Messi

by Guillem Balague

  The World Cup was a month away.

  This is how El País, from the other side of the ocean and with the impartiality that geographical distance gives you, analysed the Argentina team that was arriving in South Africa:

  Maradona waits for Messi.

  The coach entrusts the forward with the leadership of the albiceleste just like at Barça. Until now, the Flea has felt like a stranger in his national team.

  Will it be Maradona’s Argentina? Will it be Messi’s Argentina? Or maybe the magic of the World Cup will make the Argentine god and the best player in the world put aside their differences and triumph together. Their coexistence has gone down a rocky path until now. Argentina suffered like never before in the qualifying stage to get to the World Cup. The team was contorted and disorientated by Maradona’s changing and strange blackboard. His players saw him more as a reverential figure, the untouchable idol from their youth, than as a coach from whom they could learn tactics. Always crammed into his tracksuit, Maradona has previously shown himself to be brazenly headstrong in front of the microphones through his verbosity. A combination of his decisions from the bench, and the general chaos which the albiceleste’s style of play has become, has cost Messi more than anyone else. He is a superstar at Barcelona and a shadow of his usual self in the national team, because nobody plays the Barça symphony around him. There is no orchestra, only a group of soloists instead. They are always different because Maradona has moved heaven and earth from one call-up to another (even calling up players who were unable to play or injured).

  The Flea has even been attacked from home. The jeering has escalated because of the supposed lack of importance he attaches to his country since he packed his bags for the Camp Nou as a boy. While he is a symbol at Barça, Messi feels like a stranger with his national team. Maradona has not exactly made his life easier. Guardiola has freed Leo from all the chains and the little forward has erupted: 47 goals over the season, from the Ballon d’Or to the Golden Boot, squaring the circle. Maradona says that he will now copy the azulgrana model in search of the key to solve all his selection headaches. Argentina have played until now without style at Verón’s elephant pace. The list of attackers is scary, given that Agüero, Higuaín, Tévez, Diego Milito and even Palermo (included because of his miraculous goal against Peru) all appear alongside Messi. Two Champions League winners (Cambiasso and Zanetti) and Real Madrid’s Gago have fallen out of favour. Riquelme is nowhere to be seen either; he was the heart of the team until he got into a fight with el Pelusa which was never resolved.

  Maradona’s eagerness to be the protagonist threatens to eat Messi alive. The former likes to speak and wants to have the spotlights shine on him, whereas the latter is quiet off the pitch, but a beast on it. The country forgives Maradona’s faults in the same way that it demands more bite from Messi, as if the coach were the good guy and the forward the bad guy. Classes in school were suspended as televisions were switched on during the World Cup so that students could watch. On one side of the touchline is Maradona, on the other Messi. It has yet to be seen if they will share a victorious hug. It seems as if Maradona doesn’t want Messi to take his place on the altar of the supporters, as if his ego were still more important than the ball.

  Argentina hopes that the past and present will triumph together in South Africa.

  The first World Cup match was against Nigeria in a group that also included South Korea and Greece. In the pre-match press conference Maradona had said: ‘Argentina is still a Rolls-Royce but now it is driven by Messi.’

  The team had Leo behind Tévez and Higuaín, with the latter regularly floating out on the wing, with Verón, Mascherano and Di María protecting the back four and creating. Jonás Gutiérrez, an attacking wing-back, started at right-back.

  Very soon the best player in the world justified that title – Leo was without doubt the shining light, the best player on the pitch, perhaps, along with the Nigerian goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama who stopped everything except Gabriel Heinze’s header in the sixth minute. ‘The Flea’ was linking, shooting, crossing. He got past players, put pressure on Nigeria and managed to get eight shots in. He made more passes than any other player, but the two strikers had an off day.

  Maradona’s substitutions created confusion and suffering towards the end, the team fragmented and did not seem defensively solid. Everything was disguised, however, by the result, and the hug and handshake between Maradona and Leo at the end: Diego lifted him off the ground. He also kissed him twice.

  In the post-match press conference, Leo expressed his happiness: ‘It was a good match. I had a lot of freedom to move around and was very well supported by my team-mates. I had more touches of the ball. I dropped off a bit more than usual and I like that, because I have to participate in the build-up.’ Maradona enjoyed Leo’s happiness: ‘Leo enjoys himself with the ball at his feet, and as long as he enjoys himself, we all enjoy ourselves.’

  Against South Korea, Maradona took a further step towards making the most of Leo’s stupendous form. Javier Mascherano was asked to plug the gaps, with Leo positioned in front of him. Four players would feed off his inspiration: Maxi, Tévez, Di María and Higuaín, who scored a hat-trick. Leo was involved in all the goals in an emphatic 4–1 win, although the decision to move him further away from the box would have consequences after the end of tournament.

  Argentina had qualified for the last sixteen. A couple of matches would not suffice to bury the hatchet, but it did disarm many. When Leo was asked about what had happened during the previous months, he did not hide his feelings: ‘In the national team I was not the same, I was not who I was at Barcelona and I felt I had to do more. But I’ve always had Diego’s support and I changed all of that thanks to my team-mates’ confidence in me.’

  That support from Diego, logical in sporting terms, needs some clarification. Julio Grondona, who always believed in Messi, often reminded Maradona that he had to do with Leo what Bilardo did with him at the 1986 World Cup: make him feel number one, give him the captain’s armband. Of course, el Pelusa saw his new number 10 as a great footballer but he never dared state unequivocally that he was heading for a unique, insuperable status in history. That position was already occupied. Maybe he was the best in the world. At that point in time. And as a consequence he was making him the focal point of the team. But he was not willing to go any further.

  For whatever reason, and as early as 2008, Maradona had always preferred to highlight Messi’s defects, as when he said that Messi had to ‘decide for himself before the Olympics. It is time to become more of a man. It is a great opportunity to grow.’ Shortly after he was complaining about how Messi was still not the obvious leader: ‘I hope Leo changes his temperament, because I do not see him ready to go and fight for honours, to tell a team-mate something and motivate him or say to him “give it to me”. I hope that over time he gradually becomes more of a footballer, I hope that in two or three years we are able to say that Leo is the leader.’ In the midst of that verbal thrashing, Maradona went to the Olympics in Beijing as a spectator and visited his son-in-law, Sergio Agüero, who was sharing a room with Leo. Messi was never around whenever Diego arrived.

  Messages from Maradona came in the form of public gestures. In January 2009, in his first few months in charge of the national team, he went to the Calderón to see Atlético de Madrid vs Barcelona, a game in which Messi excelled. Maradona, in the stands, did not rise to applaud Leo’s stunning goal, a swift shimmy past the goalkeeper after starting with his back to goal and finishing with his right foot. Maradona then travelled to Portugal to see Benfica’s Ángel Di María. The winger also scored, a goal of less beauty than Leo’s, and the Argentine press pointed out el Pelusa’s reaction: he was photographed getting up to applaud when no one else did.

  After he was named national coach, Maradona gradually began admiring on the inside what he could not see on the outside. He started to discover that Leo was an ambitious player, with footballing knowledge, who was anxious to
be part of a national team, and that he wanted to offer the team everything he had – but he did not need to be a big mouth. Diego, remembering Grondona’s words, decided to reward Leo’s attitude now that he understood his personality a bit more.

  The day before the match against Greece that brought the group stage to a close, Maradona showed up in Leo’s room. He wanted to offer a helping hand to the group’s positive, mental state and offered Messi the captaincy. Emotional, even embarrassed, Leo accepted it.

  And he asked Juan Sebastián Verón, with whom ‘the Flea’ shared a room and who could not sleep because of Leo’s snoring, for advice. ‘I only saw him nervous once,’ remembers the veteran midfielder. ‘It was the day before the Greece match, when Maradona offered him the captain’s armband. But it was not the responsibility of leadership that made him uncomfortable; what kept him up was having to make a speech in front of his team-mates.’ As for the snoring, there was a solution according to Verón: ‘a few thumps with a pillow and job done.’

  It was cold the next morning. When the starting eleven formed a circle to listen to the new captain’s words just before the Greece game, Leo could not string a sentence together. Juan Sebastián shouted a few things out and the team jumped onto the pitch. Argentina, with a midfield of Bolatti, Verón, in his last game as a starter, and Messi, did not have to go into fifth gear to defeat a Greece team that tried to combat Maradona’s team physically. The final result was 2–0: Argentina went to the next round as group winners. Without setting the world alight but none the less operating effectively, the albiceleste were now to face Mexico, three days after Leo’s twenty-third birthday. Everybody celebrated his birthday but, to the chagrin of Carlos Tévez, nobody had remembered team-mate Javier Pastore’s four days earlier.

  It was time to loosen up the squad, a job belonging to the fitness coach and official loosen-upper, Fernando Signorini. He decided to hand out books. ‘Some looked at them, because obviously they are not the biggest readers. Mascherano would walk around with Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell, for example. And the gringo Heinze had grabbed hold of La sociedad de la nieve, the story of the Uruguayan boys who went down in a plane accident in the Andes. I gave Carlitos Tévez Las fuerzas morales by José Ingenieros as a present; he would walk around Ezeiza with the book under his arm.’ And Leo? ‘He was with Verón in their room, so they must have shared something or other.’ Messi has only ever opened two books in his life, the Bible, or so he said when he was 12, and Maradona’s biography, which he started but did not finish.

  What Signorini did discover was that Lionel was completely focused, despite the noise surrounding him. ‘I have a habit of doing the following: you go on the pitch and see a player coming towards you with the ball, calm, walking, and bam! I take it off him, or I feign to take the ball off him, and say: “You have to pay attention on the pitch.” One day training had finished and Leo was coming towards me with the ball. Walking straight at me, about thirty centimetres away. He started to look away and I moved quickly towards him, and bam! But Leo took the ball past me to one side before I got close to it! I didn’t say anything to him, but he had done me! Of course I wanted to get the ball off him. But I couldn’t; he was wide awake.’

  The last 16, Argentina vs Mexico.

  Maradona had split the team in two with Mascherano as the only pivot. It had worked till then, but the next opponents would be a greater challenge. The difficulties of creating chances started to become obvious with a constantly outnumbered midfield. Leo, again in that strange position as a midfielder in front of Mascherano, did what you tend to do in such cases: too much. Away from the box, he took charge of everything, he dropped too deep to look for the ball, and that damaged him physically and tactically. The Mexican coach Javier Aguirre managed to stop him and the team was running out of ideas. Leo looked to individual brilliance for the goal which still would not come but that did not work either.

  Argentina’s 3–1 victory had much to do with an error by referee Roberto Rosetti, who failed to see that Tévez was clearly offside for the first goal, and a Mexican defensive error for the second.

  Verón, who did not appear in the starting line-up, came on in the sixty-ninth minute at 3–0. He had fallen out of the team while el Pelusa accommodated Leo in the new game plan: the idea of having two strikers in front of him, which had been discussed in Barcelona, had become four. Instead of making the most of Leo’s speed in the final third, Diego wanted to convert him into a little Maradona. And in that equation Verón was superfluous.

  That night, Verón and Leo chatted in the hotel room. Now it was ‘the Flea’ who had to listen to his friend who felt distanced from the team’s centre of operations for no apparent reason.

  Practically none of the players left the Mexico game convinced of the merits of the system. It was said in the dressing room that things would have to improve against Germany.

  Fernando Signorini: ‘I remember that just before the start of the quarter-final against Germany, I went up to Leo and took his face in both my hands. I said to him: “Little Leo, don’t worry, you’re on the way to becoming the greatest of all time. Today the only thing that is asked of you is that you give your all and nothing else, because you’re incredibly young and you’re going to have other World Cups, so don’t worry about anything. And, as always, those outside are there and have to stay there, on the outside. Just focus on pleasing that group of seven or eight people who are the ones who will never fail you; play for them and play, especially, to have fun. Be happy, because if you’re not happy, if you don’t enjoy it, you can’t entertain anyone and it means you’re playing badly.” He had just turned twenty-three. We used to say with Diego that if our team started winning, it was very difficult for any team to come back. The problem would be if we went a goal down, because many of the lads were in great shape, but they lacked experience. We had Di María at twenty-one, Agüero at twenty-one, Higuaín at twenty-two, the same with Javier Pastore, Nicolás Otamendi …’

  The game was a disaster. Argentina were humiliated.

  Four years later, history would repeat itself against the same adversary. Germany had a new generation (Müller, Özil, Khedira) who were following Lahm, Podolski, Schweinsteiger and Klose’s lead. In the previous round, they knocked England out with an emphatic 4–1 win and in the quarter-finals they demolished the albiceleste with some electric play.

  A goal by Thomas Müller in the opening stages put Argentina in exactly the situation Diego feared. And where was Leo?

  Messi, who once again played with four target men in front of him and Mascherano protecting him, hardly got a kick in the first quarter of an hour. As he had been instructed, he went back to the centre circle to pick the ball up, and he was supposed to finish the move, too. He got lost in the dribble and the confusion, and the Germans did not even feel the need to foul him to stop him. He lost the ball twelve times and did not win it back once. An intelligent player, he found and created space but his team-mates did not see him.

  The German steamroller was unstoppable in the second half. Miroslav Klose and Arne Friedrich put the game out of reach for Maradona’s men after some great play by Schweinsteiger. They did not know how to respond to the challenges of the games. Messi was sent into a more attacking position right at the end. To see how it went. Too little, too late.

  Eighty-ninth minute. Klose finished off a counter-attack to make it 4–0. Messi, sunk, with his head down and a vacant stare, walked into the goalscorer’s path; it was his turn to be on the losing side once again.

  In the first big game at the World Cup, Argentina collapsed like the house of cards that it was.

  Barcelona’s 47-goal Messi ended up without a single goal in his five games. Despite being the player with the most shots, 30, and hitting the woodwork twice. In that World Cup, which belonged to Spain, to Iniesta, other big names disappointed, too: Wayne Rooney, Franck Ribéry, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kakà.

  Leo was inconsolable. Rage, frustration and pain all st
arted to boil up inside him as soon as the game finished. Maradona kissed and hugged him in front of the cameras on the pitch. Leo just stared into space.

  Seconds later, Fernando Signorini saw him collapse in the dressing room: ‘He died. He died. He wasn’t crying; he was shouting, hopeless.’

  ‘He was shouting, yes, yes, yes. It came out like … it was something he couldn’t avoid; it came from within him … I got hold of him, many times, but there was no way to stop it. He was like … in the dressing room, the benches were fixed to the wall, with gaps between them, and he was sitting in that gap, on the floor, with both legs together and flexed, not in the foetal position, slightly more stretched out, and shouting … he was almost convulsing.’

  ‘The atmosphere was dreadful … I said to them, “Nooo, that’s it, it’s over … Now go, meet your families and children, everything is okay, everything is wonderful, you gave it your all, don’t be too down about it.”’

  But Leo had died. Every defeat is a little death for him.

  An emotional Maradona told the press conference how Leo was crying disconsolately in the dressing room.

  ‘Bad, he was bad,’ remembers Bilardo. ‘I saw him cry. He was crying, he cries because he feels it. They say that this kid, with everything that he has, with the fame he has, doesn’t feel it. But that is not the case. Maradona, who had everything he had, always wanted to win. Leo, too.’

  That World Cup started with Maradona shouting in Montevideo (‘Suck it!’). A coach with a more serious attitude, wearing a grey suit, with a groomed beard, went to South Africa. He ended up sunk but defiant, with doubts about his future.