Messi (27 page)

In one Junior game, Messi performed a
sombrero
on a defender, a little touch that flicked the ball over his opponent, only for the player to catch the ball, whispering under his breath, ‘you little bastard’, something that goes against all the rules. ‘I’m a bastard? I’m a bastard?’ Leo screamed and he had to be calmed down. That particular gene, the one that, at the age of three, caused him to throw the cards away when he lost playing with his family, has never left him.

Again, with the passing of time, protection gradually developed into respect. Leo learned where he stood with his group and in the club, and continued to win their confidence. And they knew, as footballers, that they couldn’t put the boot in training because they could not afford to lose the one player who was helping them win games. ‘It wasn’t like at the beginning when Cesc wanted to kill him because he realised he couldn’t stop him,’ Vázquez analyses. ‘He began to be the Leo Messi we know today, the bloke who scores you fifty goals a season, and you’d better look after him. He had won the respect of everyone.’

‘The loneliness he suffered was something we only became aware of much later,’ Cesc recognises. ‘We knew he was a boy who lived
with his father and who missed his family a great deal. We knew that because the coaches told us, not because he told us. At that time we were at the stage where football either went well for you or it didn’t. So we were all too preoccupied trying to make the grade. We didn’t have the time or the inclination to be too aware of what Leo was doing or was going through.

‘I know he spent hours on messenger, on the internet, and didn’t do much on the studying front …’ But did he go to school? ‘Yes, yes, he went. I don’t know if he just painted or did drawings, but he went …’ Cesc jokes about this, but for Leo and many of his team-mates school would soon become an intolerable nuisance.

‘He was with us at La Masía school,’ says Víctor Vázquez. ‘But half the time he never turned up because he didn’t like studying. Mind you, none of us did!’ The nine o’clock bus that would take them to the Lleó XIII school on Avenida Tibidabo would arrive and more than once neither Víctor nor Leo was aboard. The fact is they found school boring. ‘We’d get there and we’d put on our music, or talk, or play with our mobiles, sometimes joke with the girls, there were girls from tennis and basketball clubs. We’d flick little balls of paper, jokey notes … and if Leo was there we’d try to include him, but Leo was always very shy, he always stuck himself in the corner. I’d go with him and say: “right, let’s do such and such.” Or we’d play noughts and crosses, or some other game, while they would be trying to teach us. The teacher would see us and say: “right! You two. Sit apart from the rest, and do what you want but stop taking the piss!”’ Víctor laughs. ‘So we’d put on our music, open a book to make it look like we were studying, just in case one of the school directors came in, and that was that. But we weren’t bad kids. We didn’t want to study, but we didn’t disrupt the class. Only the teacher!’

Oriol Palencia explained to Jordi Gil in his biography of Cesc, how Cesc and others passed the time at the Lleó XIII school: ‘When the teacher turned to face the board, we would get toilet paper and begin to shake it about as if it was a “white hankie” protest at the Camp Nou and start screaming “off, off”. At other times we would send a remote control car around the classroom … And Cesc wasn’t on his own with these pranks, he was the gentler one to be honest, though he was certainly no shrinking violet. Piqué on the other hand
had a crueller streak with his jokes. He’d tease his elders, they’d whack him and he’d laugh. Cesc was more the type who would hide your boot, niggle you, but Piqué was much cockier.’

‘Messi is one of the reasons why I came back to Barcelona,’ says Cesc, who returned to the
blaugrana
after eight years in London with Arsenal. What he means is that he wanted to relive those happy times, those laughs, those jokes, ‘the best years of my life’, as he has occasionally described them. Leo, on the other hand, simply remembers this period as a necessary preamble that would lead him, inevitably, to his final objective.

Season 2002−03: Continuity

Barcelona’s first team continued its barren run. Manager Louis Van Gaal got rid of three pillars of the club, Rivaldo, Abelardo and Sergi, but was unable to sign the players he really wanted. The team was not responding to the coach. He was dismissed in January, with Barcelona languishing in thirteenth place. Radomir Antić was brought in to try to save the day, but they ended up finishing sixth in the league, the worst finish in fifteen years. Neither did they get past the quarter-finals of the Champions League. The mistaken decision to recall the Dutchman, one that failed to please the fans, hastened the departure of Joan Gaspart, who resigned at the beginning of 2003. The club remained in the hands of a board of directors who organised elections for the summer, the results of which would bring a breath of fresh air and, more crucially, youth to the club. The era of Joan Laporta and Sandro Rosell was about to begin. And of Ronaldinho.

Meanwhile, though, the soundtrack at the Camp Nou was one of frustrated and angry whistles, and the general image from the stands was of a sea of white hankies being waved. Further down, on the dirt and grass pitches where the Barcelona 15-year-olds played, Alex García’s Junior A side were creating something magical, also ephemeral, something that was to come to an end much sooner than anyone expected.

This was a typical starting eleven, usually playing in a 3-4-3 formation:

Plancheria; Valiente, Piqué, Palencia; Cesc, Giribet, Julio De Dios,
Messi; Juanjo Clausi, Frank Songo’o and Víctor Vázquez.

‘According to their ID cards, and judging by the pranks they got up to, the group comprised fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds, but they might have been ten years older when it came to training and the matches they played,’ Alex García explains. ‘They were boys with the mentality of professionals and during training you had to put the brakes on them, they were that competitive. Such rivalries in short matches, those four against four games, five against five! Incredible, I had to stop them. And later, in games, they would never settle for a 3–0 win. If they could they’d win 4–0 or 10–0. And if there was a penalty to be taken, four players would chase after the ball. An argument would ensue.’ Alex García would referee from the sidelines.

‘With all due respect to their opponents, they competed against each other during the week, so that the day of the game felt like a training session to them,’ concludes García.

García had Messi for an entire season, the only coach in lower-grade football who can boast that, a season that saw Leo complete the campaign without any major interruptions and one in which he played every game (the only one who did), and scored 36 goals, five more than centre-forward Víctor Vázquez: it was a season that would provide the runway from which the Argentinian’s career would take off.

Leo was a boy ‘very young, small for his age, with a lot of hair, a long mane, very quiet, very formal. He spoke very little. But he listened. And I knew that he listened because he put into practice what we talked about in the dressing rooms, in the coaching sessions.’ So remembers Alex García who had often seen him play under Tito Vilanova. But if he had any doubt about his ability, Leo excelled himself against a powerful Damm side. The game was his: he scored the first goal, an individual effort that included a nutmeg on one of the defenders, and also scored the goal that made it 0–3. ‘I saw the potential of the boy then,’ García recalls.

Leo considered himself a
mediapunta
(a midfielder who plays just behind the main striker). ‘He didn’t like staying on the wing, he told me that he would, but every chance he got he would cut inside. It’s normal, you can’t put the brakes on talent. What happened is that I used to mess him about a bit and make him play in various places;
I wanted him to get used to playing in different positions, I did with Cesc as well, Víctor Vázquez … I never saw a better pairing than Víctor and Leo, it was tremendous.’

Leo was now fully aware of the level he had reached, of how important he was to the side and, perhaps more importantly, the possibilities that now lay ahead for him. ‘I remember one particular match that we had to play at the Europa pitch. The championship was at stake,’ continues Alex García. ‘It was midweek because the previous match had been called off due to rain. I got there and explained to them that it was important to win this game because then we’d have the chance to win the league. Leo came up to me and I said “stay calm”. And he said to me, “don’t worry, Gaffer, I’ll soon sort this out”. Within ten minutes he’d scored three goals. Just like that, bam, bam, bam. I think we won 1–7. He was fifteen years old and filled with a belief in his own abilities.’

That Junior side did not miss out on a single title. They won the lot: the league, Championship of Spain and also of Catalonia, in the now famous
partido de la máscara
(‘final of the mask’).

Those who remember the game still get goose bumps when they recall it.

On one of the auxiliary pitches beside the Mini Stadium, it’s the last game of the season, Barcelona vs Espanyol, and there’s maximum rivalry between the two sides that have battled out a league that had already been won by the
culés.

Barcelona’s Junior A side is winning 1
–
0.

Long ball. Messi goes for it and jumps as he tries to control it. The Espanyol defender runs across, aiming to cut him off, eyes fixed on the ball.

Messi turns. His face smashes into the defender.

The sound can be heard at the other end of the field. Leo tumbles to the ground, arms outstretched.

And there he lies
–
perfectly still. He briefly loses consciousness.

The other players run over to see what has happened to him, nobody dares touch him. There’s blood. It’s running down his nose.

His father comes racing out of the stand, anxious. He opens the gate to the pitch. He steps onto the grass.

And Leo doesn’t move. Eyes wide open, calm. He’s conscious
again. His focus is blurred and he’s confused. What happened?

The doctor arrives.

Some of the boys move to one side, nervous: they’re not the only ones. His father looks at him closely, he wants to know what’s wrong with him.

Leo gets up, calmly. They gather him up, but no, he wants to walk.

You have a fractured cheekbone, they tell him.

They take him to the FIATC hospital on the Diagonal. Diagnosis confirmed: fracture of the right cheekbone. He stays under observation for 24 hours. Leo asks his team-mates the result of the game: 3
–
1, they tell him, we won. He tells them he will try to be back for the final of the Catalonia Cup that is to be played the following week.

He says he wants to play in the final.

Leo visits the group two days later. His cheek is swathed in protective bandaging.

‘How are you?’ they ask him. ‘

I’m good, everything’s fine. They are saying eight weeks out but I think it’ll be less than that. They’re telling me that I could play with a mask, you know I don’t like being injured.’

‘But do you feel okay?’

‘Yes, yes, I was very frightened, but everything’s okay.’

The fear is, above all, of missing a run of important matches. Particularly now that everything is starting to go so well.

He doesn’t even mention the pain. His pain threshold walks the same road as his tolerance for frustration and, in the case of Leo, is very high indeed. The optimist views problems as challenges to be overcome. The pessimist foresees disaster. Leo is part of the first group – he just sees success and triumph, whatever the odds.

But it looks, for now, as if Messi will not be playing. The other players are worried: the final without Leo!

Saviola hears about the injury and sends him a shirt and his best wishes for a quick recovery. Messi, still only a Junior, has never forgotten this gesture from ‘the Rabbit’.

Barcelona’s captain, Carles Puyol, had suffered a similar setback at the beginning of the season following a collision with Frank de Boer. His specialist made him a plastic protector that was still with
the club’s medical department. Messi could play, they told him, on the strict condition that he wore the mask. There was still a risk, even with that protection, because another collision could have serious repercussions that might necessitate surgery.

Alex García spoke to Leo before deciding whether or not he would play.

‘You know the conditions for you to play. The doctor’s told me, “don’t even think about playing without the mask”.’

‘Yes, Gaffer, don’t worry.’

‘You know that I’m going to have to take you off if you don’t do as I say. We’re risking your cheekbone here. In all honesty, you should rest. If you’re injured again you’re going to end up in the operating theatre.’

‘No, don’t worry yourself.’

Seven days after the injury the same teams met again in the final played at the Via Ferrea, at the Cornella Stadium. Leo starts. The plastic protector is a little big on him and he regularly tries to adjust it. It’s irritating him.

The game gets under way.

After seven minutes, he picks up the ball on the wing and begins to move with it. As he is running he adjusts his mask. He loses the ball and appears irritated.

‘Alex, Leo isn’t comfortable with the mask, it seems as if he can’t see properly,’ Ángel Palomo, the player liaison, tells the coach.

‘Gaffer, I can’t see anything,’ Leo confirms a bit later.

Alex speaks to him from the bench:

‘Listen, Leo, remember what the doctor told you.’

He picks up the ball again, removes the mask and, holding it in his hand, goes past one player, then another. He loses the ball.

He runs to the side and throws the mask to the bench.