Messi (91 page)

At that moment Argentinian society became reconciled with Leo.

Victories followed for the
albiceleste
in Chile and Paraguay, and they were also unbeaten in Quito and La Paz, four matches which had ended in defeat in qualifying for the World Cup in South Africa.

‘Until that moment there was no definition of his role on the pitch,’ explains Salorio. ‘Now he has a fixed position. I don’t like it when he has to go so deep to get the ball, that’s why Gago is a great
team-mate to have. I’ve always said that the difference between Barcelona and Argentina is that Barcelona have Frank Sinatra with good musicians. Argentina didn’t used to have good musicians for Frank Sinatra. But now they are assembling them.’

The year 2012 continued in the same vein. In those 12 months, Leo scored 12 goals, equalling Batistuta’s record, although the latter did it in a World Cup year. And he bagged a hat-trick in a friendly against Brazil in June. For the first he finished a counter-attack after Higuaín had stolen the ball, the second after a one-two with Di María. And his hat-trick was completed with a belter from outside the area that made it 4–3 six minutes from the end, after a run similar to the Getafe one, but without opposing players in his way.

The match against Venezuela, played at River’s stadium in March 2013, cleared up any doubts, if there were any left that is. It was a sell-out. The thousands of number 10 Messi shirts were streaming to the stadium in Buenos Aires to celebrate the fact that the national team could call on the best in the world. It became the popular proclamation of the new guide.

In the stands there were banners saluting him. ‘Raise hell, Messi’, ‘
Messiento enamorado
’ (I feel in love), ‘Leo Messi, national pride’ and ‘God and the Messias’.

In order to commemorate his 100th cap, the Argentine Football Association set up a tribute that day. It was very discreet. A plaque, applause after the announcement over the tannoy. Eighty-one-year old president Julio Grondona kissed Leo Messi, the player to whom he offered the national team, or at least that is how he will want the story to be written. And then the match.

La Monumental rose to its feet every time he embarked on one of his runs.

And suddenly a chant went up that had belonged to Diego Maradona until then. ‘Come, come, sing with me, you’ll find a friend, Lionel Messi, who will hold your hand and we all spin around.’ The hand referred to is Maradona’s infamous ‘hand of God’ against England.

Leo’s name was chanted on four occasions.

The victory was even more convincing in its performance than the score line suggests, a 3–0 win with a penalty scored by ‘the Flea’ and a Higuaín brace following two Leo assists, the kind of
eye-of-the-needle passes that you need to see on the replay on television.

At 25 years old, Messi had won the fans’ complete and utter admiration.

One small detail that perhaps defined the group was observed on the pitch when they were just about to qualify for the World Cup in Brazil. From time to time, the ball would pass within a few metres of Messi and he would not go for it. He was allowed to do this. He had permission to reserve his energy and focus on his game with the ball, and he could choose when he wanted to press. ‘With another technical team or at another time, he would have tried to be Messi for the whole first ten minutes and then he would have burnt out for good,’ believes Eduardo Sacheri. ‘It seems to me that Messi feels happy in the national team these days, as he has never felt before. And at last we are capable of accepting that we were the problem, not Messi.’

Leo had improved his team contribution under Sabella; the problem did not exist previously, only in the stands, on the bench or in the media. ‘I knew that I wasn’t performing well for the national team, but I wasn’t the only one,’ said Leo Messi in March 2013. ‘The national team wasn’t performing. The people or the press expected me to go and win games single-handedly, and that has never happened in any team. I knew I wasn’t at my best and I didn’t want that.’

His performances under Sabella (20 goals in 22 games, where under previous coaches he had scored 17 in 61) matched those of the team – Leo, Di María, Higuaín and Agüero have scored 90 per cent of Argentina’s goals in qualifying.

The new manager, ‘the Flea’ confirmed, had helped. It was ‘an important change in the way of constructing the team, of positioning ourselves on the pitch and organising the unit tactically’. And Sabella himself made his own contribution to the folklore by coming up with a new adjective to define the striker:
immessionante
(a combination in Spanish of the words Messi and impressive). It has now been included in the 2013 edition of the
Santillana
dictionary.

Qualification for the World Cup was sealed with a 5–2 thrashing of Paraguay, two Messi goals nonetheless leaving some question
marks over the defence’s fragility. The nation started to imagine a good World Cup. At the back of the room full of ecstatic and expectant Argentinians, a veteran of other battles, Fernando Signorini, was sitting on a chair with his legs crossed. The national team’s physical trainer in South Africa has a few words of warning.

‘One worry is the large number of matches they make him play, because that wears out his system,’ he says. ‘I hope they leave him in peace so he can go sunbathing with his wife for a week to recharge his batteries, because if not, he will be as he was in South Africa, where he arrived after sixty-something matches, playing all of them till the end. And then add to that the training with the national team; you don’t give them much to do but you still have to exercise – which means you continue getting tired. It’s impossible for a thoroughbred to set records at the San Isidro horse racing track every Sunday. The authorities should show greater respect to the player and fans, who want a proper show with fit athletes.’

Signorini tells how one day, at the time when they were both in Maradona’s team, he convinced him not to play a match, a friendly against the Catalonia national team. And that is not easy to do.

‘I knew he would arrive tired and who knows just how tired. And then, I spoke to Diego and said to him: “Leo must not play in this match. What does he represent to us? Another $200,000 for the Argentine Football Association? Well, it doesn’t come down to the AFA here. We have to think about the human being, too.”

‘So I said to a member of the technical team: “when Leo arrives, send him to my room.” And he came. As soon as he came in, I said to him:

‘I ruffled his hair, and then he left. Like a little child, Leo! And
everybody was giving him advice. But who the hell has lived through what he has to be in a position to advise him?!’

The idea of not winning in Brazil does not come into Leo’s head; he denies that possibility as he used to deny not getting into the Barcelona first team. It eats away at him that, although he feels he is number one, he thinks he has not yet made history. And he is possibly still clearing up an old doubt: that of feeling accepted.

‘And if we come back after the quarter-finals, they will lambast him again,’ reflects Sacheri. ‘Unless he performs any number of unusual magic tricks but we still lose, but even then … And if he wins, maybe Diego will move aside for him. Or we put both of them on the altar, father and son. The advantage of Christianity is that way we can love more than one divine personality.’

Now that Messi has got used to being Messi, his goal is to win the World Cup.

As if it were written in the stars.

  
4
  

Thiago: The Definitive 10

L
eo runs another risk, adds Fernando Signorini. ‘Atahualpa Yupanqui used to say: “vanity is a human weed that poisons every garden.”’ What he is referring to is that, in Argentina, if you are successful they pump ‘vanity into your veins’. Signorini says Leo cannot take that risk. ‘In reality I would like him not to come to Argentina too often, or at least just enough time for him to enjoy it without losing any of his spontaneity and freshness. Look at what Diego is going through, the hell they are forcing him to live through. He is a prisoner of having made so many people happy through his talent.’

Faced with the possibility of winning a World Cup and the pressure of compensating for the many deficiencies in Argentinian life by being the ‘star’ the people need him to be, Signorini offers some advice: ‘He has to make the family his rock. Now it is him, his girlfriend, his son and the children to come. Everything else is superficial. He’s fantastic, and she is, too; I met her and they seem to make a great couple, the type who bring a smile to your face and make you say: “Look at how sweet they are. They get on so well and to think of what they have to deal with …”’

There remain so many challenges for Leo … A new Ballon d’Or, for example. Every year he will carry on receiving calls from clubs run by multimillionaires, all of whose offers have been rejected until now. The doubt may remain whether Leo would ever try his luck in England, home of the most entertaining and richest league in the world, if the weather conditions were different: both Manchester
City and Chelsea have been showing interest for years. Nevertheless, after Inter’s attempt years ago, there has never been any real possibility of Leo leaving Barcelona.

Although his relationship with Sandro Rosell is not as smooth as the one he had with Joan Laporta, it continues to be a more or less well-matched marriage. And a necessary one: Leo must feel comfortable in order to give the best of himself; and Barcelona are willing to continue pleasing their star in order to keep growing, until Leo says enough.

Will it be Leo or his body that shows the first signs of decline? A new study claims that a child who specialises in sports before the age of 15 increases the risk of injury and exhaustion by one and a half times. It is an old theory: Adriano, Robinho, Kakà, Owen, Cassano, Ronaldinho … they were all at the top of the footballing world, but they could not maintain that highly competitive level for very long.

They were overwhelmed by the success, and proved incapable of living with it.

Burnout syndrome, defined initially by Freudenberger during the Seventies, is more psychological than physical, an imbalance between perceived demands by the player and his ability to meet them. And that fire that consumes and burns, gradually swallows up his motivation.

Messi has always been capable of responding to new challenges, and handling what has been thrown at him, but at some point he will need to change his thoughts and beliefs about reality. ‘His mental training will become more important than physical, technical or tactical training,’ explains trainer Pedro Gómez. ‘His own motivation will be his real engine. Long may he continue playing as if he were a boy!’

Charly Rexach masterfully explains the footballer’s transformation. ‘You don’t start to dip until twenty-nine or thirty, so he still has a few years left yet, but you suddenly take longer to recover from each match. And there is another effect which is worse than the physical one: you enjoy yourself less and less, they don’t let you enjoy yourself. At twenty years old, you play with freedom, you mess around as much as you want. You are gradually given the responsibility to decide matches, you have to win them yourself.
And then another phase arrives, the one when you’re 3–0 up, you’ve scored one or two, and the coach takes you off in the second half, because the match that needs to be won is the next one. Even if you complain and say you want to play more for fun, the coach tells you that you can’t, someone else will have fun. So as you get older, you only play to win.’

Then they will start to take the ball off Leo. And then begin to keep him away from it.

‘There is more and more responsibility and it is more and more difficult to maintain the level,’ reflects Rexach. ‘Messi has taken on that responsibility and embraces it. But he also needs others who can take over, to bag the goals if he isn’t there, so that we are ahead when he comes back: these days you suffer three defeats and you can lose a league.’

‘I dare say he will have to make a change,’ says the former Argentina twenty-eight, ‘something changed in my head, making me want to be a coach. I see that he’s always going to want to play. And he’ll be thirty-three, thirty-four and will still want to carry on playing. But he will have to prepare himself for it, over the years, not now, but later on, to see what he likes.’

In April 2013, Jorge Messi explained in
Kicker
what he imagines that transformation on the pitch will consist of: ‘I can see him playing deeper, as a playmaker, something that he already does from time to time at Barça. He starts off many passages of play from deep.’

Pep Guardiola trusts Leo’s intelligence and intuition to make the next step. ‘Central midfielder? No. Well, I don’t know. It’s an option I guess. I just know that if he’s tip-top, his team will always be the favourite to win any match he plays in until the day he retires. When he is on form. Obviously you can’t be at the top level for eleven months a year for fifteen to twenty years of a sporting career. But if he gets it into his head that he is fit enough, no team can stop him.’

The tactical change, his new evolution, is also a result of progress by opposing teams that are very compact in the middle so that Messi cannot cause damage. He is at his physical peak, it is his best sporting moment, you cannot speak about physical decline, but traps are being placed in front of him so that he cannot develop his game. Maybe it is time he made the most of the fear that he strikes into rivals by looking for his team-mates, not just to use them for
one-twos and finish the play, but so he can become a false number 10. As his father says, the evolution of the man who inspires and creates for the team has already begun. For it to be effective,
el Tata
Martino will also have to adjust the Barcelona set-up.