The waiters used to joke with him about it: ‘a bit of fish would do you good.’ To which he would answer. ‘Yuk! Fish is for the water.’ If fish or meat wholesalers happened to offer him a case of Argentinian king prawns as a gift, Leo insisted that they give them to his father – but they should bring some Argentinian meat next time. On occasions he would go to the restaurants to eat on Sunday at midday and go on from there to the ground, especially when Rijkaard in his last months at the club allowed players to arrive at the stadium just before the games. And after the empanadas, the Milanese or the pasta, off to play. ‘By the time I get there I’ll have digested this,’ Leo would say.
If there wasn’t a game, after training he would have a long siesta, wake up at about four and eat a pizza. Then some conguitos, peanuts covered with chocolate. And if he was thirsty he would drink a litre and a half of Coca-Cola. A complete lack of nutritional control. He lived the life of a student.
Leo resembled a luxury car that ran on petrol but consumed diesel. Occasionally you can get away with it, but eventually the engine will seize up.
The irregularity of this lifestyle came to the attention of the board who considered watching over his growth, making sure he ate better, became stronger. ‘You should be able to plant this guy in the ground so no one can pull him up’ was a comment heard in the boardroom. But, despite the concern, during this period nothing special was done to make Leo change his habits. In fact, both the club and the player waited at least a couple of years before making the decisions that would prompt him to face up to the importance of nutritional and dietary control.
While he was recuperating, the year that could have been Messi’s was becoming Barcelona’s: Benfica had been eliminated in the quarter-finals, so they faced Milan in the semi-finals and the league was in their pocket.
Leo was now facing a race against time to be fit for the Champions League final. It was to be played on 17 May, ten weeks after his injury. If everything went according to plan, he would be fit.
5
Frank Rijkaard: The Decline
Leo believed he would be fit for the Champions League final.
‘Playing in a final is always a wonderful experience, and more so in this competition, one of the most important after the World Cup, if not the most important of all. It would be really amazing to play in it and win.’
(Leo Messi, 2006)
‘The two of us would train together, morning and afternoon,’ Juanjo Brau, Leo’s personal physical trainer, explains. ‘Physical work and physiotherapy in the mornings, gym in the afternoons. Every day.’ And he would swim. And the rest of the time he would spend at home, resting, sleeping. For one month, every day. He had to be fit. He could not miss the big date in Paris. And on top of that it was World Cup year.
On 10 April, one week before the first leg of the semi-final against Milan, and five before the final, Leo Messi was finally ready to rejoin the group training sessions. He had missed the previous six league matches and both legs of the Champions League quarter-final. If he responded well, Rijkaard intended to take him to Italy but leave him on the bench, only using him to stir things up in the second half. Leo felt ready for anything.
Ten Cate was not as clear on the matter. Before the first group session, he asked the medical team about ‘the Flea’. The player had the medical all-clear but doctors recommended that Messi should do individual work. Messi insisted that he was up for training as normal. Ten Cate took him to one side.
‘Leo, I’ve spoken to the doctor and you’re still not 100 per cent. You run the risk of missing more matches.’
‘No, I feel fine!’
Coaches will always say that, ultimately, it is the footballer who has responsibility for his own body, that he decides if he is fit for training or not. Only they know what they feel inside. Fifteen minutes into that session, Leo felt comfortable and decided to take a free-kick.
Ten Cate called out to him not to. ‘Leave it, Leo. Just in case it gets any worse …’
Leo launched the ball over the bar. And he felt the muscle go again.
A new tear in the same place.
In his leg and in his heart.
The club said that Leo could play again before the end of the league season, as it was not a tear, but nobody risked a prediction on his precise return. The injury to the femoral bicep of his right leg, they explained, needed more oxygen than it was receiving.
The official statement read: ‘During the last phase of treatment he has experienced discomfort in the scarred area and significant muscular fatigue. Therefore it has been decided to continue with the treatment guidelines and muscular reconditioning which will last until the player can resume training without symptoms. As things stand he is out of the next game.’
To get the true gist of the medical report you had to read between the lines. What the doctors meant was that Leo was inexperienced with such muscular injuries. His desire to play was akin to punishing himself. Leo had come back earlier because he wanted to get back on the pitch as soon as possible. His sprinting muscles required lots of oxygen and the healing was a slow process. At his age, they concluded, it was only natural that he did not know how to read his body, and that he imagined that he was better than he really was.
Leo did not want to speak to anyone when he got home. Something had failed once again. The latest tests confirmed that it was a new rupture, even though the club wanted to hide it. So it meant restarting the recovery. With Juanjo Brau. Physical work and physiotherapy in the mornings. Gym in the afternoons … the same routine.
Leo and Brau went to Rosario, well away from those who wanted to get him back onto the pitch too soon, away from distractions. In Argentina they watched Giuly’s goal against Milan, which put Barça through to the final. He celebrated it only with a muted ‘Goal!’ He could be fit for the final, perhaps on the bench. He would definitely make it. He carried on working hard to do so.
Time was ticking away fast; there was not long to go. The final was on 17 May, five weeks after his last setback, three after the semi-final.
In early May, Leo felt well enough. Juanjo Brau told him to be patient.
Messi asked Rijkaard to include him in the squad, and started training with everybody three days before the final against Arsenal in Saint-Denis, Paris. Leo trained with the first-team squad on Sunday at the Camp Nou. And again on Monday. Two days before the final.
On the Tuesday Frank Rijkaard attended the pre-final press conference. As well as saying it would be wrong to make Barcelona favourites against an Arsenal team containing Thierry Henry, Robert Pirès, Ashley Cole and Cesc, he did not want to give any clues about Leo’s physical condition. He had taken the whole squad with him to Paris but had to leave two players out. ‘I will not decide anything until tomorrow,’ said the Dutchman. The journalists kept on probing. ‘In terms of emotions, the team is fine. Messi? We will see what happens tomorrow. We are pleased that Leo is recovering, but let’s see, because there’s another training session and he has only had two with the team. You never know.’
And after the press conference, Rijkaard joined the squad. That Tuesday afternoon, in the French stadium, ‘the Flea’ was combative, fired up, sharp. He took a powerful shot which Eto’o blocked, leaving him groggy. His muscle was strong.
But Rijkaard and Ten Cate had already made their decision, and they revealed it to him after the training session the day before the final, privately, in an empty dressing room next to the one the players used.
The two men were waiting for him when Leo joined them.
Frank told him that he was not fit and that he was not going to include him in the final squad. Ten Cate nodded in agreement.
Henk had taken the training sessions and had not seen his usual explosive side. He did not think that Leo could handle the pressure and rhythm of a final.
They both knew they were taking him out of the club’s most important match. But then again, he was only 18 years old. ‘I’m sure you’re going to play in many m
ore finals, but this one has come too soon’, Ten Cate told him.
Leo became angry. Furious. Not with Rijkaard, but with Ten Cate. It was written all over his face, his emotions evident in his trembling lips.
His eyes started filling up with tears.
His head dropped. Not a sound. His silence was as smooth and still as glass. He breathed in, then out, and was silent again. That was how he cried ‘Can you imagine it?’ Ten Cate said of that day. ‘An eighteen-year-old kid who cannot play because of his own miscalculations?’
According to the technical staff, Leo had made a serious mistake back in April. He failed to read the messages his body was sending him. A lesson for the future, they thought, because if he had not suffered that setback he would have been an important part of the Barcelona team that was preparing to play its fifth European Cup final, in search of its second trophy in Europe’s biggest competition.
‘These are the most difficult moments for a coach,’ insists Henk ten Cate. Xavi was already a mature player and knew what he could and could not do. He had had an operation on a ligament injury and returned to training with the squad, but he realised that he was not at the right level. The centre midfielder had been out of the team for five months and he knew that he was not fully fit for the final. He was going to stay on the bench, accept it. As he was not an explosive player, Rijkaard thought he could be useful in controlling the game if they needed to. That problem was easily resolved. Leo, on the other hand, was much more complicated.
‘Tears were filling his eyes and running down his cheeks’, remembers an emotional Ten Cate.
Frank got up and hugged him.
Xavi Hernández did not play a single minute of the final. Andrés Iniesta’s fitness was also discussed by the coaching staff. He started the game on the bench because Rijkaard and Ten Cate preferred a more physical midfield with Van Bommel, Deco and Edmilson. ‘Be careful, Frank,’ his assistant said to him. ‘Talk to Andrés for a moment, he is about to explode, he expected to play.’ The rest of the team was typical of the sort of gamble Rijkaard took in big games: instead of attacking full-backs, the more defensive Oleguer Presas and Gio van Bronckhorst played, tasked with not pushing too far forward and with protecting the backs of Giuly and Ronaldinho.
As far as Leo was concerned, the coaches thought his absence served as a lesson to him: he would learn to listen now, to others, and to his body.
Messi couldn’t enjoy the final. He was bitterly disappointed. He vaguely remembers a strange start to the game, with the very early sending-off of Arsenal goalkeeper Jens Lehmann (in the eighteenth minute), Sol Campbell’s headed goal, which put Arsenal ahead, and the introduction of Henrik Larsson, who assisted Eto’o and Belletti for the win, and began what seemed an inevitable period of glory and European titles.
In the stands Leo did not feel any personal pleasure in the victory; he did not feel he deserved to be part of the celebration. So he went to the dressing room as soon as he heard the final whistle.
Ten Cate was having a cigarette in the tunnel just after the match, before the celebrations. Leo walked past him with his head down. At a steady pace.
And there he remained, preferring to distance himself from the team, to hide how upset he was. As Juanjo Brau says: ‘if he says no, it’s no, and if he says yes, it’s yes. There is no ambiguity with him.’
Leo does not appear in a single photo from Saint-Denis. He did not want to touch the cup. Nor even pick up his medal. He cried alone in a corner of the locker room.
Amid the jubilation, Brau went to look for Messi. And said to him:
‘Leo, in the Chelsea game … with that infamous tackle, the sending-off… if you had not been fit, we would not have gone through.’
‘And suddenly a light bulb went on in my head,’ remembers Silvinho.
‘We were all celebrating winning the Champions League and suddenly, hang on a second, I realise Leo is not with us. I went to the dressing room and there he was. Wearing a Barcelona tracksuit, with the kitman and Juanjo Brau. I went up to him, we spoke. “Come on, let’s go onto the pitch.” He was down, really down. Rijkaard thought the same as me; “let’s go and get him”, and the three of us found ourselves in the dressing room. After a while Rijkaard went back to the pitch, but I stayed there for a few minutes talking to him and said: “don’t worry, you’ll understand soon, we will speak about what is happening here and you will see it in a different light. And there will be many other important matches; calm down.” I understood him. He did not need to say a single word to me, I understood perfectly what was happening. And I left him to it. I went back to the pitch to celebrate.’
‘How come I missed a Champions League final like this one? I don’t know if I will be able to experience another day like today … some footballers wait ten years for a game like this one,’ Leo kept repeating.
The childish side of Leo seemed to have taken over.
Silvinho, though, does not agree that it was the reaction of a child, but that of a young adult who knew that the opportunity of playing in a final might not come again. ‘He thought he could have helped us,’ says Silvinho. ‘He was missing out on a very special moment, an unforgettable match and party. During the rest of the night, and the following day, I tried to make him see that it was not the end of the world.
‘I think he learned a lot that day.’ This comes from Silvinho, but everyone who saw him that day agrees.
Other Barcelona players were slightly less understanding of his reaction. ‘Your team has just won, you are eighteen years old, things have gone well for you, the squad wins the cup, you go to the World Cup … It was strange for him to react like that,’ said Maxi López in the press area. For those who do not think like Leo, this was just a minor setback. Nothing to get worked up about. Many footballers, on getting back to the dressing room, told him that he was as much a champion as they were.
Deco, who had picked up his medal, hung it around his neck in the dressing room. ‘Someday you will see how big a night this has been,’ he told Messi.
But Leo did not want to listen. He was in a dark place and wanted to remain there.
Slowly, though, thanks to his team-mates’ infectious joy, he began to emerge. Some of them took the cup to the dressing room so that he could finally touch it and have his picture taken with it.
‘I realise now that I should have enjoyed that final much more, more than I did, for the moment that it was. I don’t think many players get the chance to be able to win the Champions League. I was very young and didn’t want to celebrate it. Then Ronaldinho, Deco and Motta brought me the cup, and that is a very beautiful memory. Today I regret not enjoying it more on the pitch, although afterwards I did. I was there, and it is something very special.’ So said Leo four years later.
He left the dressing room and on the way to the coach he ran into Ten Cate. ‘I think he jumped on my back or something of the sort,’ Henk remembers. ‘His face had changed, he was now smiling. Everyone was all over him, he felt loved, I imagine. And then I remember the flight back home, he grabbed the microphone. We were sitting on the upper deck of the plane with the players and the directors, the families were sitting on the lower deck. But the whole plane could hear everything through the speakers. So he grabbed the microphone and said: “Mr President, please, I don’t want another watch, I want a car.” Messi had passed his driving test just before the final, two weeks earlier, and he already had a watch for winning the league, so that is why he said it. They gave us all an Audi. An S3, I think.’
The ‘negotiations’ for the bonuses did not end there. Laporta bumped into a happier Leo: ‘And I said to him, “So, Leo. Happy?” He was sitting in one of the last rows, and he said to me, “I’ve already looked at a few flats.” He was joking. We all laughed. And he continued with the joke: “with a garage to park the car.”’
‘In the end he came out of his shell and everything was perfect,’ insists Silvinho. ‘I remember how we celebrated that final like crazy when we got back to
Barcelona, the streets packed with people, unforgettable.’
The season ended with victory in Europe and in the league, Real Madrid’s galácticos finishing twelve points behind. Samuel Eto’o was the top scorer with 26 goals, and both the Cameroonian and Ronaldinho were chosen in the best XI of FIFPRO, the footballers’ union team of the season.
In 2012 in El País Leo Messi analysed that period with a more reflective appreciation: ‘Rijkaard is a person to whom I owe practically everything, it was he who had faith in me, it was he who gave me my debut as a kid. It was he who knew how to handle me, he knew to leave me out at that time, when I didn’t understand and didn’t like it, he knew why he did it and the truth is that everything that came after that, came thanks to him.’
The team was destined for great things, but what no one knew at the time was that that Paris final was as good as it got.
‘It was fascinating to see how, before our very eyes, the kid was becoming the best player in the world. And this in only a few months.’ Eidur Gudjohnsen, who arrived the following season, along with Thuram and Zambrotta, did, of course, have a privileged view of Leo’s progress. But his comment has an added depth. Eidur and Leo recognised each other as outsiders in that small world of the Barcelona squad. The Viking and the Argentinian communicated without understanding a word of what the other was saying: ‘I didn’t understand Leo: he spoke very quietly or very quickly or with that thick Argentine accent. I would just keep saying, “what has he just said?” I think that made him laugh. And, despite not understanding each other, we got on really well, we would laugh at each other’s jokes. Or what we thought were jokes.
‘I thought it was an interesting exercise seeing his impressive progression, game by game, and trying to get inside his head,’ continues the Icelandic forward. ‘And it was not at all easy, because what you see from the outside, even for his team-mates, is a guy who is passionate about football, who lives and breathes football, who spends the rest of his time at home, or sleeping, or playing a bit of PlayStation, and that’s it. But I always knew that, behind all that, there was much more, there had to be more.’
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