Messi

by Guillem Balague

  (Fernando Signorini)

  And on the pitch, what unites them and what separates them?

  ‘Football-wise, they have nothing in common,’ says Hugo Tocalli. ‘Maradona was the conductor. Leo isn’t. They played in different positions – Messi is more of a player for the last third. And they are from two distinct eras.’ The role of the number 10 reflects the differences in football between the Eighties and today and goes a long way towards explaining what makes them different.

  Thirty years ago the number 10 was a symbolic figure, the conductor of the orchestra who gradually disappeared from the centre, before being seen in the 4-4-2 system that became all the rage, either situated on the wing, becoming a second forward off the main one, or dropping back as a defensive midfielder in front of the back four. It ceased to have the importance that it had had before, and the game suffered as a result. Then, with Pep Guardiola and the Spanish side, it reappeared but in a position further up the pitch, in its latest evolution: the target man disappeared and was replaced by a false nine.

  With much tighter, more together and more physical defences, the Maradona-like player who orchestrated things from the midfield can no longer exist. The centre of the action, the engine room of the team, moved closer to the box, in that position known as mediapunta in Spanish, or ‘in the hole’, from where the major influence on attacking play occurs today. Maradona would have been a Messi if he were to break through today. We’ll have to see if Leo, when he begins to lose his pace, can drop back and convert himself into the type of organiser that Maradona was. Many feel that this might be how he will evolve.

  The statistics favour Leo: at the age of 25 he had already won 21 titles compared to Maradona’s five (Pelé had won 18, including two World Cups). Leo passed the 311 club appearances and 34 international goals that Maradona scored before retiring at the age of 38, a long time ago. But that is clearly a reflection of the way they play – Leo spends a lot more time in or around the area than Diego did.

  In any case the stats count for little in this particular discussion: ‘In the confused comparison as to who is the best, Diego or Leo, Messi appears to be the perfect machine, capable of smashing all possible records, although realistically I don’t know if he will ever be able to entertain quite like Maradona.’ So says well-known Olé journalist Luis Calvano.

  As for the rest, this footballing tale is full of common myths. In the 1986 World Cup, so it is said, Maradona won the tournament practically single-handedly without playing in a side better than the Argentina of today. It is repeatedly written that he played for everyone in an eleven bursting with destroyers. The fact is that without Bilardo’s defensive system they would not have won the World Cup, and without intelligent players it is impossible to mount any sort of decent system. When Diego wasn’t playing well, the team supported him. Similarly, at Napoli and at Italia ’90, when Argentina were runners-up, Maradona had a good defensive structure protecting him.

  It is said that Barcelona play for Messi. They surround him with eight world champions as well as other extraordinary figures (Eto’o, Ronaldinho, Iniesta, Xavi, Busquets, Villa). But Barcelona without Messi would not have won as much, or as consistently: it would have been a great side but lacking its leading light, the killer, the assassin in the box.

  Time for a quick game: put a 25-year-old Maradona in Pep’s Barcelona team. Where would he play? Xavi or even Messi now occupies the space taken up by the number 10 of yesteryear. Diego had an explosiveness and skill that would allow him to play further up the pitch. He would bang in the goals. But these days players cover many more miles than in his era and, given his tendency to let himself go physically, he could find it difficult to keep up with the demanding rhythm of a whole season. And now imagine Messi in Maradona’s Napoli shirt. Up against those tough defences that opted for man-marking, his intelligence and efficiency would make him the star of the side. But the space, the tactics, even the ball is different, heavier; he may well have found it difficult to elude his rival.

  An entertaining, if ultimately pointless, exercise.

  ‘Of Pelé it can be said that he played in an era where footballers didn’t move and while I hope Messi takes Argentina to victory in the World Cup, it won’t be easy because he is known by everybody. In the last game against Milan they built a cage around him. He is a great lad, but I sincerely believe that I have been the greatest player in the history of the game until now.’

  Who said that? You got it – Maradona.

  With Diego ‘el Pelusa’ Maradona in charge of the national side a cycle came to an end. Four months after his first appearance as coach, Juan Román Riquelme, the then successful leader of Boca Juniors, retired from the national side claiming that he did not have ‘the same codes’ or ‘the same way of thinking’ as the coach. They could not carry on working together. Without actually saying as much, Riquelme was criticising the fact that things had been done badly: he found out on the radio that he was not going to be called up for a friendly, learned on television that Maradona was putting his place in the starting line-up in doubt because of the ‘physical problems’ that he seemed to be having at his club. ‘He’s of no use to me like that,’ Maradona had said publicly. But in his claims Riquelme was referring to something else: a group of players had received calls from the Maradona camp asking them to create a ‘difficult climate’ for the then Argentina manager Coco Basile, who had always protected Riquelme. If the conspiracy that the Boca footballer suspected was true, it had worked and now it was affecting him.

  The leadership was changing.

  With the World Cup a year away, Maradona stopped criticising ‘the Flea’ and turned his team’s attention to the Barcelona star to try to make the most of his talent. Maradona, a man prone to making public gestures, symbolically offered Leo the number 10 shirt for his first official game as coach against Venezuela, where victory was essential, not just for the purposes of classification but also to give credit to the new order. Leo wanted the emblematic number, but had not asked for it. When he accepted it, he already knew that Maradona had spoken to the captain Javier Mascherano and the veteran Verón about it. Both gave him the okay. ‘It would be an honour,’ he said in answer to Diego’s proposal.

  People were dreaming of and speculating about how the two of them would work together and things did indeed start well. ‘Seeing Messi like this every day is a pleasure. We should all leave the ground, pay again and come back in,’ said Maradona after a convincing 4–0 victory over Venezuela that saw a 21-year-old Messi at the centre of operations: he scored the first goal, provided the assist for the second and made the difference in an attack that included Carlos Tévez and Sergio Agüero. The number 10 shirt that had weighed so heavily on the shoulders of Ariel Ortega, Marcelo Gallardo, Pablo Aimar, Andrés D’Alessandro and Riquelme had a new owner. ‘It made me very happy that Diego gave me the number ten. The two shirts that I wore will be for my mother and my brother,’ explained Messi at the end of the game. The one that finished up in the hands of Matías Messi is now part of the museum that the city of Rosario is designing in homage to Leo and other sporting stars from the city.

  ‘Román is dead, long live Lionel,’ proclaimed the newspaper El Comercio.

  Long may he live and long may he survive. ‘Diego was worried that Leo would get kicked around, it’s the biggest worry you have with these kids who are crucial for the team,’ explains Signorini. ‘Because if you don’t have a figure like that in your squad, but rely on six or seven players who play more or less the same, well, one of them gets kicked, you stick on another. But Diego thought, whoa, if they break Leo then you’re left with nothing.’

  ‘In August 2009 we went to play a friendly in Russia,’ remembers Mascherano, ‘and Leo got injured the day before … and it was like someone had hit Diego over the head with a hammer. Maradona loved Leo. I think more than just love, it was almost like he had been rejuvenated, gone back thirty years, he could see himself in Leo. And anyway, on that day, he was de
ad. Diego went off by himself to the middle of the pitch while the doctors were checking Leo. And it was only a friendly! Maradona needed Leo.’

  After winning the first three games, including the one in Moscow (2–3) that Leo played no part in, Maradona’s side was humiliated 6–1 in La Paz by Bolivia which was explained in no small part by the altitude sickness that caused Leo to vomit. Maradona had taken part a year before in a match organised by the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, to call upon FIFA to end a ban on any match played at an altitude of more than 2,750 metres. He therefore let coach Fernando Signorini (‘It’s like an external doping’) and Leo (‘Personally, I think it’s impossible to play here, even though other players come here and play. Equally this can’t be used an excuse for the defeat’) explain the difficult conditions the team had faced.

  As early in his tenure as then, criticism of the Maradona regime was running deep. ‘Never before had he been so associated with football mistakes. He got it grossly wrong in the game plan,’ wrote Juan Pablo Varsky in Canchallena.com.

  Argentina were not playing well, but the confusing coaching was not helping either. ‘Maradona’s way was a total mess,’ says Cristina Cubero, who regularly attended Argentina matches. ‘Maradona was a great footballer but an appalling manager: tactics were never worked on, it was total anarchy. Training sessions were terrible, kickabouts without any corrections, order or organisation. A bit like touchy-touchy; you’ve seen how I touch the ball, no? Well, do the same.’

  Messi was not at his best either. Having been given the responsibility of leading the team, he kept trying too hard, looking too often for the individual move, appearing in the wrong part of the pitch. But not all was lost yet – qualification was still in Argentina’s hands.

  They scraped past Colombia and lost away to Ecuador, before facing Brazil in Rosario, a request by Messi that was respected. There were four games left and they had to win at least two of them. It was at the Rosario Central ground, the Gigante de Arroyito Stadium, and all his friends and family were there to see him. Brazil won by a comfortable 3–1 scoreline, a result that guaranteed their passage to the South Africa World Cup. The subsequent disapproval that followed showed no respect for past or present idols. Leo and Maradona both copped it. ‘In the battle of the “aces”, Kaká enjoyed himself and beat Messi,’ was the headline in El Clarín.

  Olé did not believe the Tévez−Messi partnership was working. ‘Tévez runs everywhere and clashes with Messi. That is why the Flea gets close to Verón, in a deeper position. And then Mascherano has got no space to distribute the ball. The team is a mess.’ Juan Pablo Varsky reflected on most commentators’ opinion of Leo: ‘They say he is a problem. He doesn’t play with anybody apart from Verón. In Barcelona he simply plays, here he is always expected to score the Getafe goal … He did not play well against Brazil. He wanted the ball but he rarely did what the move demanded. While the 10 of Argentina was playing for his prestige in every ball, the 10 of Brazil [Kaká] did everything in a simple way.’

  Another defeat, this time against Paraguay, left Argentina one place below where they needed to be to qualify. Olé had warned before the game that ‘so far Maradona has got it all wrong, he has not been able to hide his weaknesses as a national coach’. The same mistakes had been appearing regularly and were repeated against Paraguay (wrong tactics, too many players called up, wrong substitutions, inexplicable absences), but the sports newspaper also put the finger of blame on the players: ‘It is they who have to help Maradona.’

  Messi tried to run at defenders where he didn’t have to, didn’t keep the ball when it was the best option, was not sure what his role was, and, the worse the team played, the more he got it wrong in his search for the heroic series of dribbles. Leo was evidence that the team was less than the sum of its parts. In Guardiola’s historic Barcelona he had a team that strengthened his potential; in Argentina he had to save the side. ‘He plays everywhere and plays at nothing. Tévez and him don’t pass to each other,’ Mdzol.com wrote at the time.

  Former national coach César Luis Menotti was more understanding: ‘He is not a strategist, he finishes off the strategy. In Argentina, everything is confusion and he is caged in it. Messi, at Barcelona, plays; with the national team, he runs.’ Maradona asked him to play as he wanted, but did not create the necessary conditions for Leo’s football to shine; in any case, ‘the Flea’ knew he was failing to help and felt responsible for what was unfolding.

  But there was something that was hurting Leo and his family, to the extent that he was losing the hunger to play for his national team – the personal attacks. The online magazine ‘Minutouno.com’ published an article in October 2009 that explored the reasons for his bad performances and came to some astonishing conclusions. ‘The answer could be found in the emotional conflicts in the head of the player. Having left Argentina as a kid, psychologists believe he might feel a possible uprooting and resentment towards his country of origin. “Instead of getting upset with his parents, he takes the distress out on his nation,” the psychoanalyst Cristina Carrillo explains. “It is difficult for a child who grew up away from his country to connect amicably with it.”’ It was ‘difficult to defend the albiceleste shirt’ due to that ‘unresolved situation of his childhood’.

  Leo knew about what was being written, about these doubts. And they were making him irritable. He felt not just Argentinian, but very Argentinian. And yet playing for his country was becoming painful – there was no pleasure in it, only sacrifice as he was being punished by the press and fans, who identified the national team he was leading with failure.

  El Clarín’s headline after the Paraguay match was excruciating: ‘You cannot play any worse, Argentina’. The defeat meant Maradona’s cycle was defined by two victories and four defeats, the most negative stats in 25 years. There was only one way out of this mess: they had to beat Peru and Uruguay in the last two qualifying matches.

  Martín Palermo scored in injury time, and from an offside position, in torrential rain, when it looked as if Argentina might be out of the World Cup. The referee gave the goal and Maradona threw himself to the ground and slid along the grass on his knees in celebration.

  The sky-blue and whites also beat Uruguay. On the pitch of the Centenario Stadium in Montevideo, with a place in South Africa now assured, a completely wired Maradona screamed in the pouring rain ‘suck it, and keep on sucking!!’ at the press while he hugged technical coach Carlos Bilardo.

  The coach wanted his survival to be seen as a job well done, but the media preferred to focus instead on the poor play, the lack of a system, the unjustified changes in the starting eleven that were never repeated, and also on the revolving squad (55 players called up for 13 games). On this occasion Messi was not only criticised for his performance – he was taken to task by fans for not joining in the celebration of Mario Bolatti’s winning goal against Uruguay.

  In the Messi entourage none of that was easy to deal with. Why so much criticism, so much impatience? It was not just him who had played badly. Was it the challenge to the footballing legend that was Maradona’s? Jorge and Celia witnessed a morose 22-year-old Leo days after every call-up to the national squad. He hardly spoke, his conversations with his mother over the internet when he was back in Barcelona were monosyllabic and his father too failed to lift him from his melancholy. At times he walked like an old man, with his shoulders hunched. ‘If they carry on busting his balls, we’re not going back,’ a family member said at one point. No one likes to see their son suffer.

  Maradona was very aware of the situation and used press conferences to defend Leo. But he had to go further. Before getting to the World Cup, he needed to speak to Leo alone, to make him feel his support, his love. El Pelusa liked to say in his usual witty way that talking to Messi on the phone was ‘harder than speaking to Obama’, which he later changed to ‘harder than speaking to Cristina [Kirchner, Argentina’s president]’. Finally he decided to go to Barcelona.

  He did so at the
end of March 2010, a few months before the start of the World Cup.

  Maradona made his way to the training ground to say hello to Pep Guardiola, and later met up with Messi on his own at the Majestic Hotel. Leo listened to Diego and his manager, worried about how the team was playing, took a piece of paper and asked Messi to sketch out a system in which he would feel more comfortable playing. Leo, initially surprised, did nothing at first but Maradona insisted.

  Messi, who loves attacking teams, thought he knew what was going wrong with the national side. With the abundance of talent in the forward line, it was a question of getting the right mix to guarantee the best performance. And he could play in a position whereby he was instrumental in the creation of the play, but could also affect the result and score.

  Leo suggested dispensing with the 4-4-2 system that Maradona employed more often than not, with two wingers (Ángel Di María and Jonás Gutiérrez), two centre-midfielders (Mascherano and Verón) and two forwards (Messi and Higuaín). Instead, he suggested a 4-3-1-2 or a 3-4-1-2 system – effectively three up front, but with enough players to defend. Someone with lots of running in him, such as Jonás or Di María could be one of the wingers, going up and down to defend and to attack. Carlos Tévez and Gonzalo Higuaín could be the forwards. Leo would mix with the two up front, and the three or four midfielders who were protecting him. That way, he would always be close to the ball.

  Maradona agreed.

  Suddenly, Leo felt positive about the World Cup. Despite the difficulties of qualifying, he thought he and Diego had found some common ground. After Barcelona won the 2009−10 league title, the team went to celebrate with the fans at the Camp Nou. As tradition dictates, the players got hold of the microphone on the pitch to send the supporters a message. ‘Bona nit,’ Leo started his brief discourse in Catalan as the stands were chanting his name. ‘I am not going to say anything strange this year. Simply, thanks to everybody, visca el Barça, visca Catalunya, and ¡aguante Argentina, la concha de tu madre!’(Keep at it, Argentina, you bastard!), a war cry for his nation.