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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Barcelona ride on Messi magic
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Barcelona ride on Messi magic

The Spanish club is poised on the brink of a treble, led by the unstoppable Argentine

Messi in action against Bayern Munich on 12 May. Photo: Kerstin Joensson/APPremium
Messi in action against Bayern Munich on 12 May. Photo: Kerstin Joensson/AP

NEW DELHI :

He’s finally said it. Lionel Messi “is the best player of all time". He should know. He had the privilege of managing the Argentine footballer for four years at Barcelona, and winning the Uefa Champions League twice in that period. In those four years, Pep Guardiola was used to watching the man he calls the best the sport has ever seen operate under him, reducing opponents to dust. Now, as coach of Bayern Munich, Guardiola finally knows what it is like to be at the receiving end. Painful, sure, but also transformative; perhaps even transcendental.

On 12 May, Bayern won the second leg of their semi-final against Barcelona in the Uefa Champions League narrowly, as they are wont to do at home at the Allianz Arena, Germany. But the overall victory for the Spanish team was a foregone conclusion after a heavy dose of Messi magic in the first leg of the semi-final, which Barcelona won 3-0.

In the second leg, Guardiola’s team tried hard to close the gap. Bayern’s Moroccan defender Medhi Benatia thumped in a header when he was left unmarked in the box during a corner as early as the 7th minute. The Allianz Arena came alive, pulsating with sound and fury. Here was hope!

Then Messi happened again. In the 15th minute, as the Barcelona forward line surged towards Bayern’s box, Messi quietly fell back just behind the Bayern defence. The ball was duly cut back towards him in the middle of the park. Messi needed just one perfect touch to slice the defence wide open with a pass that found Luis Suárez. Suárez could have scored, but the striker selflessly passed the ball to Neymar, who needed to just tap it into the open goal.

Fourteen minutes later, the same combination produced the same result. Messi, Suárez, Neymar. The attacking trio without compare that has now combined to score a staggering 114 goals for Barcelona this season. The night ended in a 3-2 win for Bayern, but it was too little, too late, as Barcelona made it to the final in Berlin in June with a 5-3 aggregate victory.

At the end of the match, all Guardiola could do was be honest with his praise for Messi. He minced no words.

“He is the best player of all time," Guardiola said. “I compare him with Pelé. I am so happy to see this football."

Barcelona had ended last season without a major trophy. This season, they have four more games to play, and a full treble lined up for them if they win three of those four matches: the Champions League final, the Copa del Rey final, and La Liga (where the title is theirs in all but name).

“We are where we want to be every year, a step away from everything," Barcelona’s influential playmaker Andrés Iniesta said after the match on Tuesday. “And we want to take this step. We can’t stop now."

Barcelona’s complete turn in fortunes dovetails perfectly with Messi’s own. Last season, his form had dipped to a point that forced many football commentators and analysts to say that perhaps the best of Messi was over. He still finished the season with 41 goals and 15 assists, and broke a few records along the way, but it was not good enough, and at the beginning of 2015 it was Cristiano Ronaldo who won the Ballon d’Or, Fifa’s award for the best player of the year.

Since then, Messi has simply left everyone in his blurry wake. He has scored 53 goals from 53 matches this season across competitions, and has sent in 25 assists. But, of course, the impact Messi has had on the field is only half revealed by statistics. The rest is visual, intuitive, visceral: Watching him move with the footwork of a boxer who cannot be caught; watching him explode with pace, his automaton legs moving like a speeded-up cartoon; watching him dribble and cut past bewildered and demoralized defenders; watching him orchestrate a whole game with his perfect passes, distributed in a dazzling variety of speeds, angles, weightages and routes.

Barcelona will face either Juventus or Real Madrid in the final in Berlin, but perhaps it will not really matter whom they face. As Guardiola had observed after the Messi-thrashing in the first leg of the semi-final, the Argentine is “unstoppable".

In that match, on 6 May, he had scored two goals, each perfect in its own way, each as different from the other as it gets. The first, a lashed shot taken quickly, perfectly aimed at the low corner of the goal, fizzing past the imposing Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. The second, a sublime and subtle change in direction while running with the ball at high speed (leaving the defender Jérôme Boateng so confused that he fell on his backside) before gently lobbing the ball above a disbelieving Neuer. He had a hand—that is, a foot—in the third too, with another inch-perfect pass to Neymar. With those goals, Messi had recaptured the record for Champions League goals from Real Madrid’s Ronaldo with 77 goals from all seasons, and a league record of 10 already in this competition. If the first leg was about dribbling, shooting, and scoring, the second leg was all about perfect passes, distribution, and devilish floated balls from Messi. Is it any surprise that he has the most assists in the Champions League this season as well?

Few footballers in the history of the game can reduce managers, colleagues and contemporary as well as former players to such hyperbole that superlatives start running short, but that is exactly what Messi is doing this season.

“Being that close to Messi on the pitch is special," Barcelona defender Javier Mascherano said after the first leg of the semi-final. “Messi is a player that is impossible to describe. You just have to watch him and admire."

Chelsea coach José Mourinho, generally reticent in praise, especially for players from other teams, actually agreed with Guardiola that Messi is unstoppable.

“I think this guy makes the gap by himself. You have doubts that (Manchester) City with Messi can win the Champions League? Or Arsenal with Messi can win the Champions League? Or Chelsea with Messi can win the Champions League? Or Man United with Messi can win the Champions League? Don’t you think? I think," Mourinho told sports website Espnfc.com last week. “I am saying that a team with that boy is a different team, is a different story."

Mourinho was so dazzled by Messi’s performance in the first leg that it even soothed the pain of not having his own team in the competition.

“This season was the first season for many, many years that I wasn’t there, but, watching Messi, you don’t miss being there!" the Chelsea manager said. “You enjoy it so much that you don’t think about not being there. You just think about what the guy did. “Every time I was thinking about how best (to) collectively—I am not saying stop him—give him a difficult match. I think this is the correct word. It is not about stopping him but giving him a difficult match. That is the best you do against him."

Other football legends pitched in too. Former England captain Gary Lineker tweeted: “Anyone still arguing? He’s the Messiah. I should know, I’ve followed a few."

Former Barcelona and Netherlands striker Patrick Kluivert said on Twitter: “He really is from a different Planet #Messi even if u are supporting another team u have to admit this."

That other Argentine legend, Diego Maradona, had once said that in Messi he had seen the player who would inherit his place in football. Perhaps the crown has already passed.

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Published: 13 May 2015, 08:13 PM IST
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