–
And the board decided that the next coach had to be José Mourinho or Pep Guardiola. You chose Pep because of his relationship with and knowledge of the club. At the famous meal after the Champions League semi-finals where Pep said to you, ‘No tindràs colons’ [Catalan for ‘You won’t have the balls’] to choose him as Rijkaard’s replacement, was Leo spoken about?
–
Definitely. We spoke about players, those he wanted and didn’t want. And about Leo, Pep kept repeating, ‘a machine, he is a machine’. Pep, when he spoke about him, always said that he was the best, a machine. The subject of Ronnie and Deco came up. At the time we discussed whether Eto’o should stay, I think we were right to hold onto him. And Henry was almost fully settled in and on form. Of course Leo was spoken about. He was going to be the focal point.
As soon as that season ended, Joan Laporta drove to Castelldefels. To Ronaldinho’s house. Ronnie knew what it was about; the president had already told him that changes were planned if the team did not win anything. Pep Guardiola had told the president that he wished he could have changed him back into the player he once was, but did not believe it was possible. Laporta considered it the president’s duty to communicate the decision, face to face, to the player who had changed the history of the club. ‘Ronnie, we think the moment has come for you to end your time here at Barça.’ The conversation between the player and the president was an emotional one. Ronaldinho’s sister was also present.
The World Cup two years earlier was discussed. Joan knew that it had touched him deep down and that he had never understood why people reacted so negatively towards him after Brazil’s failure. The three of them viewed the situation as unfair, the criticism over the top, but Ronaldinho had not recovered from that.
‘Ronnie, our expectations have not been met and, as I told you, we can no longer remain together. Milan want you, Manchester City want you, you have to make up your mind,’ Laporta told him.
Laporta had already spoken to Roberto de Assis, Ronaldinho’s brother and agent, in case Barcelona reached this decision. The most interesting deal in financial terms was the City one, but the club that attracted the player more was AC Milan, who ended up signing him for €25 million.
Ronnie told Laporta that he understood. He would choose a team. He was happy Laporta had come to tell him personally. He could not forget how, at Christmas time, many people, in and outside the club, wanted to get rid of him, but Laporta had convinced them to let him finish the season. Out of respect and gratitude, Ronnie deserved it. That is what the president thought and he said goodbye with a hug that made him cry. And Ronaldinho, too.
When Joan Laporta left Ronaldinho’s house, he gave a big sigh, a combination of sadness and relief. He took his phone out and dialled a familiar number. ‘Listen, are you at home? I’m coming round. I want you all to be the first ones to know something.’ He had called Jorge Messi who was at home with his son in the house next door to Ronaldinho’s. Another decision had been reached by the board and he wanted to inform them.
Laporta knew that the relationship between Leo and Ronnie was special, and had decided to tell the Argentinian first-hand that his friend was not going to stay at the club. And that the board wanted Leo to become the focal point of the team.
‘Leo must take the lead, take over from Ronaldinho,’ said Laporta with all the gravitas the occasion demanded. ‘Accept responsibility. The number ten shirt is all yours.’
Leo lowered his head while they spoke about his friend, but he accepted the challenge. He knew it was what he had to do in professional terms. Laporta understood that he had to generate some enthusiasm with his new star: if he could manage it, he would win him over to the cause. He told him the home-grown players were going to be given more important roles and he also shared with him the technical staff’s plans. The coach would be Pep Guardiola. ‘Pep is going to understand you, he knows the club inside out and thinks you are a machine,’ said Laporta. Dani Alvés and Eric Abidal had signed and Gerard Piqué was close to joining them.
‘Sign Piqué, Mr President, sign him, he used to protect me when we played together as teenagers,’ said Leo.
A question became inevitable now that he was going to become the new solitary figurehead. ‘Who else would you bring in?’ Laporta remembers asking Leo. Deco and Motta were to be sold: two more friends going. Maybe Eto’o, too. The team that was forming was, in theory, solid, but needed the approval of the new focal point. Leo’s family also participated in the conversation; it was a moment of mixed feelings. They saw the sadness the inevitable transfers of his friends caused Leo. They remembered a particular game in which their son scored while Ronaldinho was recovering from another injury, and he raised both hands, displaying all ten digits as a celebration. It was for the departing number 10, for his mate. But they also wanted to make Leo see that it was in his best interests that Ronaldinho should leave. And that the new acquisitions and decisions on the group dynamic were going to help him.
Leo saw it that way, too.
‘In the end Frank could not be angry with the guys. When he should have got angry, he couldn’t, because he adored them, he ended up winning two leagues and the Champions League with them …’
(Txiki Beguiristain)
Frank Rijkaard and Ronaldinho arrived at the club at one of the most difficult moments in its history, and managed to bring FC Barcelona back to the position and standing they deserved. The people in charge of the team, management included, opted for a long-lasting football model and the final downward spiral, led by a number of bad decisions, was, ultimately, the consequence of success. Often, sadly, that is more difficult to digest than failure.
Both Frank and Ronaldinho accompanied Leo on his journey through adolescence, both showed him ways to be professional, new codes, but also one-way paths from which Leo managed to find his way back. ‘When I arrived he was a boy,’ says Eidur Gudjohnsen. ‘Two years later he was a man. The number ten fitted him like a glove. You won’t see him training in the gym, or doing many extra hours. But he carried with him the one thing that is so hard to obtain: he knew that it was his time. And he grabbed it with both hands.’
But there remained one thing for Leo Messi to do.
Today Ronaldinho regrets not having been able to be at Barcelona a few more years to enjoy the growth of ‘the Flea’. But it was perhaps his very absence that allowed Messi to prosper.
When they were parted that summer, both knew they would not see each other again as regularly, or in the same circumstances. Distance cools everything.
And, sure enough, after a few exchanges between Barcelona and Milan soon after the Brazilian left Barcelona, the two friends lost contact.
At the Beijing Workers’ Stadium on 19 August the summer of 2008, Brazil faced Argentina in the semi-finals of the Olympics. Ronaldinho in the canarinha, Messi in sky-blue and white. Argentina won 3–0.
At the end of the match, Messi sought out the figure of a disappointed Ronaldinho.
And the hug they gave each other lasts to this day.
6
Leo Is Not a Natural-born Genius. Nobody Is
–
Diego, Diego, it’s an honour to welcome the best player in the world to our city.
–
The best player has already played in Rosario! His name is Carlovich.
That was Maradona’s response when he arrived in Rosario in 1993, at the start of his brief stay at Newell’s. Carlovich. As it stands it might sound like any other Yugoslavian name – an immigrant’s name. And so it is. In the streets of Rosario people fill in the gaps: Carlovich!? A football legend, the king of the double nutmeg. The man who, stepping on the ball, made time stand still. One day he escaped a defensive trap with a single backheel that lobbed three of his opponents. There was no other like him. What Messi does, what Redondo did, what Maradona did, was in his DNA. Not Diego, not Leo, it was Carlovich. He was the greatest.
So they say.
There is not a
single piece of film of the man they call Trinche Carlovich, an Argentinian footballer of the 1970s. You can find newspaper cuttings and the odd photo that will show the footballer with long legs and long sideburns. Hands firmly planted on his hips. Huge. A footballer from the neighbourhood. Those articles talk about individual moments of brilliance that grow with time and the telling. And also of one legendary game in particular.
Not long ago they asked Trinche, no longer physically able to do what he once did with the ball, what he felt when he heard these things, when he remembered how they used to sing his name from the stands and how they came from all over Santa Fe province to see him. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘turn back the clock. Would you have done anything differently?’ At the end of the day, he played only two games in the first division. Carlovich’s lip tightened. ‘Nooo.’ He turned his head. ‘Noo, sir, don’t ask me that …’ He bit his lip. His face contorted. ‘No, not that.’ And he wept.
As the twentieth century dawned, immigrants from all over Europe flooded into Argentina eager to take advantage of the country’s economic boom. One of these was Mario Carlovich, a Yugoslav, who, like so many of his countrymen, was fleeing the continuing upheaval in the Balkans. He settled in the area of Belgrano, in the west of Rosario, and there he raised his family. Seven sons. The youngest, Tomás Felipe, was born in 1948. He would later acquire the nickname el Trinche, ‘the Fork’, presumably because he was tall with thin legs – even though he himself ignores the meaning and origin of the nickname. Like virtually everyone else in the neighbourhood, football was his passion. He was invited to join the junior ranks of Rosario Central when he was 15, and ended up making his debut for the first team some five years later. He played a second time in the first division. And that was it.
Carlovich was what the Argentinians call a volante, a left-footed defensive midfielder. He had class and vision but lacked speed. His technical brilliance failed to impress the coaches of the day, Carlos Grignol among them, who looked for physical presence rather than technical skill. But despite being six foot, he wasn’t built for contesting high balls. He wasn’t your ‘standard type’.
There was nothing standard about him.
On the day of one particular game, the team was getting ready to leave Rosario for Buenos Aires. ‘He arrived with a small bag, climbed onto the bus, nodded to the driver, ignored everyone else and made his way to the back,’ remembers the well-known Santa Fe journalist Eduardo Amez de Paz, who described that era so emotively in his book La vida por el fútbol (‘Life for Football’). ‘Ten or fifteen minutes later, when no other players had turned up, he went to the front and asked the driver what time they were leaving. “As always, son, we’re leaving at half past two, quarter to three.” Bored with waiting, he got off the bus, never to return. Days later it was discovered that he had gone to play for the Rio Negro club in the Belgrano neighbourhood, in an amateur tournament.’
‘There were some circumstances,’ he explains enigmatically now, ‘a few things that I didn’t like at Central, and made me feel alienated. So I left.’ A few months later he reappeared at Central Córdoba, Rosario’s third club, his ‘home’ for more than a decade, an institution that was always in the shadow of the canallas and the leprosos, and where he won the championship in division C and promotion to the division B in 1973. He donned the charrúa shirt over four different periods, playing a total of 236 games and scoring 28 goals. His style and his magic, similar to that of Juan Román Riquelme, remained for ever engraved in the memories of the inhabitants of the Belgrano neighbourhood, and those of La Tablada, where Central Córdoba’s modest Gabino Sosa Stadium is situated. It was to here that Marcelo Bielsa, the former Athletic Bilbao trainer, would make frequent pilgrimages over a four-year period, with the sole intention of watching Trinche play. The stadium now has a mural of Carlovich at the entrance, painted at the request of those at Canal + who travelled from Madrid a few years ago to make a documentary about him.
During those years at Central Córdoba, his legend spread throughout the pampas. One afternoon before a game against Los Andes, a club in Buenos Aires province, Carlovich realised that he didn’t have the necessary document that players had to give to referees in order to take part in the game. The paperwork had been left in Rosario. A local director who had heard of him but had not seen him (division B matches weren’t televised) approached one of the officials with a simple request: ‘Let him play. I know this person with the long hair and the moustache. It’s Trinche. Let him play because we’ll probably never see anyone like him around these parts again.’
The legend of Trinche Carlovich acquired national status and eternal historical importance one night on 17 April 1974 at the Newell’s ground. The Argentinian squad of Vladislao Cap was preparing to travel to West Germany for the World Cup. They were looking for a side to play a friendly for the Sports Journalists’ Circle charity and picked a Rosario Select XI. Ten first division footballers were called up (five each from the two main Rosario sides, Newell’s and Rosario Central) and one from the second division, Córdoba’s number 5, Carlovich. They had never trained together and arrived at the ground about two hours before kick-off.
The stadium filled up. There were no television cameras and nobody filmed it, but those present (footballers, coaches, fans), plus a memorable radio commentary by Oscar Vidana on LT8, all spoke of ‘the dance of the Rosarinos’. In all its glory. No one could stop Carlovich. Trinche himself explains. ‘I nutmegged a defender, and by the time he’d turned around, I’d done it again. It’s the way I play, but on that day the stadium went crazy.’ The double nutmeg wasn’t performed on just any player but on Pancho Sa, the defender with the most Copa Libertadores trophies in the history of the game. Eventually, as their frustration grew, the internationals resorted to insults when they realised that things weren’t going their way. At half-time it was 3–0. In the dressing room Vladislao Cap approached the Rosario management to ask them to take ‘that number 5 off’. And he wasn’t joking. Carlovich started the second half, though.
It finished in an unforgettable 3-1 win for the Rosario side and the national side were jeered by a celebrating stadium that, for once, didn’t make any distinction between canallas and leprosos. Here was glory and sublime football in its purest form. It could have meant a new contract or a new club among the elite for Trinche, but Carlovich always returned to what Amez de Paz describes as his ‘first love’, ‘the neighbourhood, his friends and the amateur tournaments where his status was assured, where he had nothing to prove and could just enjoy the sheer thrill of the game. When he played in those, he never failed to turn it on, never failed to compete or enjoy himself, as he did, on occasion, in the more important Rio Negro tournaments.’ His neighbours at his Belgrano home remember that Trinche, after training or after a game, would carry on playing with the boys in the street, of whatever age, at whatever time, and on whatever field happened to be available for a game.
‘I love the way the youngsters play, I love the potreros,’ recalls Trinche. ‘Today there are very few of them left, they all begin with synthetic surfaces but before it was grass, and more grass. What’s more – there’s no more space. It’s shrinking by the day in Rosario. Before there were lots of pitches, now there are no more pitches. I tell you why I like to play in the streets – a player who goes onto the pitch and looks up into the stands where there are 60,000, 100,000 people, how is he going to enjoy the game? He can’t play, ever. Those people in the stands, their demands, their insults …’
In 1976 he signed for Independiente Rivadavia, a club in the city of Mendoza. One Saturday he got himself sent off just before the interval. He had to: if he hadn’t he would have missed the bus back to Rosario; Sunday was Mother’s Day. On another occasion, on a very hot day, one of those sultry days when you’d rather be at home doing nothing, Trinche and a couple of his companions worked the ball across to an area that was shaded by some trees. They were just touching the ball to each other; no one could get it off them. And
after ten minutes or so the referee stopped the game. ‘Come on, lads, play football!’ Trinche answered: ‘It’s too hot in the sun, ref!’
‘Trinche was a footballing anarchist, something that stopped him making his first division debut much earlier,’ writes Amez de Paz. ‘It didn’t really happen for him until he was about twenty-one. They say that he only played when he wanted to, when he felt like it. I don’t think that’s strictly true. He enjoyed playing. It was in his blood. But he never looked on football as a way of life, nor was he interested in negotiating a contract. He wanted to play and for him that was all that mattered. The sheer enjoyment of playing.’
He only spent one year in Mendoza before returning to the province of Santa Fe, this time with Colón, but he only played two official games: muscle injuries were beginning to dictate his career. He returned to Central Córdoba where he achieved his second promotion. He began to be known for his lack of appetite for training, a lack of ambition. It is said that at one of the many clubs that he played for, outside Rosario, he asked for a car as part of his contract. When they gave it to him, he got into it and drove home to Belgrano, never to return.
One morning on the day of a game, the Central Córdoba squad got together at the Gabino Sol to head off to Buenos Aires. Trinche hadn’t arrived: he had overslept. They went to look for him and he came downstairs in his underpants, hair uncombed, and that, more or less, is how they took him to the capital. Nobody remembers who they were playing, maybe it was Almagro, but that day Central Córdoba won. 1–0. Goal from Trinche. We all want the stories to be true. Someone tells them so they must be true. Mustn’t they?
Trinche retired, but after three years of inactivity he returned to the field of play. It was 1986. He used to walk through matches but he could anticipate a pass long before anyone else. It was just one last season. For a few years he could be seen in the neighbourhood launching 40 yard passes and doing the occasional dribble.
Messi Page 39