Messi (62 page)

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.

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.