Messi (71 page)

Leo had not only carried out his defensive duties, following Pep’s instructions and his own intuition, but he had scored, too. And after jumping to intercept the perfectly placed ball from Xavi, he sent a looping header over the keeper to score – a goal that Van der Sar has since consistently refused to discuss, either in public or in private. In the process, his boot came off. It was as if Leo had needed to stretch so much to reach the right height that his foot was suddenly too small for him. It was an Adidas boot. The best publicity they could have hoped for.

‘Pep liked being on top of his players, knowing their mood, when they are fine, when they are not,’ says Pedro. ‘It is very important for us to have someone who sees you and understands you with all the days we spend training and all the matches we play. No two days are the same; one day you might be in high spirits in training or in a match, but down in the next. You need to have someone who makes demands on you but is also around when you need him, someone who knows what you’re feeling almost without speaking. Pep demanded plenty from Leo, but he knew that the boss was there in the good times and the bad, that he was by his side, and Messi responded to that.

‘So when Guardiola made changes, it was so that Leo could shine and Messi knew that,’ continues Pedro. ‘And when things went well, in this case the final in Rome, you could see there was a special connection between the two of them, like saying “just as we planned it”.’

Leo and Pep hugged each other the first time they met up again in the privacy of the Rome dressing room. They did not say anything. There was no need to. It was their way of saying ‘we’ve done it’.

‘Yes, it was a beautiful thing, it is always incredible to score goals and even more so in that match, in that final, it was something inconceivable, like a dream, so it was amazing. It was all happiness after that, lots of partying, lots of joy,’ recalled Messi some years later. He explained to
El País
what was behind all the rejoicing, over and above
the level of celebration that such a victory always brings. ‘There had been the 2006 Champions League final which I was unfortunately unable to play in, because of the injury against Chelsea in the last sixteen which I didn’t recover from. I had said I wanted to win the Champions League as a participant and that was really beautiful.’

‘It was a really happy, and, at the same time, complicated match for me,’ remembers Silvinho. The full-back knew his time at Barcelona was coming to an end; the club had still not offered him a contract extension and ultimately never would. He was 35 years old and had played in almost all the cup games and many league ones, too, due to injuries to Puyol and Abidal, which forced Pep to reshuffle the defence. He also started the Champions League final at left-back after Abidal’s suspension and Keita telling Guardiola not to select him out of position, as the coach had planned: Keita told him the team would suffer if he did so.

While Silvinho walked around the Olympic Stadium pitch after the victory, he thought back to journeys with Ronaldinho, conversations with Rijkaard, the day Deco invited Leo to sit at the Brazilian table, the Argentinian’s rant at the Chinese cleaner in the hotel. He asked Messi for a photo with him. ‘While celebrating on the pitch, I was aware that it wasn’t just a friendship coming to an end, but an important part of my life. It was an ending. And I knew that Leo would be one of those people with whom I would find it hard to stay in contact, and it would hurt me not to have him by my side, as a team-mate, as a friend. It was a very difficult night. He didn’t understand it at the time, but I gave him a big hug on the pitch and cried quite a bit … I gave him a big hug because I wasn’t going to have him by my side as much as I wanted. And in my head, I kept saying to myself: “it’s ending for me.”’

Leo was hugging him happily, but Silvinho was deeply sad. ‘I started the final: what a way to end a career. And while I was with him I was saying goodbye without saying anything to him. It was a night of mixed feelings.’ Silvinho recently sent him the photo of them hugging. ‘Bloody hell, Silvio, what an amazing photo,’ Leo replied to him. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ Silvinho prompted him. ‘Yes, I do,’ said Messi. And then it finally hit Leo: he at last discovered the reason for that emotional hug.

‘I remember that when we were having dinner with our families
after the Rome final, the fans were going up to him and he received them with calmness and humility,’ recalls Pedro.

In fact, the evening turned into a nightmare for ‘the Flea’. Barcelona had organised a celebration in a castle near Rome, in theory a private do, but it became a parade of hangers-on. ‘Even the cats got in,’ one Barcelona player says. It was a struggle getting through the throng and, as a result, the players spent hardly any time with their families. The harassment was such that it became impossible to enjoy the evening. Not an appropriate celebration for such a historic night.

The mood changed in the morning, on the plane, as Juanjo Brau remembers: ‘On the flight home, he grabbed the microphone and did a few turns. He couldn’t stop laughing, making jokes about his team-mates with fine Argentinian irony.’

‘Leo demonstrated that he was the best player in the world,’ concludes Piqué. ‘We had already said it but nobody believed it. After that night, the order of things was pretty clear.’ Messi had become the top goalscorer in the competition with nine goals, two more than Steven Gerrard of Liverpool and Bayern Munich’s Miroslav Klose. Also, in the eyes of most commentators, the best player in the world.

At the Camp Nou while celebrating the treble after a bus ride through the streets of Barcelona, Leo, wearing a scarf and Catalan cap, grabbed the microphone and shouted, slightly the worse for wear from alcohol, his voice a little hoarse: ‘Next year we are going to carry on and win everything, and we are going to celebrate it all over again.
¡Visca el Barça i visca Catalunya!
’ Jorge Messi watched this with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.

The following season Pep Guardiola decided to dispense with the services of Samuel Eto’o. He spoke of ‘feeling’ (using the English word at a press conference), to avoid having to explain that Eto’o had no wish to continue playing second fiddle to the new star. In one training session he had shouted at Guardiola, reminding him that he was a forward and that Guardiola had never been one; that he knew what he was doing. At the end of that campaign there was no longer any understanding, or patience. Pep was conscious of the enormous effort that Eto’o had made that year, but they had reached an impasse. The coach’s decision was inevitable: the development of ‘the Flea’ required he be given all the leeway that Eto’o was demanding.

‘Ronaldinho brought hope to the “Barcelonistas” back to the club and Eto’o helped immensely with the victories that came as a consequence,’ explains Joan Laporta. ‘I assumed the responsibility of telling Samuel that he would not be continuing at the club. For a player as temperamental as him, it is difficult to take on board that concept of “feeling” that Pep mentioned, even though he knew that he could have done more to please the coach. This was not a whim of Pep’s, rather a decision that was very difficult for us to take. That year we wanted to sign Villa, or Forlán or Ibrahimović. We tried Villa first of all, but financially it was impossible. Finally it was Ibra. We needed Eto’o to agree to the deal before we could bring in his replacement, but Samuel did not want to go on loan to Valencia, although he said yes to Milan. What’s more, Ibra was the technical staff’s preference. Manchester City offered us €32 million for Eto’o, but he did not
want to go there either because they still had not qualified for the Champions League.’ Zlatan cost the €20 million at which Eto’o was valued plus €46 million more, making him the most expensive player in the history of the club.

The new tactical approach offered the possibility of implementing the classic Dutch 4-3-3 formation with a forward in Ibra capable of holding the ball and playing with his back to goal, something that gave the option of using the long ball more often, but also someone with the talent to drive at goal and to score. Pep had played in such a formation under Louis Van Gaal, with Patrick Kluivert the player up front.

But for that to work a fruitful relationship had to be established between Zlatan and his colleagues up front, especially Leo, who would often come inside with dangerous diagonal runs. That was the challenge for the coming season and it would reach its peak in December when the club hoped to consolidate all that it had set out to do a year and a half earlier. To do so they had to win the sixth title out of six, the FIFA Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi.

Leo had a minor ankle injury and had some recuperative sessions with Juanjo Brau on the beach at Abu Dhabi. He was not yet ready to start the semi-final against the Mexican club Atlante, and stayed on the bench. The game became an uphill battle after Barcelona conceded a goal in the fourth minute. Not even Atlante were ready for that: they knew they were up against the best team of the year and felt they didn’t stand a chance. ‘Boys, we’ll defend deep and let’s hope we don’t concede five,’ said one of the senior players before taking to the field. But, given the chance, the Mexicans were not going to give anything away. Busquets equalised in the thirty-fifth minute, but it was difficult to create chances against the defensiveness of Atlante. In the fifty-fourth minute, Ibrahimović placed the ball in space for Leo, who had just come on, to run on to and he scored to make it 2–1. Pedro scored the final goal to make it 3–1, becoming at that moment the only player to score in all competitions in a single year.

Before the final against the Argentinian team Estudiantes de la Plata, Messi witnessed one of the most memorable speeches Pep Guardiola ever gave his team. He ended it with the words: ‘If we lose today, we will still be the best team in the world. If we win, we will be eternal.’

But Estudiantes scored the first goal and then dropped deep to defend their advantage.

‘I felt more confident doing it like that because I was too close to the goalkeeper to try a header. The ball came to me at a strange angle, we’d been practising a lot and as I was so close I thought about guiding it more than just hitting it with my head,’ he told Martín Souto in the interview for TyC. Leo explained in
El País
that ‘I tried to guide the ball. I saw the goalkeeper going in one direction and I thought I would send it the other way.’

It was the day that Pep Guardiola cried on the pitch, the culmination of an extraordinary year and a half of pressure, pleasure and results. Leo was the first to hug him, grateful, before going to shake the hand of all his rivals, all defeated Argentinians.