Messi (34 page)

Nereo Champagne; Ricardo Villalba, Ezequiel Garay, Lautaro Formica; Pablo Zabaleta, René Lima, Juan Manuel Torres, Matías Abelairas; Pablo Barrientos; Pablo Vitti, Ezequiel Lavezzi.

Manager: Hugo Tocalli.

Before the game it started to drizzle and in the first half Argentina were an overwhelming 4–0 ahead. It was time to bring on the boy.

‘He was a few metres away and I said to him: “Let’s go,”’ Salorio recalls. ‘He is sitting looking at me, as if to say: “Is it my turn then?” And I said. “What? Don’t you want to play, then?” He warmed up and started the second half.’

At half-time, Lavezzi and Abelairas came off, and Franco Miranda and Leo, with number 17 on his back, came onto the pitch.

‘They couldn’t stop him,’ Zabaleta says today. Leo made two assists. In the eightieth minute, with the score 6–0, he picked up the ball unmarked on the edge of the centre circle, in the opposition’s half. ‘It was an extraordinary piece of play, then and now,’ ‘the Professor’ recalls. ‘He dribbled past everyone. And I said: “we’ve got a star here.”’

Messi had set off in double-quick time, then, face to face with the keeper, wrong-footed him with a feint and found himself in front of an open goal. His first goal for Argentina.

In the end it was a convincing 8–0 victory. The match was shown on TyC Sports, but the recording was lost for many years. It was recently found and returned to the Argentine federation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrEF6Gnjgs

From that starting eleven, Ricardo Villalba was to make his debut for River Plate’s first team but he only played once for them. He tried his luck in the second division (with Rafaela, Defensa and Justicia) and later lower down (with Defensores de Belgrano in the Metropolitan B), before returning to the second division (with Aldosivi). René Lima, who came out of the junior ranks at River, went to Israel for a few months, and then jumped from club to club in the first and second divisions in Argentina before moving to Chile, where he now plays at Cobreloa. Franco Miranda played in Sweden and Scotland (with St Mirren) and now plays for Sportivo Belgrano. Matías Abelairas, who was replaced by Leo, plays for Puebla de Mexico, having moved there from Vasco de Gama. He was rejected by Glasgow Rangers after failing a trial with them. The road to the summit is littered with obstacles; for some, they are insurmountable.

The team then travelled to the Estádio Suppici in Colonia for the next friendly, this time against Uruguay. Leo came on at the start of the second half with the score at 1–1, thanks to a goal from Pablo Vitti. Messi scored twice (47th and 56th minutes) and played a big part in the fourth goal, as Salorio explains. ‘The keeper gave the ball to the left-back, Leo was about ten metres way. He got there first! Then he went past one, past the goalkeeper and he was left with a tiny space between the post and the goal line and so he just touched it back so Lavezzi could come in and stick it in. I said: “Whoa, we’ve got something amazing here …”’

The final 1–4 scoreline reflected the difference between the two sides. ‘This Messi is something special’ read the headlines on the sports paper
Olé
. ‘When we returned on the Buquebus to Argentina, I said to Leo that in December we would take him to train with us because we wanted to take him to the Sudamericano Championships in Colombia in 2005,’ says Tocalli.

That cold summer, Leo returned to Rosario to spend the rest of his holidays. He walked the streets without being recognised. They would be his last days of anonymity.

The Sudamericano Championships began on 13 February 2005 and the top four teams would compete in the following summer’s World Cup in Holland, and after those two friendlies, Messi was included in the final squad. He arrived in December to join up with the group with Barcelona’s permission (it was being played in the middle of the season), despite the fact that he had already made his debut with the first team two months earlier in a match against Espanyol. Zabaleta, captaining the side, was two years his senior and he soon got close to the new arrival, as it was his duty. ‘I sat down with him on one occasion to discuss what we had in mind, to ask him what he needed, to tell him that we were with him. And it was all short answers, he was the boy of the group.’

Pancho Ferraro, the coach of Gimnasia de Jujuy, took charge of the Under 20s from January after answering the call from José Pekerman, the new coach of the full side. In January he travelled to Colombia where he shared the bench with Tocalli, who continued as coach of the Under 20s before becoming Pekerman’s assistant. ‘That’s where I first saw Messi,’ says Ferraro. ‘In the first two
South American games against Venezuela and Bolivia, he was on the bench. The team was playing badly in the first halves but things changed in the second because Leo came on.’

‘The Flea’ did not have the same physique as the rest of them, they said. But he came on in the sixtieth minute against Venezuela and made it 2–0 (the final score was 3–0), winning the man of the match award. ‘But I never got hold of the ball,’ he was heard to say; he would have voted for Garay. Against Bolivia he came on at halftime for Barrientos. Five minutes into the second half he made a run from midfield going past everyone before scoring. Thirteen minutes later he scored again to make it 3–0 at the finish.

He was in the starting line-up for the next match against Peru, although this was the exception rather than the rule: he only featured from the start in three of the nine games. ‘He lacked intensity, the games were very demanding, some of the stadiums were at quite high altitude, and we realised that he was tiring a bit,’ remembers Tocalli. ‘Coming out for the second half, he caused havoc,’ Ferraro points out. Since he performed less well if he played from the start, Tocalli and Ferraro considered putting him back on the bench:

‘We went to get him. He was rooming with Lavezzi,’ remembers Pancho Ferraro. ‘In the room, Hugo told him what we had in mind and Messi thought it was a good idea. It didn’t upset him. On the contrary. “I planned to say the same thing to you”, he said. Sometimes you ask yourself how this type of player will take it. And it depends on how you speak to them. It depends how you sit them down, how you look them in the eye, and the words you use. Leo understood.’

The competition continued. Argentina had won four games and
drawn four. They had to play the last game against Brazil on 6 February. Victory would guarantee third place and qualification for the world championships in Holland. Leo came on for Neri Cardozo in the sixty-fifth minute with the sides level at 1–1. Barrientos put in a cross that Leo finished to make it 2–1, the winning goal, his first against a Brazil side that were going to finish top in any case. Colombia, with leading goal scorer Hugo Rodallega, were second and Argentina third.

Leo confirmed that he was now at the level that everyone thought he would be. He never doubted it but the impact he had made on the tournament made him want more. He was aware, though, that his body was putting limitations on him so he listened to the advice of Tocalli: ‘work with a personal trainer, like Ronaldinho’s.’

And he did exactly that on his return to Barcelona, sometimes in double sessions. Three months after becoming one of the movers and shakers of the Under 20 side, Leo scored his first goal for Barcelona in one of the nine games he played for the first team that season. The season was becoming one full of memorable events.

Before flying to the Netherlands for the world championships, Leo passed through Rosario and returned to the Newell’s ground for the first time in five years. Some people greeted him; not all of them knew him but those who did passed the word – ‘this is the kid who had to leave, the one from Barcelona’. They asked him about his new home, how were things going for him and about the national team. The Under 20 world championship had grabbed the attention of the Argentinian public. The team, which historically had performed well at this level with three victories in the last five competitions, were very powerful. They were going to Holland to win the title.

The competition actually has a very long and interesting tradition; it is the most important of all the tournaments for the younger ranks of international sides and a window on a host of new faces. It is hard to predict what will happen there: a substitute in a first game can very quickly become an automatic starter and end up the tournament’s best player, in what is often the best launching pad for great careers.

At the age of 18, Maradona led his Argentina side to its first
world Under 20 title in Japan. In Chile in 1987, Yugoslavia called upon the services of the likes of Robert Prosinecki, Zvonimir Boban and Davor Šuker. Portugal had the golden generation of Luis Figo, João Pinto and Rui Costa who were champions in 1991. And in 1997 France prepared for its attack on the World Cup with the launch of David Trezeguet and Thierry Henry, even though Pablo Aimar’s Argentina won the tournament. In 1999, the Spain of Xavi Hernández and Iker Casillas won the title: it was the sign of things to come. In 2001 Argentina won (with Javier Saviola starring) and Dani Alvés faced Andrés Iniesta in the final of 2003.

The fifteenth edition of the tournament was to take place in Holland between 10 June and 2 July. Spain had brought with them players like Fernando Llorente, Cesc, Albiol, José Enrique; Colombia had brought Falcao. Brazil had Rafinha (now with Bayern Munich) and a host of players who still play in their country’s domestic leagues.

Argentina gave Leo a few more days’ holiday because he was the only player coming from Europe, but he preferred to meet up with the group when the squad was called together. It may have seemed a minor detail but it was one, none the less, that was appreciated by his team-mates: the ‘we’re all the same’ approach is one of the best types of calling cards.

When Tocalli, Ferraro and Zabaleta saw Leo in the meeting prior to the side’s departure for Holland, they discovered a new Messi compared to the one of four months earlier. ‘We noticed a huge development in those months,’ remembers Pancho Ferraro, who would be the only coach of the Under 20s. ‘We noticed a Leo in much better physical shape,’ recalls Hugo Tocalli. ‘He was better armed. He was more resilient. We couldn’t forget that he was at Barcelona and he came to us with evidence of all the work he had done there on his physique, tactics and technique.’

He had taken another great leap forward, this time physically. At almost 18, he was 1.69 metres tall and weighed 64 kilos.

This was the Argentina squad for that tournament:

‘I like watching European football very much,’ remembers Gustavo Oberman. ‘Leo had made his debut with the Barcelona first team but he didn’t play a lot. I knew that. We’d seen him in the Sudamericano tournament, even though he’d had a lot of physical problems during that time, but the truth is, in the games he appeared in he earned the admiration of everyone: team-mates, press … They all said: is this the successor to Diego? Because at that time everyone was waiting for a successor to Maradona, someone that would fight him for his crown. We spoke about this among ourselves.’

Forty days of planning took place under the aegis of ‘Professor’ Salorio. He brought along books and films, invented new educational games and tried to spring surprises on his team every day to keep them motivated. But Salorio knew that the first hours were crucial; that’s when the pieces begin to fall into place, when personalities are studied, when people recognise each other, choose each other’s company.

Sergio Agüero, ‘
el Kun
’, the same age as Leo and from Independiente, wasn’t one for watching television or watching league matches that weren’t Argentinian, or for getting involved on the internet. He hadn’t paid much attention when Leo was being spoken of as the great prospect from Barcelona. During that first morning the group were at table having a meal together. Messi to the right of Agüero, and to the left of him Formica. Garay was facing them. They began to talk about football boots and Leo commented that a new boot had just come out in the USA, and stuff like that. Kun looked at him. And then he looked at him again. He asked himself, who is he? He had to find out.

‘I said this to Leo,’ Agüero recalls now, ‘and Leo remembers, eh!! He pisses himself laughing now. So … he looked at me and said “Lionel”, “Oh – I said – almost like me. And your surname?” “Messi,” he said. And of course I thought, “fine”, and then Formica
looks at me. “What?” I say. “What?? You don’t know who that is?” Afterwards I began to realise that I had heard about some player from Barcelona and thought to myself, “Oh, it’s him.”

‘Of course that was when we were eating,’ remembers Agüero laughing. ‘Later, when we were training, I said, “this guy flies”. And after that we used to piss ourselves laughing together, we got on really well and got together to room-share.’

Yes, they shared a room in that tournament. ‘I created the Kun–Messi mini society,’ explains Gerardo Salorio. ‘Why? For two reasons: they were the youngest with similar tastes (they were both brilliant at PlayStation) and also I thought I could prepare a double act for the future of Argentinian football.’