Messi (58 page)

‘As I was growing and learning more, I studied his movements, how he played. I followed him,’ admitted Leo who has every Pablo Aimar shirt he has been able to get hold of (Benfica, Valencia, Argentina) in his home. ‘I should be the one doing the collecting,’ says the ex-River player today.

Despite his tender years, Messi, who had just signed up with Adidas after leaving Nike, was one of the stars of the German sportswear company in the World Cup summer. He featured in an award-winning commercial (‘History is chasing me but I’m quicker’), in which ‘the Flea’ draws a small doll playing football with much bigger dolls, and describes his dream of not going unnoticed despite being the weakest. Huge posters showed his face in the biggest footballing cities in the world, and a special pair of boots was designed for him with two stars and the inscription ‘The hand of God’ and the date 22 June 1986. This marketing approach was not to everybody’s taste in the squad – too much noise for a youngster, some felt.

In any case, Leo had only just made the World Cup squad. After injuring himself against Chelsea in March, he suffered another setback in April and Rijkaard did not think he was fit enough to play in the Champions League final in May. He certainly wasn’t match fit, but he didn’t want to travel to Germany just to make up the numbers. He wanted to help, even offer something that, in truth, he had no right to expect at his age, and with his physical limitations.

Some days before setting off for Germany in a combined match between the national side and Under 20s at the Monumental Stadium, Pekerman played him in the last half hour of the game to see how he performed after his 79 days out. It was a way of loosening him up: the coach could see that anxiety was building up. He finished the match and he seemed okay, the manager thought. Leo quickly made his way to the tunnel with his head down. And he started to cry. ‘Have you injured yourself again? What is wrong, Leo?’ the medical staff asked him. Messi shook his head – that
wasn’t it, that wasn’t the problem. He hid the tension and remained silent. And then, with a gesture of despair, he came out with it. An inconsolable Leo shouted, ‘I’m a disaster, I can’t play like this!’ It was his pride talking, the need to be on top form before the World Cup. Leo and his eternal discontent.

As part of his baptism, very clear rules as to who was in charge of the squad were established. In a pre-World Cup press conference in Nuremberg with Roberto Ayala and Gabriel Heinze, an innocuous question (How does the group pass the time?) culminated in a diatribe against the new young players. ‘They don’t say much’, ‘They don’t come and drink
mate
’, ‘They’re always on their PlayStations’, ‘Our generation has another way of doing things’. The strong group in the dressing room had not readily accepted the call-up of Oscar Ustari, Leo’s friend, which had made him the youngest ever Argentinian goalkeeper to be selected for a World Cup. This had been in preference to German Lux, the River Plate goalkeeper who had won the 2004 Olympic title, keeping a clean sheet in the process, resulting in him being called up for every match in the previous three years.

According to the Argentinian press there was an incident before the tournament that, reading between the lines, confirmed Leo would find it difficult to impress his new colleagues so early on in his career. In a training session, Messi nutmegged Heinze. In the unwritten code of Argentinian football, something like that had to be avenged: Heinze continually went in hard on Leo. But he was in for a surprise; rather than apologise, ‘the Flea’ looked him straight in the eye and gave him a warning: ‘Don’t do that to me again.’

The 18-year-old boy, who at times seemed 25 on the pitch and 14 off it, was going to be part of a World Cup squad. ‘We each had a room with a connecting door in between,’ remembers Ustari. ‘One day, I went into mine and he followed me in. There were two beds in each room and he said: “you’re not going to sleep here on your own and me over there, in another room, on my own.” So he slept in my room. And constantly, at all hours of the day, he would play keepyuppies. With anything. With a tea bag! I would carry
mate
around in little round balls and he would do dozens of kick-ups with them. At three o’clock in the morning! They gave him two little footballs and he was there in bed leaning back against the headboard slowly
kicking both the balls in the air, bang, bang, bang. With both footballs at the same time!’

And he would play on the PlayStation every day. ‘In the training camp in Germany I saw that he would take all the children of the other players to his room to play on the PlayStation, four- and five-year-olds, Crespo’s sons,’ remembers ‘Professor’ Salorio. ‘I’d look at him and … one day I saw that he was giving them sweets, they were all around him.’

And that’s how he arrived at the greatest show on earth. The World Cup. The one he had dreamed of winning for Argentina.

Javier Saviola and Hernán Crespo were the two forwards selected to start against the Ivory Coast.

Pekerman did not play him, and a 2–1 win was a good start even though the performance was far from brilliant.

Serbia and Montenegro were up next.

Maradona came down to the dressing room to greet the lads and, taking Leo to one side, said to him, ‘have strength, courage and score a goal’.

A packed stadium in Gelsenkirchen saw him come on against Serbia in the seventy-fifth minute in place of Maxi Rodríguez with the scoreboard reading 3–0, already reflecting the superiority of the sky-blue and whites who were making the most of the speed and efficiency of their side. His World Cup debut. And at a younger age than Maradona.

In the 16 minutes that he was on the pitch he provided Crespo with an assist to make it 4–0 before scoring the sixth and final goal himself, to make it 6–0 – the only goal he has so far scored for his country in the World Cup finals. Maradona rose to his feet to give him an emotional salute from the stands.

A draw in their next match saw Argentina, together with Holland, through to the next round. The result benefited both teams, and when things are destined to end a certain way, that’s generally what happens. Both sides had made several changes to their starting line-ups. Leo started up front alongside Carlos Tévez. Argentina showed, in the words of ESPN, ‘a little bit of Leo, and a lot of Tévez’ – occasional sparks from the start, and a smattering of dribbles and daring as the game progressed.

But for last 16 against Mexico, Saviola and Crespo were once
again the front two picked by Pekerman. Leo came on in the eighty-fourth minute of a hard game with the score 1-1. Argentina won after extra time. ‘With an open heart, with a suffering ravaging their whole bodies, with a soul that was full of hope and expectation, with sparks of intelligence, with other footballing acts of bravado, Argentina continued along the path, and now look ahead to Germany in the quarter-finals,’
El Clarín
reported the following morning in typically gushing style. Leo showed flashes of brilliance with a direct style of play that pushed Mexico onto the back foot.

The match was played on Leo’s birthday. And also on Riquelme’s, who was nine years older. That night Leo retired to his room but decided to call in on his team-mate’s party. He opened his bedroom door, walked in and Riquelme turned around to him, irritated: ‘Idiot! Don’t you know how to knock! You’re going to have to learn how to knock on a door! Who the fuck do you think you are?’ A pale Messi lowered his head, turned around and left. And so the learning process continued.

‘Look, we all saw him as a player who was already different, let’s say.’ So says Javier Mascherano. ‘You could see him and, of course … He turned nineteen at the World Cup, but you could already see he was a footballer who did things differently.’

Messi wasn’t in the starting line-up for the quarter-final against Germany because Saviola and Crespo continued in that role. He sat on the bench with his headphones on.

No one talks about whether Leo should have been in the starting line-up or not. It’s what happened during the game that is still talked about today.

Argentina dominated possession during the first half and also for part of the second without really creating any great danger.

Until Ayala put his side ahead with a header from a corner.

The host nation had to push up and by pressuring high up the pitch hoped to regain possession and hurt Argentina. As a result there was a great deal of space behind their four defenders who were not especially fast.

And then, suddenly, over a nine-minute period, a World Cup was lost.

The goalkeeper Roberto Abbondanzieri got injured. Pekerman was forced to make a change. On came Leo Franco.

Cambiasso replaced an angry Riquelme.

Pekerman apologised to Juan Román. He was looking to refresh the midfield.

There was one change left. A quick player could do a lot of damage. That’s what they’re all saying now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Pekerman thought that at that moment what was needed was a tall striker, one who could complement Tévez and hold the ball up, a very useful recourse when a team is under the sort of pressure that Germany were applying. And his presence would also work as a weapon to defend, to avoid the greatest German danger: set pieces.

There were 11 minutes remaining.

Julio Cruz, a physically imposing forward, came on for Hernán Crespo.

Messi stayed on the bench. Recognising that he wasn’t going to get on, he removed his boots. He was criticised for that.

It is said, and written, that it will never really be understood why Pekerman chose not to bring him on. There’s talk about group dynamic and hierarchies. That it was a divided squad. That Julio Cruz carried more weight in the squad at the time, and that he was part of the group who were in charge in the dressing room. Even that it is a secret the coach will take to his grave.

It seems that, in truth, people don’t want to listen to Pekerman. As always happens, defeat removed his right to an audience.

Such decisions are not taken for one reason only, and neither are they made because of political considerations. Would it have been talked about if Klose hadn’t scored a minute after Crespo had been substituted, to make it 1–1, or if, after extra time, Ayala and Cambiasso hadn’t missed their penalties in the shoot-out? Would Messi removing his boots have been talked about? Do you see how defeat causes confusion, how thin the line is separating victory from failure?

‘They all criticise us for the substitution – we were winning 1–0 and we didn’t put Leo on,’ says Hugo Tocalli, Pekerman’s assistant. ‘If the match were to be repeated, we would do exactly the same. Let’s not forget that in the previous game we were drawing 1–1 and Messi and Aimar came on. That’s to say we were neither capricious nor anti-Messi.’

With hindsight, the decision can be seen as an injustice, overlooking the fact that here was a 19-year-old boy who had only played 122 minutes in the World Cup and had only recently returned from injury. Hindsight forgets that he was not then the same Messi that he is today.

‘These are decisions that coaches make, but there was a lot of debate in Argentina,’ Mascherano explains. ‘That is the typical debate generated by sportsmen as great as Messi. But after that World Cup the debate ended. Leo was unquestionably an automatic starter after that.’

Gerardo Salorio was a member of Pekerman’s technical team at that World Cup and he has no doubts: ‘He didn’t play because the coach, in the tenth of a second that he has to decide, stuck with the conviction that he had from the first twenty minutes of the game: that the only way they were going to score against us was with a header. And that’s why he put Cruz on, mostly to defend. The injury to our goalkeeper killed us, otherwise Leo would have come on and possibly affected the game in the last fifteen minutes. The Germans were physically dead …but anyway … it wasn’t our destiny.’

Back in the dressing room, Leo cried. He wasn’t the only one. Argentina seemed to have the look of champions, but … With these ‘buts’ are written the histories of all the world’s national teams.

And the boots? ‘I’m strange, sometimes I prefer being alone … I do stupid things, but I don’t handle my pain depending on whether I play or not. Sometimes I’m fucked. I suffer as a footballer. I know that they were saying that I didn’t feel the pain of our elimination. It looks like I don’t feel anything, that I’m made of stone and that I don’t have the right to suffer in my own way’ [Leo, July, 2006].

Afterwards, Messi would not watch any more games in the tournament.

But he was grateful. He did not forget that Claudio Vivas, coach Pekerman and his assistant Hugo Tocalli had launched a plan some two years earlier for him to play in the sky-blue and white of his country. ‘I thought I was going to play more. I lost ground with my injury and got there just in time. I will always be thankful to Pekerman for taking me [Leo in 2009].’

He had just made his debut in the World Cup and he took that home with him. That and the pain of a national defeat that, thirteen
years after the last major title, the Copa América of 1993, still left an open wound.

Argentina arrived at the Copa América the following year in Venezuela as favourites with Leo Messi as a fixture in the starting line-up. He played all 90 minutes of the opening match against the United States (4–1) alongside an in-form Crespo, who scored a brace. The Flea’s’ spark and quality were acknowledged by reporters. In the second match against Colombia he once again started, was fouled for a penalty which was converted to make it 1–1, and helped create the second (scored by Riquelme) in an emphatic
albiceleste
4–2 victory. With passage to the next round secured, Leo was rested from the start and Paraguay were narrowly beaten; he played the last 25 minutes.

Messi scored the second goal in the quarter-final against Peru which ended in a convincing 4–0 win. He scored against Mexico in the semi-finals (3–0) and it was not just any goal.

He picked the ball up in the right-hand corner of the penalty area where the centre-back was waiting for him, and as soon as he entered the box he chipped the ball over the waiting goalkeeper in the six-yard box. He had no right to invent that finish; the conditions were not suited to that goal.