Messi

by Guillem Balague

  –

  That’s good, Leo said and then returned to the room he was sharing with Kun.

  Argentina had qualified for the next round, albeit as runners-up. In any case qualification had relaxed the group. Leo spent his time with Kun on PlayStation (taking turns to be either Barcelona or Argentina). And it was not always that amicable. ‘Once we really fought, a proper fight,’ Leo remembered in an interview on Mundo Leo TV. ‘And we decided there was a long way to go before the end of the tournament, so it was best if we played without trying to kill each other afterwards. A healthier solution.’ There was a lot of time to listen to Cumbia music with Ustari or just hanging out with the others. ‘He felt comfortable with Kun Agüero, and it had been a wise move to put the two of them in the same room,’ remembers Ferraro. ‘Leo played with the boys, he laughed, always laughing. Kun was more jovial, but Leo was always laughing about what the others did, in particular what Kun did.’

  ‘They’re different. Leo is introverted, Kun is an extrovert. But the way they talk is similar, they’re a good combination,’ says Salorio. ‘And Leo waits to see what Kun is doing, it amuses him. And it amuses Kun that he makes Leo laugh.’ Agüero performed the task of making Messi’s little world a happier place. ‘Yes … Leo would walk around the training camp looking for situations that would make him happy.’

  One of Salorio’s additional responsibilities on the technical staff was that of imposing discipline and control on the players. After getting off on the wrong foot with Messi at the Sudamericano tournament, he made sure he was a bit more subtle in establishing the ground rules. One day he found Kun and Leo with bags of crisps.

  ‘I slept in the same room as Kun, and there were various meetings that we had to attend at specific times,’ Leo remembered in an excellent interview by Martín Souto of TyC Sports where it seems that Leo forgot that the cameras were rolling. ‘If you were late, you were fined. Downstairs in the hotel there was a machine that sold sweets and snacks. Everything: chewing gum, sweets, crisps. We were forbidden from buying any of this stuff and at nine o’clock everyone had to be in their room. Downstairs there was also a computer, which was the only one there was, so we used to go down to play on it for a while before curfew time. We went down together and Kun said, “shall we buy something from the machine?” We did and hid what we bought under our shirts. It was three minutes past nine, the door of the lift opens, and it’s “the Professor” …and Kun’s there trying to make sure the crisps don’t fall out.’

  –

  Nice, are they? asked Salorio.

  –

  Yes.

  –

  Good, let’s agree on something then. Eat them, because it’s not nice to get food and throw it away, but they will be the last ones you’ll be having. Okay? Enjoy them.

  Salorio had defused the situation. ‘Sometimes bars of chocolate would arrive for the players and I would confiscate them. Then they’d win a game and I’d say to them: “Right, let’s have some chocolate.” And I’d give every member of the group a bar. I used to carry them around with me in a bag and during the tour I’d be there with my bag, and right up to the last match we would be eating chocolate, sweets, biscuits …’

  As he had done on previous occasions, Salorio decided to form a ‘government’ of players, in which ministers were appointed. The players would be divided into seven departments: cleaning, order and tidiness, economics, the ministry for buying birthday presents, the ministry of fines, special orders and the ministry of entertainment that would put on a different film every night at seven o’clock and also distribute books. ‘The Professor’ then asked for each ministry to name its leader. Inevitably the players would pick those with the biggest personality so that they could fight their corner for them against Salorio; and those with lesser personalities would inevitably end up in the departments considered of lesser importance. This way the squad would begin to evolve more naturally. The tougher departments were the ones that imposed laws and punishments. And there were stiff fines. With the money raised (it amounted to between $600 and $700) they bought presents for any birthdays being celebrated that month. With anything left they acquired a computer as a reward for the person who won the most competitions. And they would play until ten or eleven at night, either individually or in group competitions. They were slowly coming together.

  ‘The Professor was a star,’ Leo told Martín Souto. ‘The truth is they would come down hard on us, but they were veteran coaches, they knew what they were doing, and I laugh about it now because I know just how many bollockings I’ve had from them.’

  Leo was not one of the main men in any of the ‘ministries’ and that perhaps is proof positive of the mark he initially made on the squad: as a footballer he was considered ‘relevant’, but off the pitch he was small in more than one sense of the word. ‘He didn’t drink mate,’ remembers Salorio. ‘Later he got used to it but at that time he didn’t drink it like most of them did. He didn’t participate. On the pitch, he was an assassin, off the pitch, no. When we were playing darts, I found out who could take the fifth penalty. If someone came along and scored three hundred points, give him the fifth penalty, coach.’

  Leo built his small and manageable world within the group: he looked to Kun Agüero for the laughter and, as big groups always put him on the back foot, he looked to Ustari the rest of the time. And that was a lot of time: during meals, going in and out of training sessions, walking about. His team-mates used to joke about the ‘couple’. ‘Osky, they say we’re an item. Does it bother you? Does it bother you? Tell me,’ Leo asked Ustari. ‘Because if it bothers you, I’ll go and say something to them right now!’

  He wasn’t always so brave, as the goalkeeper recalls. ‘He made me go and ask the Professor if he could stay a while longer in our room. And I said to him: “why don’t you go?” And he said: “no, because he listens to you, and …” He was a boy, a boy. We used to put the beds together in my room so Messi could sleep in the middle. That’s how he was.’

  But as soon as he crossed the white line onto the field of play, Leo became that competitive person with no need of friends. ‘In one training session we played a short game,’ remembers Ustari. ‘There was a shot from about a metre and a half and he whacked it like he wanted to take my head off! And he hit me and I said to him: “What are you doing?” and he looked at me like … he was the keeper killer, transformed. One day we were doing some dead-ball work and we were laughing and then suddenly the game started and … well, he was another person. And this was just a training session.’

  Ustari found his weak point, how to get to him, to make up for all the goals he used to score against him (a goalkeeper has few ways of getting at a striker, he will invariably lose the footballing challenges). ‘You never score from a free-kick, I said to him.’ And it was true. Actually, Ustari thought it was something he should improve on, so he discussed it with him. ‘You don’t score from free-kicks, because you don’t want to, because if you were to practise …’ And that’s what Leo did. And he started to score from set pieces in training sessions.

  ‘It’s only because I started to practise them,’ he told Osky.

  Finishing second in the group put Argentina in the most difficult part of the draw with their next opponents, a strong Colombia with players like Radamel Falcao, Freddy Guarín and Hugo Rodallega.

  Last 16

  Argentina vs Colombia

  22 June 2005, Unive Stadium, Emmen

  Attendance: 8,000

  Referee: Claus Bo Larsen (Denmark)

  Before the game, Salorio set out to ‘make mischief’. He looked for an enemy he could focus on and found him in the opposing coach. A group of players and Argentinian coaches were drinking mate when they saw Eduardo Lara, the Colombia coach, coming down the stairs. ‘He came down like one of those typical Buenos Aires men, as if he was about to dance a tango, clutching his small bag tightly, and I said to them: “Look at him, he’s already winding us up, he already thinks he’s beat
en us”,’ said Salorio with a half-smile. ‘It wasn’t true! The poor bloke was just wandering around the place, much as we were! And they, of course, joined in and said: “You’re right, look at him, the son of a bitch!”’

  That night ‘the Professor’ came up with another of his games: with your wrong foot you had to try and score with a plastic ball to a small goal about 20 metres away.

  During the match itself, six minutes after Colombia’s goal (Otalvaro, 52nd minute), Messi played a one-two with Cardozo who returned it to him inside the area. His angle was getting narrower and so ‘the Flea’ decided to shoot. ‘The feller remembered the game we had played,’ ‘the Professor’ recalls today. ‘As everything started to close in, he thought: “If I hit it well last night, why shouldn’t I hit it well now?” And he scored from a narrow angle.’ He ran back and celebrated with all the rejoicing normally reserved for your first goals. Barroso scored in injury time and Argentina were in the quarter-finals.

  That was the first full game that Leo had played for the Argentinian side and put an end to any arguments about whether or not he was worthy of a place. ‘There are players who are fast and others who have great technique,’ analyses Oberman. ‘Riquelme is a great technical player. Jesús Navas of Spain is really fast, but doesn’t have Messi’s control. Riquelme has fantastic control but doesn’t have the speed of Messi. Messi has both things. And that is very difficult to find.’

  Quarterfinal

  Argentina vs Spain

  25 June 2005, Arke Stadium, Enschede

  Attendance: 11,200

  Referee: Benito Archundia (Mexico)

  In the next match Argentina had to face the European champions and big favourites who could rely on players like David Silva, Fernando Llorente, José Enrique, Alexis and Cesc Fàbregas, with whom Leo had been reunited after two seasons in London with Arsenal. The night before, Messi met up with Cesc at the hotel where the squads were staying on the day of the game. The last time they had seen each other was with the under-16 side at Barcelona and both had gone on to make their debuts for their respective senior international sides. Cesc only knew it was Leo’s birthday when one of his Argentinian team-mates shouted across the room, ‘Leo, happy birthday, mate!’ Nothing to make a big fuss about, Leo thought.

  ‘And the night before the game my two strikers had a fight!’ Salorio remembers. ‘I was giving one of my motivational talks, playing a film, and in a flash Messi is fighting with Oberman. A ruckus that no one knew anything about, not even the coach. And all about something really stupid, I’m moving this way, you’re moving that way, a push, things get a bit heated, the other gets angry, he throws a punch, he gets one back … stupid! And we’ve got Spain the following day. I got the two of them together: “What’s going on?” They half explained it to me, shook hands … and off to bed! It couldn’t be solved, and when something can’t be sorted out, everyone to bed and we’ll try to sort it out in the morning. Recently a friend had given me a very good book – to this day I still have it on my bedside table – called Why Do People Do Such Stupid Things?, or something like that. And they had done something stupid. It was four in the morning, I was looking at the book for something that I could read to them about it but couldn’t find it … until I started reading the chapter on adolescence. In the morning they both woke up with faces like smacked arses … And I said: “Before we start we’re going to talk a bit.” I read the chapter and I called the two of them. I passed them the book and said: “put your hand here. Do you swear by St Evangelio not to repeat any of these stupidities because the truth is we need you to stop trying to break each other’s balls; if we are going to get past Spain we need all the balls we have. And the rest of the group were laughing. And they embraced and everything was forgotten.’

  With one problem solved, Salorio needed a new hook to make the next game more of a challenge. ‘And I asked myself, how can I get under these guys’ skins? So I told them a story: “during the days of Peronism we were a very rich country and Spain was very poor. We got into the habit of sending them three boatloads of grain … These are the great-grandchildren of those we saved from starving. What I mean is that they wouldn’t even be here if we hadn’t fed them. And so, for that, today we have got to kill them.” As you can tell, the story was historically and factually slightly inaccurate. The first ball that their number 9, Llorente, got, Cabral went and killed him, he kicked man and ball and then he pointed his finger upwards. Pancho said to me. “What the fuck did you say to him?” “Nothing, Pancho, I didn’t say anything to him.” “What the fuck is he saying to him?” “How do I know what they’re talking about!” Then the player came up to me and said: “You know what I said to him? I told him about the boats!” And Llorente looked at him with a look as if to say … “what is this bloke going on about?”’

  Spain were not only the favourites, they were also playing the best football and Pancho Ferraro changed the formation to defend deeper. The match was tied at 1-1 until the seventieth minute, but Leo was getting more and more into the game as it went on. His precise pass from deep infield found Oberman who lifted the ball over the keeper as he came out. The two, involved in the dispute the night before, had united on the football field to score a crucial goal at a key moment.

  ‘It was the only game I did not play as one of the starting eleven,’ Oberman remembers. ‘It was super-complicated, a hard game. Up until then I hadn’t scored goals, and I came on in a bad mood: there were goal-line clearances, I’d hit the post, and smashed the goal-keeper in the face with a shot … and when I scored the first person to come up and congratulate me was Leo. “See, I told you you’d score.”’

  Two minutes later, a rebound fell to Messi and without it touching the ground he chipped it over the first defender, carried on, and then with the lightest of touches did three more things: rounded another defender before trapping the ball and then hitting it home with his left foot to make it 3–1.

  At the end of the game Leo celebrated with the rest of the team on the way to the dressing room and sang as the boys liked to before and after games, at least when they won … ‘Ole, ole, ole/ ole, ole, ole, ola/ole. Ole, ole/ every day I love you more/oooooh, Argentina/it’s a feeling/ I can’t stop’, swinging their sweatshirts and football shirts around their heads. And ‘Argentina are going to be champions/ Argentina are going to be champions / and we dedicate it to all those fucking mothers who bore you’. Suddenly there was a knock on the changing-room door. It was the chairman of the Spanish Football Federation, Ángel María Villar.

  –

  Lads, quiet, shouted Salorio.

  –

  No, no, for fuck’s sake, insisted Villar. My guys have rings, long hair, the latest mobile phones. Yours don’t have a pot to piss in, they don’t have hair, they run, they give their all, they play, they have balls this big. Let them shout! Viva Argentina!

  All of a sudden Leo’s life was on fast forward. Any number of things were going on at the same time and Leo was taking them all in his stride. Called up for the national side. Tick. In the starting lineup. Tick. Scoring. Tick. The team’s problem solver. Tick. And now, as he entered the final phase of his progression, Barcelona added another box to be ticked. Before the semi-finals against the Brazil of Rafinha, Felipe Luis, Renan and Diego Souza, Leo signed his first professional contract with the FC Barcelona first team. It was the third one he had signed with the club, only this time it came with a buyout clause of €150 million. Box ticked. ‘In Holland? Not even I knew about it,’ Pancho Ferraro says today. ‘But he didn’t seem any different. He’d been somewhere with some guys, Barcelona club directors, but I didn’t find it strange …’ Once again, he was taking steps down a path already trodden, and doing it with his usual lack of emotion.

  Obviously, Messi’s focus was on the job in hand, specifically the forthcoming test that the national side were facing: the semi-finals of the world championships. Two hours before the game he had to listen to three of his seniors, all of whom had looked a
fter him, had helped him make the most of his talent, had helped him along the road to his first tournament with Argentina.

  First, Pancho Ferraro. ‘I said to them, “you can make a mistake against Colombia, or Bolivia, but you can’t make a mistake against Brazil because if you do they’ll kill you”. I put the video on for a while, switched it off and then started to talk about what Brazil was and about what we were going to do. And then suddenly, Leo said halfway through the conversation, “Don’t worry, we’re going to win tomorrow.” He addressed it to me but you got the feeling that he was talking to everyone.’

  The captain, Pablo Zabaleta, had taken part in the previous Under 20 World Cup finals that had seen Argentina knocked out in the semi-finals, again against Brazil. In Holland the two rivals were now meeting again at the same stage. And in the same hotel. ‘Remember, we don’t want to look at the Brazilians if we lose, they will be with us if we lose, and we will have to deal with their happiness when we’re eating, training … Better win!’ Zabaleta reminded them, too, of the unusual situation that they were facing. ‘When it came to me to speak as captain, I said I was being presented with the opportunity to play my last Under 20 World Cup final. I did not want to let that pass. And on top of that they had eliminated us two years earlier. For that reason we had to do everything in our power to win.’

  Before going out to warm up, Salorio had prepared a message. ‘Emiliano Molina, one of Kun Agüero’s best friends and one of Independiente’s goalkeepers, had just died. The internet had been banned, so I gave them the news a few days earlier. And … we were in the semis, we were facing Brazil. This is what I said to them: “lads, on Sunday we’re going to have a special advantage in this game because we are going to take them on with three goalkeepers. We are using Ustari, Lucas Molina and another Molina, Emiliano, also of Independiente, who have both died in a six-month period, from heaven they will be battling with us, we cannot lose this game. Let’s get out there.” Everybody was shocked and emotional, and I walked off. They all followed me to training.’