Lionel Messi, the mystery of being the best

By Sebastian Fest (dpa)

That is just how decisive Brazil 2014 is for the Argentine, who may get a second chance in Russia 2018 although he will be 31 by then.

“I want to win a World Cup. I will give everything to achieve that, because that is the only dream I have left in football,” Messi said just months ahead of the event in Brazil.

The Argentina team around him does not appear too solid so far, but the fact that Messi dreams of lifting the trophy on July 13 in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana stadium is very logical. He achieved every goal he set himself so far, so why not the World Cup?

Always small-built, strong of late and invariably shy, Messi is not just the closest real life can get to a Play Station player come true, but also a man who lives, dreams and eats football. One could almost say that he would hardly exist as a person without a ball.

Messi did not have it easy to become what he currently is, a superstar player at Barcelona, a team who produced over five years the best football anyone has seen in a couple of generations.

His father, Jorge, took him away from his native Rosario so he could try his luck at Barcelona when he was barely 13. Messi shed countless tears in those days, when he also had daily injections of a growth hormone prescribed by his doctors. He was so small and weak that many sneered when they heard talk of his future as a footballer.

When he arrived in Spain, his skills turned against him, with contemptuous comments at youth tournaments about him being a “futsal player.” A little over a decade after that, Messi had won anything one could ever win at the club level.

In spite of that, however, his obsession remains to succeed at the helm of the Argentine national team.

That is a striking obsession, because Messi has spent more than half his life in Spain, looking out onto a blue Mediterranean that has little to do with the brown water of Rosario’s Parana river.

Some invisible yet powerful thread clearly ties Messi to his birthplace, because he has become more and more of an Argentine over time. There is not a trace of a Spanish accent in the few words he ever utters, least of all a wink to Catalan, the language that many staunchly stand up for in the region around Barcelona.

“Messi does not speak Argentine Spanish… He speaks Rosario Spanish!” says Josep Maria Minguella.

Minguella is a crucial man in the history of Spanish football: it was indeed he who led Messi to Barcelona, but 20 years earlier he had done the same with Diego Maradona.

Maradona is a key element to understand Argentine idiosyncrasies, but also to understand Messi.

The man on whom a whole nation’s football hopes currently rest was born one year after Maradona led Argentina to the World Cup title in Mexico 1986, after scoring against England what is arguably the best goal of all time. That, in turn, happened barely four years after the Argentine defeat to Britain in the Falklands War.

Football, war, epic, revenge … Maradona could do it all and, more importantly, he enjoyed it all. Messi, however, was paralyzed when Maradona, by then Argentina’s coach, made him team captain in South Africa 2010 for the match against Greece.

He needed to address his team-mates in the changing-room, and Messi shies away from speeches and public exposure just as much as Maradona enjoys them. They are two extremes of Argentine nature.

Messi would always rather play football, and according to anyone who has ever played against him, he does that extremely well.

“His best weapon is the control he has on the ball, he is very fast with the ball at his feet,” Spanish defender Asier del Horno, whom Messi drove crazy during a Barcelona-Chelsea clash, once said.

“He loves to disappear so he can re-emerge better. He goes to one side of the pitch with his head down, he lets people forget about him, and suddenly he accelerates,” former Argentina youth teams coach Hugo Tocalli explained.

“You think he is somewhere else, and he appears right in your face. It is something scary and wonderful at the same time,” French defender Jean-Alain Boumsong graphically put it.

“He has magical powers,” Brazil right back Dani Alves, one of Messi’s best friends at Barcelona, once told dpa.

Naturally left-footed, Messi can also score great goals with his right foot, his head – as Edwin van der Sar knows, – his chest or, as he once did on a cold night against Espanyol, with his fist wrapped in a black glove.

Antonella Roccuzzo, a cousin of one of his best friends, has been his partner for years and is the mother of his son Thiago, who was born in late 2012.

The fact that Messi hardly speaks at all and that his face sometimes appears not to convey any expression does not mean that he lacks character.

Josep Guardiola, precisely the man who got the best performances out of the Argentine, got a taste of that character. Over four years at the helm as Barcelona coach, Guardiola changed Messi’s diet – the youngster used to snub fish and salads and loved Coca Cola – and led him to become a more complete, tactically intelligent player.

However, right at the start, Guardiola noticed he stood before a special boy: beyond insisting that he “always” had to play, Messi texted him from the bus they shared a message saying he was uncomfortable with Zlatan Ibrahimovic as Barcelona’s centre-forward. Months later the Swede left the club.

Juanjo Brau, the physical trainer who made Messi’s body resistant and turned his muscles and ligaments into solid parts to leave behind a record of frequent injuries in his first few years as a professional footballer, also got a glimpse of the striker’s character.

Brau did something that Messi did not like, and the Argentine did not hesitate to turn away from him. Soon after that, he suffered an injury, which he had not done for a long time. He was sidelined for two months in late 2013. That seemed like a small tragedy, but Messi came back refreshed to let Barcelona and Argentine fans dream on.

However, some other mysterious thing happened, and Messi’s play shrank over eight shocking days in April, taking Barcelona down with it.

Is Messi preserving himself for the World Cup? Is that really all he cares about? That is precisely the hope that bewildered, disoriented Argentine football fans are holding on to.