Barcelna's Messi's goals against Real Madrid in the Champions League were a product of his myriad talents.
BARCELONA, Spain — Given a rare night on the Barcelona bench last Sunday, Lionel Messi yanked on the seat in front of him, hunched his shoulders over the chair back and kicked it with his cleats. He seemed not so much the world’s best soccer player as a restless kid in a movie theater.
He is 23, with a grown-up’s income reported to exceed $43 million this year. Yet Messi still has a boy’s floppy bangs, a boy’s slight build and a boy’s nickname, the Flea. Even the ball stays on his feet like a shy child clinging to his father’s legs.
It is a boy’s fearlessness, enthusiasm, calm and humility, too, that help explain why Messi is already considered one of the greatest ever to play the world’s game. In the space of 18 tense days from April to early May, Barcelona played four Clásicos against its archrival, Real Madrid. The Madrid strategy was to strangle beauty out of the matches, to use nasty muscle against Messi, to shoulder him down or shiver him with a forearm or take his legs in scything tackles. Once, he was sent rolling as if he had caught fire.
Messi made small appeals for fairness with his eyes and hands, but he remained unflappable and without complaint. He did not yell at the referee or clamp a threatening hand around an opponent’s neck or fake a foul and dive to the ground. He remained apart from ugly words and scuffles and expulsions that marred the matches. Instead, he trumped cynicism with genius.
With a boy’s ardor, Messi put Barcelona in the final of the Champions League in Europe — the world’s most prestigious club tournament — to be played against Manchester United on Saturday at Wembley Stadium in London. He delivered both goals in Barcelona’s 2-0 victory in the first leg of the semifinal round against Real Madrid. This gave Messi a startling 52 goals in his first 50 matches of a season in which he also leads the Spanish league in assists. The first goal was merely outstanding in its timing and clever anticipation. The second a Masterpiece of acceleration, power, balance, agility, vision and darting virtuosity.
“I think this genius is impossible to describe,” Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s manager, said. “That’s why he is a genius. He has instinct. He loves to live with pressure. He is one of the best ever created.”
That defining Champions League semifinal match was played April 27 at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid. Nine months earlier, stars from Barcelona and Real Madrid joined to give Spain its first World Cup title. Together, they lifted the winner’s trophy in South Africa. But now they played for club, not country. Temporary brotherhood fissured. Blood rivalry resumed. Madrid, the capital, was once the base of Franco’s dictatorship and is now the seat of Spain’s constitutional monarchy; Barcelona sits in the heart of the autonomous Catalan region, with its own language and cultural (and soccer) identity.
An Argentine, Messi was not born into these tensions. He came to Barcelona at 13, when the club agreed to pick up the costs of treatment for a growth-hormone deficiency. As the story goes, his contract was written on a napkin. At the time, he was about 4 feet 7 inches. He now stands 5-7. If his lack of size made him shy and self-conscious as a boy, his low center of gravity made him spectacularly elusive as a soccer player.
“We thought he was mute,” said Gerard Piqué, the lanky Barcelona center back who played with Messi in the club’s youth academy. “He was in the dressing room, on the bench, just sitting. He said nothing to us for the first month. We traveled to Switzerland to play a tournament, and he started to talk and have fun. We thought it was another person. He was really good, but he was really small and thin. His legs were like fingers. One coach said, ‘Don’t try to tackle him strong, because maybe you will break him.’ And we said, ‘O.K., but don’t worry because we cannot catch him.’ ”
A decade later, Messi proved even more artful and cagey in the Champions League semifinals after the April match remained scoreless into the 76th minute. As Madrid sat and waited, Barcelona dominated possession with its elegant, patient attack, probing for an away goal that would serve as a tie breaker if needed in the home-and-home series. It was a format meant to encourage aggressiveness in visiting teams and to discourage them from turtling into a defensive shell.
An opening came soon enough. Madrid was vulnerable. In the 61st minute, it had been reduced to 10 men after Pepe, a defender, was red-carded for a cleats-up challenge on Barcelona’s right back, Dani Alves. Pushing into midfield, Pepe had been Madrid’s most effective marker of Messi in two earlier matches during the month, one a tie in a Spanish league game, the other a Real Madrid victory for the Spanish Cup (which was unceremoniously dropped under the team bus during the celebration). But this match was more important, a chance to play for the championship of Europe. Pepe’s eviction was a harsh blow that changed everything.
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