“For me, Pele is the best. Nobody has done more than Pele,” a 70-year-old gentleman told reporters in America this week when asked who was the finest footballer to have played the game. It sounded fair enough even if it was not easy to forgive the old man for his sin of referring to himself in the third person.
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| Lionel Messi |
Arsène Wenger, who has suffered at the Argentine’s balletic feet more than most, yesterday joined the throng who think Messi may ultimately be recognised as the greatest ever. “Yes, he is that good,” conceded the Arsenal manager after this time having the opportunity to enjoy Messi’s freakish dismantling of a Real Madrid team set up specifically to suffocate him.
The real crime of Wednesday’s ugly Clasico was that all the thuggery, feuding, cheating and cheap talk should overshadow Messi’s latest masterpiece. That this felony occurred was also partly down to the fact that even though the Argentine soared way above all the dross with two goals, the second of which could not have been conceived of and executed by anyone else, it somehow did not feel remotely surprising.
For Messi is making the incredible seem workaday. Why did it not take away our breath that he could slalom through four sentries and coolly slot past one of the world’s best keepers? Only because we had beheld it before from him. Over and over.
Yes, his statistics astonish – 99 goals since the start of last season – but more remarkable still has to be the high percentage of those strikes fashioned solely through his individual sorcery. He seems incapable of scoring ordinary goals.
We are lucky to live in an age where each gem is captured for posterity. So many of the wondrous offerings of past greats can be only the stuff of fond, sometimes imagined, memory, never immortalised on film. But Messi now has a veritable art gallery devoted to his oeuvre. It is football’s Louvre.
Of course, it is too early to call him the best ever, especially when some Cristiano Ronaldo fanciers, such as Sir Alex Ferguson, still think it is a toss up whether he is even the best of his generation. Surely, though, we can put that one to bed now.
Pele himself was quick to remind everyone this week that he was world champion at 17, won three World Cups and scored more than 1,200 goals, while Maradona could tell of how he single-footedly — er, and single-handedly — won a World Cup.
But that happened when he was 25 and Pele’s 1970 peak occurred as a 29 year-old. Messi, as his admiring coach Pep Guardiola pointed out, is only 23. “Outrageous,” he said.
And if he gets no better? No matter; that he remains the antidote to the sort of poison sloshing around on Wednesday is enough.
Ronaldo’s brilliance comes alongside an ego the size of Lisbon and he could pout and whinge for Portugal. But as Wenger yesterday noted of Messi: “He has mental qualities: humility, desire to play, happiness to help the team, always desire, you never see any bad reaction despite all the kicks he gets.
“When you look at the numbers, you have to kneel down and say they are fantastic. When a guy scores 52 and has 25 assists in a season, when it is so difficult to score a goal in modern football, you just have to say it is absolutely exceptional.”
So exceptional that you wonder what can stop his ascent. The retirement of his priceless assistant, Xavi? Or burnout? Remember, only two years ago Guardiola had to carefully ration Messi’s game time; now he seems to play every minute God sends with a work rate simply exhausting just to watch.
Indefatigable, but not indestructible. Wednesday left him nursing bruises and a micro muscle tear that will keep him out of Barça’s match tomorrow but hopefully not the Clasico finale in the Nou Camp.
Football should hope the physical pounding Messi is bound to endure during his quest to be the greatest will not interrupt this period of consistent individual excellence, now two years and counting. And, of course, let us pray he remains the sort who would never dream of talking about himself in the third person.
