Of all the ways in which the various World Cup disappointments that the Barcelona squad felt were processed, perhaps none was more instructive than Ronaldinho and Messi’s approach.
Observers close to Messi worried that Messi’s peripheral involvement could have damaged the young man mentally. But, far from pushing the self-destruct button, Messi threw himself fully into the next stage of his career and, from adversity, Messi drew strength, his presence and importance in FC Barcelona growing in the season 2006–7. The Brazilian, meanwhile, never really seemed the same after becoming something of a scapegoat for his country’s failure.
By contrast, Messi’s star continued to be on the ascendancy, even if FC Barcelona entered a period of decline, signalled by a 2–0 defeat by Fabio Capello’s Real Madrid at the Bernabéu in the first Clásico of the 2006–7 season, in October. During that campaign, Messi scored seventeen goals in thirty-six games. Looking back on those goals now, it still often appears as if the groundsman’s teenage son has wandered on to the pitch. He still seems adolescent, loping, his hair permanently in his eyes. Even the lightning-fast changes of direction seem to carry a sulkiness. But if physically he still seems undeveloped, his brain is clearly on a different level from almost everyone around him. His opponents seem several moves behind him, chasing shadows. He can often be seen pointing where he wants the ball played by a teammate, opening his body to say ‘here’. When it comes to scoring the goals, it is the coolness that marks him out; he often simply sidefoots the ball past the goalkeeper. Again and again, he pops up on that right-hand side of the penalty area, sweeping the ball into the net with his left foot.
However, there were still peaks and troughs. He continued to be plagued by major injuries, and a metatarsal fracture sustained on 12 November 2006 kept him out of action for three months. He recovered in time for the last sixteen of the Champions League against Liverpool, but he was effectively marked out of the game; in early March 2007 Barcelona, the reigning champions, went crashing out of the competition. In La Liga, his goal contribution actually increased towards the end of the season: eleven of his fourteen goals came from the last thirteen games. On 10 March 2007, at the Nou Camp, he scored his first hat-trick in a Clásico. Spain’s big two approached the game with every reason to feel demoralized after getting knocked out of the Champions League. But instead the players, with Messi the best among them, seemed to find renewed energy in what – against all odds – turned into one of the more exciting Clásicos of the modern era.
The word before the match was that these were two teams in a funk, but the game began with three goals in the first fifteen minutes. Ruud van Nistelrooy powered in a deflected cross from just outside the box for Real, only for Messi to sneak in wide on the right and side-foot an equalizer. Then a foul on Guti in the penalty area allowed van Nistelrooy to score from the spot. Another loose ball in the box allowed Messi to crash the ball into the roof of the net for his second. Both keepers were on brilliant form, making world-class stops throughout. It seemed a game-changer, if not game-ender, when Barça’s young homegrown defender Oleguer was sent off just before half-time for a second yellow card.
Rijkaard removed Eto’o and played with only two forwards, an off-form Ronaldinho and Messi. Madrid dominated the second half and seemed set for victory when the gloriously sweat-banded Sergio Ramos leapt highest and headed their third. But Barcelona came again, and Messi salvaged the draw in stoppage time with a wonderful strike. Ronaldinho wriggled clear on the left, turning inside and holding several challenges off before curling the ball infield with his right foot. Without breaking stride, with quick feet, perfect balance, and a disarmingly cool head, Messi collected the ball five yards outside the penalty area, burst past Helguera and the final despairing lurch of Sergio Ramos and then hit the ball low to the left of Casillas. As the ball goes in, even Capello can be seen acknowledging the goal, shaking his hands together in admiration.
For all the gloomy pre-match forecasts, this Clásico had turned into a scorcher, with three goals in the opening quarter of an hour, a red card and penalty, and thirty more shots at goal, including Messi’s third on the brink of full time.
At aged nineteen, Messi had yet to shrug off the nickname El Mudo – ‘the mute one’ – with which he’d been dubbed by some of his less respectful colleagues in Barcelona’s youth team. There was no doubting the accolades after this match, though. Just one word, ‘MESSI’, splashed repeatedly across the front pages of the sports media in Barcelona. No one was in any doubt, in Catalonia at least, that he was well on his way to being the best player in the club’s history. The headline in the Madrid sports daily AS proclaimed, ‘¡Viva el fútbol!’ Messi was the main cause for celebration, much against the tribal instincts of most Madrid fans.
The point earned was enough to send Barça top that night. It was also the catalyst for a run of ten wins from the last twelve La Liga games of the season for Real Madrid. The two sides finished level on points, seventy-six apiece, but the draw at the Nou Camp (coupled with Real winning on home soil earlier that season) meant the Bernabéu club were crowned champions on the head-to-head ruling.
But with Ronaldinho in decline, and Eto’o now considered the third-choice striker by Rijkaard, it seemed that the Messi era at FC Barcelona was well under way. That March, the club had declared their long-term faith in him, and put a new value on him as their key player when he signed a seven-year contract which increased his salary over the period from €1.7 million to €6.5 million, with a €150 million release clause.
The following month he had immediately dispelled any doubt that he might not be worth it, scoring a spectacular goal in the first leg of a semi-final Copa del Rey encounter against Getafe at the Nou Camp. To those Barça fans who claimed that Messi was on his way to becoming the new Diego Maradona, he seemed to provide a watertight case – with a near carbon copy of one of the greatest goals in World Cup history. The similarity between Messi’s strike against Getafe and Maradona’s run through the England defence in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup seemed only too apparent but, just in case, Catalan television played them side by side on a split screen.
Messi, still only nineteen, picked up the ball inside his own half and, keeping it so close to his boots as to make it seem glued, proceeded to carve his way through the Getafe side, with the effortless movement of a racing skier in a slalom. A series of swerves and feints beat five defenders – Paredes, Nacho, Alexis, Belenguer, García – and finally the goalkeeper, Redondo. The goal became the talk of world football.
‘It seemed a hybrid had been born: Diego Messi or Leo Maradona,’ wrote the doyen of British La Liga commentators Sid Lowe.1 ‘So, you can copy a work of art, after all,’ wrote the widely respected Spanish football writer for AS, Alfredo Relaño. He compared Messi to Elmyr de Hory, who forged famous paintings but always put the signature upside down. ‘This was a replica, with the same path, the same acceleration with every touch, the same pauses and feints, always escaping on the same side. The only difference was Messi finishing with his right foot – that was the upside-down signature,’ Relaño wrote.2
And yet, for all the hype, commentators seemed to have overlooked how the two goals were separated by the very different context and circumstances in which they were played. Messi’s goal came in a one-sided match between Barça and one of the lesser clubs of La Liga. The event was a semi-final tie of the King’s Cup, a tournament that – for political reasons – many of the more radical Catalan nationalist Barça fans refused to recognize or get too excited about.
As Maradona himself would argue, the challenge he had faced in 1986 had been much greater: a World Cup quarter-final against a decent English side with the memory of the Falklands War still fresh in the competing national psyches. Maradona was determined to avenge his country’s humiliating defeat, and the deaths of hundreds of young Argentine soldiers. It gave the occasion in the Azteca stadium a huge emotional, cultural and political charge, as well as a sporting one, and dwarfs that game against Getafe.
In fairness, while the Getafe goal has a huge following on YouTube and has often been used as an example of Messi at his best, it is worth recognizing, as Guillem Balagué has done, that Messi scored that goal hundreds of times when he was in the lower ranks and in the Barcelona B team, and after the Getafe game went on showing his ability to break from deep and run with the ball, dribbling past whatever came in his path, up to and including the goalkeeper on a good day, often against much tougher competition. What that goal in Getafe displayed was skill, conviction and authority of a kind that left everyone watching with the sense that there was nothing even the best of defences could do to stop such a player in such form. It is an enduring example of football played at its best.
Around the world, articles were written about the boy from Rosario, this ‘flea’, this ‘devil’, this ‘anti-Beckham’. He was a man without tattoos or piercings, who turned up to interviews in clothes that appeared to be borrowed from an elder relative, but of whom Samuel Eto’o said that watching him play was like watching a cartoon, while his Argentina teammate Gabriel Milito described him as unlike any other player in the world.
When asked if he aspired to be the best player in the world, Messi replied: ‘Well . . . it would be nice, but it’s not an obsession.’