreline reflected the difference between the two sides. ‘This Messi is something special’ read the headlines on the sports paper Olé. ‘When we returned on the Buquebus to Argentina, I said to Leo that in December we would take him to train with us because we wanted to take him to the Sudamericano Championships in Colombia in 2005,’ says Tocalli.
That cold summer, Leo returned to Rosario to spend the rest of his holidays. He walked the streets without being recognised. They would be his last days of anonymity.
The Sudamericano Championships began on 13 February 2005 and the top four teams would compete in the following summer’s World Cup in Holland, and after those two friendlies, Messi was included in the final squad. He arrived in December to join up with the group with Barcelona’s permission (it was being played in the middle of the season), despite the fact that he had already made his debut with the first team two months earlier in a match against Espanyol. Zabaleta, captaining the side, was two years his senior and he soon got close to the new arrival, as it was his duty. ‘I sat down with him on one occasion to discuss what we had in mind, to ask him what he needed, to tell him that we were with him. And it was all short answers, he was the boy of the group.’
Pancho Ferraro, the coach of Gimnasia de Jujuy, took charge of the Under 20s from January after answering the call from José Pekerman, the new coach of the full side. In January he travelled to Colombia where he shared the bench with Tocalli, who continued as coach of the Under 20s before becoming Pekerman’s assistant. ‘That’s where I first saw Messi,’ says Ferraro. ‘In the first two South American games against Venezuela and Bolivia, he was on the bench. The team was playing badly in the first halves but things changed in the second because Leo came on.’
‘The Flea’ did not have the same physique as the rest of them, they said. But he came on in the sixtieth minute against Venezuela and made it 2–0 (the final score was 3–0), winning the man of the match award. ‘But I never got hold of the ball,’ he was heard to say; he would have voted for Garay. Against Bolivia he came on at halftime for Barrientos. Five minutes into the second half he made a run from midfield going past everyone before scoring. Thirteen minutes later he scored again to make it 3–0 at the finish.
He was in the starting line-up for the next match against Peru, although this was the exception rather than the rule: he only featured from the start in three of the nine games. ‘He lacked intensity, the games were very demanding, some of the stadiums were at quite high altitude, and we realised that he was tiring a bit,’ remembers Tocalli. ‘Coming out for the second half, he caused havoc,’ Ferraro points out. Since he performed less well if he played from the start, Tocalli and Ferraro considered putting him back on the bench:
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Pancho, we should speak to Leo.
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About what? Ferraro and Tocalli talked as they drank mate [a kind of tea], an Argentinian custom, and sat on the side of the blackboard moving counters around.
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We need to speak to him because I don’t see him as good as he was coming from the bench. What about if we do it as before, put him on the bench and play him in the second half?
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Okay, Hugo, could be. Let’s speak to him.
‘We went to get him. He was rooming with Lavezzi,’ remembers Pancho Ferraro. ‘In the room, Hugo told him what we had in mind and Messi thought it was a good idea. It didn’t upset him. On the contrary. “I planned to say the same thing to you”, he said. Sometimes you ask yourself how this type of player will take it. And it depends on how you speak to them. It depends how you sit them down, how you look them in the eye, and the words you use. Leo understood.’
The competition continued. Argentina had won four games and drawn four. They had to play the last game against Brazil on 6 February. Victory would guarantee third place and qualification for the world championships in Holland. Leo came on for Neri Cardozo in the sixty-fifth minute with the sides level at 1–1. Barrientos put in a cross that Leo finished to make it 2–1, the winning goal, his first against a Brazil side that were going to finish top in any case. Colombia, with leading goal scorer Hugo Rodallega, were second and Argentina third.
Leo confirmed that he was now at the level that everyone thought he would be. He never doubted it but the impact he had made on the tournament made him want more. He was aware, though, that his body was putting limitations on him so he listened to the advice of Tocalli: ‘work with a personal trainer, like Ronaldinho’s.’
And he did exactly that on his return to Barcelona, sometimes in double sessions. Three months after becoming one of the movers and shakers of the Under 20 side, Leo scored his first goal for Barcelona in one of the nine games he played for the first team that season. The season was becoming one full of memorable events.
Before flying to the Netherlands for the world championships, Leo passed through Rosario and returned to the Newell’s ground for the first time in five years. Some people greeted him; not all of them knew him but tho
se who did passed the word – ‘this is the kid who had to leave, the one from Barcelona’. They asked him about his new home, how were things going for him and about the national team. The Under 20 world championship had grabbed the attention of the Argentinian public. The team, which historically had performed well at this level with three victories in the last five competitions, were very powerful. They were going to Holland to win the title.
The competition actually has a very long and interesting tradition; it is the most important of all the tournaments for the younger ranks of international sides and a window on a host of new faces. It is hard to predict what will happen there: a substitute in a first game can very quickly become an automatic starter and end up the tournament’s best player, in what is often the best launching pad for great careers.
At the age of 18, Maradona led his Argentina side to its first world Under 20 title in Japan. In Chile in 1987, Yugoslavia called upon the services of the likes of Robert Prosinecki, Zvonimir Boban and Davor Šuker. Portugal had the golden generation of Luis Figo, João Pinto and Rui Costa who were champions in 1991. And in 1997 France prepared for its attack on the World Cup with the launch of David Trezeguet and Thierry Henry, even though Pablo Aimar’s Argentina won the tournament. In 1999, the Spain of Xavi Hernández and Iker Casillas won the title: it was the sign of things to come. In 2001 Argentina won (with Javier Saviola starring) and Dani Alvés faced Andrés Iniesta in the final of 2003.
The fifteenth edition of the tournament was to take place in Holland between 10 June and 2 July. Spain had brought with them players like Fernando Llorente, Cesc, Albiol, José Enrique; Colombia had brought Falcao. Brazil had Rafinha (now with Bayern Munich) and a host of players who still play in their country’s domestic leagues.
Argentina gave Leo a few more days’ holiday because he was the only player coming from Europe, but he preferred to meet up with the group when the squad was called together. It may have seemed a minor detail but it was one, none the less, that was appreciated by his team-mates: the ‘we’re all the same’ approach is one of the best types of calling cards.
Messi Page 26