Messi (5 page)

There are fears, doubts, promises and today also a methodology in Barcelona’s famous academy, but still there is no guarantee of success.

Someone asked Leo after eight days of training if he still thought it was a good idea to sign for Barcelona? That person was Rodo Borrell. Leo said yes, he liked the training methods, in Rosario it was all much more physical and here most of the work was done with the ball, which pleased him. He was enjoying it. And he could see how massive the club was. And the challenge.

He wanted to stay.

Ten days after the Messis’ arrival at Barcelona, there was little more to see of the city. No more to know about him as a footballer. Everything was done. He had taken nearly two weeks off school and that had never been part of the plan. It was clear that any club would
have wanted Leo, but this was a unique experience for Barcelona and no one wanted to take the risk: they had to wait for Charly.

Jorge was ready to return home. ‘Stay one more day, Rexach will be back on Monday,’ he was told.

The president’s adviser finally arrived from Sydney and met up with Rifé. There were a number of issues on the table, among them the matter of the Argentinian boy. ‘Play him in an older group, two years older. I want to see how it unfolds when he plays with the bigger boys,’ said Rexach.

The final trial was set to take place on 2 October. At six in the evening. Instead of the clay surface where he had played most of the time, this would take place on pitch three, the artificial surface located behind the bowling alley. Facing the Mini Stadium.

The moment had come. There was no going back. The following day Leo and Jorge were to return to Argentina. Leo, all one metre forty-eight centimetres of him, was to face youngsters two years older than him.

Migueli came to see him. And Rifé, of course. And Quique Costas, Xavi Llorenç, Albert Benaiges, and also Rodolfo Borrell who had had him in his team for the last ten days. They sat on the substitutes’ bench.

The game started. And Charly Rexach still hadn’t arrived.

He was coming late after a lunch. Recently back from Australia, he was between time zones.

Two minutes later, Charly climbs up the steps leading to the pitch.

Rexach comes through the door, passes the corner flag and goes behind the goal.

Messi gets the ball in the centre of the pitch and starts to dribble towards whoever stands in his way.

Leo dribbles past two, rounds the goalkeeper. Scores.

Jorge Messi: Great play. Goal!

It was their only goal of a game that Leo’s team ended up losing 2–1.

Rexach gets to the substitutes’ bench – not the first but the second – where all the coaches have gathered.

Ten minutes after he had arrived, Charly Rexach left pitch number three. He had sat down for a couple of minutes on the youth coaches’ bench, turned around and gone out again the way he had come in.

All that waiting. And he hardly saw a thing!

Jorge Messi thought Rexach had not given Leo the attention he deserved after the journey, the days of waiting. Had Charly noticed the couple of things that Messi did? Jorge was asking himself. Surely that was enouh to keep him at the club. Hopefully.

At the end of the game, Leo said nothing. Always quiet, he just listened.

Part One

In Rosario

  
1
  

‘Pass it, Leo!’ But He Never Did

E
very Sunday: last one there is a rotten egg!

Without fail, Leo would arrive at his grandmother Celia’s house and there, on a small concrete patch in front of the house, would play rondos (toros, or, in English, piggy in the middle) with his brothers Rodrigo and Matías, though in those days it wasn’t called rondos. Or they would play foot tennis. Then his cousins would arrive, Maxi and Emanuel. A third cousin, Bruno, would also be born to Claudio and Marcela, Leo’s aunt and uncle, some years later
.

Two rocks served as goalposts. The first to score six goals. So the game began
.

Leo’s grandmother and her daughters, Celia and Marcela, busied themselves in the kitchen preparing pasta with a rich sauce. The husbands, Jorge and Claudio, and his grandfather, Antonio, chatted animatedly on the sofa in the small, narrow, dining room, or on the doorstep, ears and eyes ever alert for the children at play. Look at that touch, notice how Emanuel dribbles with the ball, Leo as small as he is and how difficult it is to get the ball off him …

‘Good, Maxi, good, shouted Jorge, who had played in the lower ranks of Newell’s Old Boys until called up for military service
.

Time to eat! The children drifted in, hungry but reluctant to leave the game
.

Hands had to be washed before everyone sat around the table of that humble two-bedroom house that no one ever wanted to leave, and that served as a meeting point for hundreds of Sundays for brothers-in-law Claudio and Jorge, sisters Celia and Marcela, and
for the cousins who always wanted to play football. Sometimes the sofa doubled as a bed for one of the grandchildren, whichever one insisted on staying over on that particular day. They adored their grandmother Celia and it wasn’t just because of the delicious pasta, or the rice, every scrap of which was finished off. Celia was one of those grandmothers who could never say no to her grandchildren
.

Food was eaten in a rush. Everything was delicious, but with the ball tucked under an arm, the five youngsters, still savouring the taste of
dulce de leche
(milk candy), headed off to the square in the Bajada part of town
.

And it was there that they would finish what they had started, or start another game of first to six. Once more, giving it their all. Four hours non-stop; sometimes more
.

There were never uneven games. Sometimes the bigger boys, Rodrigo, born in 1980, Maxi, in 1984, and Matías, in 1982, would challenge the smaller boys, Leo born in 1987 and Emanuel, in 1988, who was a good goalkeeper. The kicks they received were shared evenly, far more rough and tumble than in the younger football matches. Much more. Leo and Emanuel were at the receiving end from the older frustrated ones. Especially Leo. ‘Matías, careful, man!’ Jorge would shout
.

And Leo would run around like a headless chicken after the ball, and then, when he got it, he would refuse to let it go. With veins bulging, his face redder than a tomato – that is how his uncle Claudio remembers him. And watch out if he lost. He would start to cry and throw a tantrum, hitting out at anyone who dared try to console him. He had to carry on until he won
.

‘Always ending badly, always fighting. Even if we had won, my brother would annoy me because he knew I would get angry. It always ended badly, with me crying and furious.’ So said Leo to the Argentinian magazine
El Gráfico.

Often the clashes were between neighbourhoods. The Sunday matches they played in the little square next to grandma’s house were open to anyone. And the Messi/Cuccittini team never lost. Matías explains: ‘At first they didn’t want to play against us because Leo was so small, and so was Emanuel, and they ended up congratulating him. Leo was nine years old and he was playing against eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids and they couldn’t stop him.’

Is it any wonder that at least a couple of footballers emerged from this rich mix of talent?

Rodrigo was signed by the Newell’s younger section at the age of 11, having previously played – as had all the Messis – for Grandoli. He was a central attacker with a great ability to score, fast and skilful. He was selected for his age group for Rosario in intercity meetings. Leo told the story of his brother’s early football retirement in
Corriere della Sera:
‘Yes, he was very good. Sadly he had a car accident where he fractured his tibia and fibia, and in those days if something like that happened to you that was the end of your career.’ That, and perhaps he lacked the tenacity needed to become a professional. His passion, he discovered, lay in the kitchen. He wanted to be a chef
.

Matías was a defender in Newell’s lower ranks for a year before deciding not to carry on. But he returned to football years later, and his last club was Club Atlético Empalme Central who competed in the Rosario Regional league and where he played until he was 27 years old
.

Maximiliano, one metre sixty-five tall, and the eldest of Marcela and Claudio’s three sons, scores regularly for the Brazilian side Esport Clube Vitoria in the Serie A Brazilian championship, having been in Argentina (with San Lorenzo de Almagro), Paraguay, Mexico and also the Brazilian club Flamengo. In his first training session with his first Paraguayan team, Libertad, he fractured his skull. But he is stubborn. And came back to football. The day after the premature birth of his daughter Valentina, who spent her first few days in an incubator, he scored for Fla. The same evening Messi hit a hat trick for Barcelona against Valencia and dedicated the three goals to Valen
.

Emanuel, from Rosario, like all of them, inseparable from Leo as a child and with whom he shared time at Grandoli, started as a goalkeeper and spent a year at Newell’s before making the step to Europe. Now he is a left-side midfielder. He arrived in Germany in 2008 to play in the reserves of the TSV 1860 Munich side, and the following year made it into the first team. He was also at Girona in the Spanish second division. Now one metre seventy-seven tall, he plays for Club Olimpia in the Paraguayan first division. One day he would like to play for the Ñuls (as
Argentinians refer to Newell’s Old Boys) with Maxi and Leo
.

Bruno was born in 1996 and missed out on the early street contests, although he enjoyed many other street matches with other youngsters, and was one of the great prospects from the Rosario-based club Renato Cesarini that produced Fernando Redondo and Santi Solari, the son of one of the club’s founders. He looks and plays very much like Leo: the way he runs, his touch on the ball, even the way he celebrates his goals. But you have to be careful with comparisons. Today in his Twitter and Facebook accounts he writes: ‘Life is not the same without football’ (February 2012). He left it all behind him but now he is trying once again to climb aboard the high-speed train that is football
.

Leo left for Barcelona aged just 13 and so the meals he shared with his cousins became less frequent. And the football matches naturally became a thing of the past. The boys were growing up, life was separating them. But some of the child remained in all of them, as it does in all of us
.

Celia, Leo’s grandmother, died when he was 10
.

A river, the meandering Paraná, the Monumento Nacional a la Bandera, the National Flag Memorial, two great clubs. And its people. Above all, its people. This for the visitor is Rosario.

What sort of place is Rosario?

Rosario is 300 kilometres from the capital Buenos Aires, about three hours via a road that runs arrow-straight, cutting through an enormous valley with little between the two cities. Far from the madding crowd, seemingly isolated, a proud little city (the people are not from the province of Santa Fe, they claim, they are Rosarinos) and their local derby is
Lepers
vs
Scoundrels
, Newell’s Old Boys vs Rosario Central, half of the city’s inhabitants plus one against the other half plus one, ‘the most passionate game of all’, according to anyone you ask, even though many prefer to forget that sometimes passions become confused and turn to violence.

Leo is a
leproso
(leper). Newell’s are referred to as such because a century ago both they and Rosario Central were invited to take part in a charity match in aid of a leprosy clinic. Newell’s accepted, Rosario Central did not. Since that day the NOB rivals have been called
canallas
(scoundrels).

Arriving from Buenos Aires via the motorway, you have to take the exit to the ring road, a large C flanked on the right by an area comprising tin shacks boasting the colours of Rosario Central that tell you that you are entering the city of the
canallas
. This is soon confirmed – as is the very opposite: no, no, ‘this is the city of the
leprosos
’ you can read on other walls, daubed in the red and black of Newell’s Old Boys. The statistics and the graffiti disagree with each other. These tin shacks, home to so many families on the outskirts of Rosario, have windows with views over the motorway. The areas around here are poor, with dirt floors, where people ride around on motorcycles without crash helmets; old motorcycles, but not vintage ones. Later, the poverty disappears to be replaced by factories and other large buildings. Every driver seems to be admiring the scenery or taking note of something because none of them seem to be paying attention to road signs or markings. Either that, or perhaps as some Argentinians say, traffic signs are put up merely to hinder your progress.