Messi (63 page)

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 started 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.

Maradona left the
albiceleste
that summer. The eternal number 10 would have tried to make the final victory his, but he allowed the defeat to have other authors.

With Maradona, Leo had his worst ever goalscoring return: three goals in sixteen games. He had got almost nothing out of Messi, and exposed his inadequacies as a coach on the greatest stage of all. But this latest failure of the national team was interpreted as a general one: ‘Hang on, wasn’t Messi supposed to be a genius?’

The analysis was insulting and opportunistic. It was written and said that Leo should have lifted an average team to the category of world champions, but he was not capable of doing it, of repeating what Maradona had done.

Many in Argentina actually asked themselves if Maradona had wanted Messi to have a good World Cup. What a load of codswallop. Saying that ignores what these sportsmen are made of. But it is true that, having been able to study the way Leo was handled by Guardiola, and even Coco Basile or Pancho Ferraro, and how he worked with them,
el Pelusa
had still preferred Leo to triumph à la
Maradona, eventually making him play as an all-round midfielder, something Messi was not, and forgetting that conversation they’d had in Barcelona where the team for the World Cup was designed. A historic opportunity wasted.

‘Argentina was a little team from a city park,’
Goal.com
wrote. ‘The stupidities of Maradona were more powerful than the team. The stubbornness of Maradona not to recognise his mistakes took Argentina to the debacle.’
El Clarín
pursued the same idea: ‘Maradona never found the team. All the responsibility fell on Messi and he is not Maradona. The coach was inept. He didn’t put Messi on the box in South Africa, where he can hurt. The players discovered Father Christmas doesn’t exist – Maradona is not what they thought he was.’

Analysing the World Cup for
El País
, Leo bade farewell to the tournament in Germany: ‘[That was] something ugly that happened because of the way things turned out, the aim was to go further and we had the team to do it. We arrived at the World Cup in a bad state after qualifying by the skin of our teeth. In the World Cup I think that we had done things well until the Germany match. That was another kettle of fish. They were deserved winners given the way the game panned out; they scored very early and dominated the whole match: the truth is that it was a disappointment not to get further.’

The two World Cups and even the 2007 Copa América saw an inconsistent Leo. It would have been worse without him but clearly they had not managed to build a team that could get the most out of the most talented footballer of his generation. Messi instigated a footballing debate even before it became known that Maradona was not continuing as coach. ‘We have to start again from zero,’ he said. That might have been a prudent analysis of the situation but what really happened was that the World Cup in South Africa saw an increase in the split between the Argentine fans and Messi. And nobody was going to shut up about it: the flow of accusations continued, universal, unstinting. Leo did not stand up to be counted after the Germany defeat. If he had been earning euros, he would have played better. He did not celebrate goals with enough passion. He was arrogant. Cold-hearted. Protected by Grondona. Even autistic. All these things were said and written.