Messi (78 page)
Authors: Guillem Balague
Some footballers say that the feeling you get is like a greyhound before a race, or a car revving up just before the clutch is released. ‘When he retches, Leo feels it is a very personal moment and he tries to keep his distance,’ says Mascherano. ‘It happens to a number of us, me included. For all the experience that you have, the adrenaline doesn’t disappear. And before a game with all this nervous tension, sometimes it causes nausea. Once the game starts it disappears.’
‘There was one game where he was suffering from flu, against Osasuna,’ remembers the ‘little boss’ Mascherano. ‘He had a fever. He scored two goals! Seriously, he played with a temperature! The doctors had signed him off sick because you couldn’t count on him, but he wanted to play. And he came on, and well …’ Messi was signed off sick in the morning with a slight temperature, flu symptoms and a cold, but three hours before the Copa del Rey game
against Osasuna he said to Pep that he was ready to play. ‘When he told me that I put him on the bench,’ explained Pep. He came on half an hour from the end, long enough for him to score twice.
Before the last 16 second-leg Champions League game against Bayer Leverkusen at the Camp Nou, Leo felt unwell. He had a headache. They gave him a paracetamol. ‘Really? I’ve only just found out that he wasn’t feeling well,’ admits Mascherano.
GB: In the match against Bayer Leverkusen, Leo had a headache. Have you seen him vomit before any games?
PG: I also used to vomit. If you’re tense, you have to get rid of the nerves and that’s what you do.
GB: But you seem to get nervous. And Messi seems to be the calmer type.
PG: It’s probably all inside him. Let’s put ourselves in his place. He has this burden on him to have to do what he does over and over again, and I’m sure that at times this is difficult. Well, I imagine it is, because to tell you the truth I don’t know how he carries so much weight on his shoulders.
GB: Did he seem quieter on the day of the Leverkusen match?
PG: I don’t remember anything like that. I don’t go into the dressing rooms with the team before a game, I don’t want to see them, it’s their moment, I was in my office. Just before going out we are together, but that’s it.
GB: Did you say anything special to him after those five goals?
PG: I can’t remember. I suppose I congratulated them all. In the Champions League when you go through you always think you still have two more games to enjoy in Europe. You never know when it’s going to finish. With the passing of time I find myself congratulating fewer people, it’s probably my age. To us, the technical staff, we had our moments of enjoyment and often I would stay in my office to celebrate it between ourselves. At that game I don’t remember whether I did or didn’t go to congratulate him. Normally in the Champions League I would, because playing in Europe is beautiful.
7 March 2012. Last 16 of the Champions League second leg. Barcelona 7
–
1 Bayer Leverkusen
Barcelona: Valdés; Alvés, Piqué, Mascherano, Adriano (Muniesa, 63rd minute); Busquets, Xavi (Keita, 52nd minute), Cesc; Pedro, Messi and Iniesta (Tello, 52nd minute).
Bayer Leverkusen: Leno; Castro, Schwaab, Toprak, Kadlec; Renato Augusto (Oczipka, 67th minute), Reinartz, Rolfes, Bender (Schürrle, 55th minute); Kiessling and Derdiyok (Bellarabi, 55th minute).
Goals: 1
–
0. 25th minute: Messi. Receives a pass from Xavi in space and chips it over the keeper. 2
–
0. 42nd minute: Messi. Receives a pass from Iniesta and scores after some individual brilliance. 3
–
0. 50th minute Messi. Pass from Cesc and scores with another chip. 4
–
0. 55th minute: Tello: 57th minute: 5
–
0 Messi. The keeper fails to hold onto the ball and he pounces on the rebound. 6
–
0. 62nd minute: Tello. 7
–0
. 84th minute: Messi. Left-foot shot from the edge of the area. 7
–
1. 90th minute: Bellarabi.
Ramón Besa,
El País
: Hurricane Messi. Messi must be thanked for wanting to play all the time, that he makes no distinction between friendly or official matches, easy or difficult ones, important or banal, and that he does not accept being substituted, even when the result is a foregone conclusion, whether he is on form or not, whether it be hot or cold, home or away, Wednesday or Saturday. There are no formalities for ‘the Flea’ to adhere to, least of all in the Champions League, a competition in which he has already scored 12 goals in seven games, following his five goals against Bayer, a figure previously unheard of in the tournament’s history. No one is more demanding than Messi himself, with each one of his performances converted into a spectacle and he, therefore, accepts the blame for displays that fail to shine. Nobody finds more passing channels better than Piqué, Xavi and Iniesta. The ball always arrives well placed, balanced, perfectly timed at the feet of the genius that is Messi.
Robert Alvarez,
El Pais
: Messi arrived at the Camp Nou with a headache. However, as he didn’t want to be sent home he asked Doctor Ricard Pruna for a painkiller. The Barcelona coach who left after the game with the Argentine boss, Alejandro Sabella, explained the virtue of ‘the Flea’. ‘It makes no difference if it’s raining or it’s cold, it doesn’t matter whether they kick him or not. I would imagine that in the days of Di Stéfano, of Maradona, of Cruyff, of Pelé, they said that they were the best. Now he sits on the throne and only he will decide when he wants to leave it.’
‘Was that a game in the Champions League or was that Messi on PlayStation2?’ asked Atlético’s Falcao ironically. ‘Messi is unreal. For me, the best ever,’ said Rooney of Manchester United. There are no words to describe the way Barcelona plays. It is at an extraordinary level, without doubt. ‘Without Messi, Barcelona are the best team in the world, with him they are from another galaxy,’ concluded Bayer coach Robin Dutt.
10. THE FOUR BALLONS D’OR
El País: You say that you are not interested in how many goals you can score, that you prefer titles. What is your motivation?
Leo Messi: I prefer winning titles with the team over individual awards or scoring more goals than anyone else. I am more concerned about being a good person than being the best footballer in the world. On top of that, in the end when all of this finishes, what do you take away from it? My intention, when I retire, is to be remembered for being a good guy. I like scoring goals, but also having friends among the players I’ve played with. It is good for people to value you as a person and have a good opinion of you.
El País: So you are not too bothered about winning your fourth Ballon d’Or?
Leo Messi: Awards are good. I am thankful for them, of course. But at the end of the day, it interests you guys more, you’re always asking if this one is better than that one. Xavi or Iniesta? Who knows? …The team definitely makes me better. Without the help
of my team-mates, I would be nothing, I would win nothing. No titles, no prizes, nothing.
(Interview with Leo Messi in
El País
, Ramón Besa and Luis Martín, 30 September 2012)
In
El largo viaje de Pep
, Martí Perarnau writes that around October that year Guardiola had a discussion with his players in which he asked them to forget about comparisons and not to speculate over which team was the best. That was the job of journalists and talk shows. ‘Look,’ he said to them, ‘it’s not a question of discussing whether we are better than this or that team,’ writes Perarnau. ‘Some will have one opinion and we will have another. We will only see the true picture, like in good films, as the years pass and you watch them again and speak about them. They become classics. Now we cannot understand everything,’ he told them, ‘but you will be spoken about in fifteen years. Definitely. You will be spoken about and, then, at that moment, the whole world will recognise that we were a great team.’
GB: Rodrigo Messi tells how Leo, at the age of 13, said he wanted to win the Ballon d’Or.
PG: Did he say that? He wasn’t wrong, was he? I was so happy when he won it after the Champions League final in Rome. We said to him on that night: ‘The award is yours.’ It was clear that it was his. These awards have always made him very happy, he has always taken it like that: something that he wants to win. I imagine that Michael Jordan wanted to be the best defender, top scorer and best rebounder in the NBA … Well, Leo is the same. And you say, why, is a league, Champions League and Ballon d’Or not enough? Why does he want more? Because that’s how they are. They thought Nadal was finished, and he goes and wins everything. And I’m sure Jordan has thought someday, why don’t I go back at 50? We are made of different stuff, from another place, different parents; we are competitive, we like to win, but you have another way of thinking, and you say: listen, you’ve lost today, and you feel bad, but you think, what can you do, that’s life. And you know your limitations and say to yourself: I can’t do this because I don’t know so much. Leo doesn’t, he always has the perception that if he’s okay, he will win.
First Ballon d’Or, 2009, and FIFA Player of the Year
Leo Messi had been third in the
France Football
magazine’s choice for the Ballon d’Or in 2007 (behind Kaká and Ronaldo) and second in 2008 (the Portuguese won it): but in 2009, at 22 years old, not only had he been chosen at the end of the summer as the best player in the Champions League and best striker in the competition, but he also carried away the most prestigious award with a notable statistic: never before had there been such a huge margin between first and second place, between Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Xavi Hernández, also representing a Barcelona team that had won everything, came third.
The ceremony took place in Paris and all Leo’s family travelled with him. Celia, his mother, attended the event in an elegant red dress, and Jorge looking thinner than usual and slightly under the weather, surveyed the scene and recalled decisions, journeys, tensions, distances. Surrounded by his four children, with Leo holding the Ballon d’Or, while the obligatory photos were taken, Jorge started to cry. ‘I have achieved the objective I set myself in life: I have four phenomenal children, their lives are all on track. I’ve done it.’
At the next match at the Camp Nou against Espanyol, his mother handed him the Ballon d’Or on the pitch while the stadium, his team-mates, the opposition captain and even referee Iturralde González, gave him a standing ovation.
‘Leo has an advantage which has helped him mature: the family setting,’ admits Joan Laporta. ‘That tight-knit group they have formed … I could see it at the first Ballon d’Or event, we all went together and it was a pleasure to see the way they were talking to one another.’
Laporta, the four siblings and parents ate with the event organisers. ‘Leo was really emotional. He was surely over the moon, because he felt that he had achieved something which he had been dreaming about and it had become reality,’ remembers the ex-Barcelona president. ‘The thing is, I say surely because Leo … hardly expresses his feelings off the pitch, he always has that mischievous half-smile on his face, as if none of it has anything to do with him. I’m sure he would rather be playing on the PlayStation than being at all these formal ceremonies.’
‘His father was quivering like a jelly,’ says Txiki Beguiristain. ‘His brother and mother, too. The state of them! But I don’t know if they really know how he was feeling.’
FIFA also gave him the award for the Player of the Year in a ceremony that took place in Zurich on 21 December. The Ballon d’Or is voted for by journalists, whereas the FIFA Player of the Year is voted for by international managers and national team captains. Once again he won by the biggest margin in the trophy’s history. The Barcelona delegation met in the hotel lobby where they were staying, planning to leave together for the Palace of Congress where the awards would be made. Leo was nowhere to be seen. They looked everywhere for him. ‘Go up to his room to see if he’s there,’ said Laporta. And there he was, on the bed, finishing a game on PlayStation with his brothers Rodrigo and Matías. Hurriedly they tried to put one another’s bow ties on, but didn’t know how to do it: father Jorge had to come to the rescue.
Second FIFA Ballon d’Or, 2010
10 January 2011, Messi received the first FIFA Ballon d’Or, the combination of the two awards that had a 450-man jury comprising national coaches, captains and journalists. It was the year of the triple
azulgrana
representation, which rewarded what Barcelona and La Masía had done for football, and also the Spanish national team’s first World Cup victory. Iniesta was the favourite. If not, hopefully Xavi will win it, they were saying in Spain. The two central midfielders were about to discover that the Spanish players did not seem to get the same respect internationally as they get at home.
Leo did not expect to take the award home; no one was really putting their money on him. Which is probably why he nearly left his black Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo and bow tie at home. On this occasion his parents and sister went to the ceremony with him, as well as an aunt, uncle and cousin. Seven Barcelona players had featured in the team of the year and Pep Guardiola, nominated for coach of the year, also travelled with them. That prize ended up going to Mourinho, Champions League winner with Inter.
For the press, the big favourite was Andrés Iniesta, who had scored the goal that clinched the World Cup for Spain. Nike had
prepared 10,000 shirts to celebrate the award. What happened to them is unknown. The world of football, starting with UEFA President Michel Platini, thought it was time to pay homage to Xavi, for his journey, for his titles, for the possession style he defended.
It was Guardiola’s task to announce the winner. ‘And the winner is … Ay, ay, ay,’ said the coach before reading out Leo Messi’s name. ‘The Flea’s’ group observed a certain coldness in Guardiola’s expression, something they found hard to ignore.