Lionel Messi: 100000 years, 10 magic moments
The first goal: Barcelona vs. Albacete, May 2005
Sent on as a substitute, it takes Messi just 17 seconds to score. It is a classy lob, unexpectedly cool for a 17-year-old kid who'd barely played, but it is also offside. Well, it's not, but the linesman says it is. So Messi has to do it all over again. Another pass from Ronaldinho, another soft-shoed finish, the ball lobbed over the keeper and into the net. Messi is up on Ronaldinho's shoulders, waving his arms about, eyes wide, overwhelmed by how much fun this is. Bojan will later take the record from him but, for now at least, he is the youngest official goal scorer in the club's history.
Lionel Messi's 10 years at Barcelona
- Corrigan: The best quotes of Messi's career- Hunter: 10 years of watching Messi
- Lowe: Messi's five best moments
- Messi's Barca career in photos
At Stamford Bridge, February 2006 ... but not Paris, May 2006
The game that led one newspaper to run a headline declaring that Messi had "earned his doctorate." If so, he is one of those annoyingly precocious child geniuses.Barcelona had just been knocked out of the Copa del Rey and with Ronaldinho missing, they had lost two league games in a row too. They arrived at Stamford Bridge under pressure. Chelsea had gone 49 matches without losing at home under Jose Mourinho; their run ends here. And Messi, wearing 30 and still only 18, is extraordinary, for his personality as well as his performance. He spends the game getting hit hard and keeps coming back for more, keeps on going at them.
Barcelona 3-3 Real Madrid, March 2007
The confirmation. The night when even those who didn't know knew. The first of those ridiculous displays where all you could say was "wow." The night where Messi made Fabio Cannavaro, then-European Player of the Year, look like a marble-treading clown performing to the sound of a kazoo and crashing symbols.It's forgotten now, but the search for the "New Maradona" was constant. Every smallish, creative Argentinian was the New Maradona. Messi was about the 87th of them. Messi might still have some way to be considered as good as Maradona even at 27, but that night, still only 19, he made sure no one other than him would be called the New Maradona again.
Messi does Maradona, April 2007
A cold midweek night at a far-from-full Camp Nou is not the Azteca Stadium. The Copa del Rey is not the World Cup, and Getafe aren't England. They certainly aren't England in 1986 with the Falklands War still on many minds. Messi, then, is not Maradona. But, boy, did he come close.Watch the two goals again side-by-side -- and you can because someone has handily welded them together -- and it's quite astonishing. If he had actually tried to copy Diego, he could not have got much closer. Both men ran for just over 10 seconds. Maradona covered 62 metres, Messi 60. Both players touched the ball 13 times and both beat six opponents, dashing past five of them and shooting past the sixth. Messi, like Maradona, collected the ball on the right, around the halfway line.
Where Maradona skipped past Peter Reid and Peter Beardsley, quick feet took Messi away from Javier Paredes and Ignacio Nacho. Coming in from the right, Maradona cut inside Terry Butcher and then straightened up to go through the gap between him and Terry Fenwick; Messi did the same with Alexis and Belenguer. Peter Shilton came out to meet Maradona, Luis Garcia came out to meet Messi. A dropped shoulder, a turn to the left and both men were past the goalkeepers, Maradona putting the ball into the net away from the despairing lunge of Gary Stevens, Messi eluding the dive of Pablo Redondo. And, no: Paredes, Nacho, Alexis, Belenguer, Garcia and Redondo might not be remembered for years to come, but still.
Olympic gold in 2008
An Olympic gold medal is a pretty big deal already, but this was not just about the final, it was about the future; the first glimpse that Pep Guardiola might reach Messi in a way that no one else could. The battle went back and forth; Argentina wanted Messi to be at the Olympics; Barcelona, who had a Champions League qualifier to worry about, did not. Rules and regulations were quoted, arguments and counter-arguments expressed.Everyone had a say and in the middle of it all was Messi. He wanted to play, of course, but he kept quiet. All he could do would wait, even if Diego Maradona didn't think so. "Messi should be more of a man," he said. FIFA declared that Messi had to go to the Olympics, so Messi headed off to China. Meanwhile, the case was heard at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, who ruled that Messi should rejoin Barcelona. All the battle, all the effort, all the expense and Barcelona have finally won.
The 6-2? Yeah, but ... The manita, 2010 -- five goals and none of them Messi's
When Barcelona beat Real Madrid 6-2 in May 2009, Messi was described as "Maradona, Cruyff and Best all rolled into one," and Andres Iniesta said that he had played in the best clásico of all time.From Barcelona's point of view, it may well still be the most exciting, the most brilliantly unexpected, and probably the most fun, but another victory the following November ended up being even bigger, which is incredible in itself. And eloquent too.
In the first game, the 6-2, Messi scored two and could have scored six or seven: He almost got one with a cheeky chip, he hit another at Iker Casillas, then put one wide and failed to round off what would have been the perfect goal -- a wonderfully smooth, slick, 10-pass move that began with Xavi turning on the edge of his own penalty area and ended with Iniesta and Messi playing a one-two on the edge of the Madrid six-yard box.
But inexplicably, Messi put his shot straight into the arms of Casillas. That said something about the dominance and the 6-2 felt like something that could not be improved upon, but many believe it was when Barcelona then beat Madrid 5-0, the raising of the manita, or little hand, connecting it forever with the 5-0 derbi win achieved by Johan Cruyff's Dream Team.
If the 6-2 was magical, this was surgical. The control was absolute. "They could have played with two balls ... and Barcelona would have had both," wrote Marca. It was the first time in 10 games that Messi did not score, he didn't even do one of those Messi runs, but it did not matter.
As one match report put it: "There were fewer brilliant dribbles, less fantasy but there was a stunning assuredness and impeccable precision in the passing. This was the Messi who controls the game and then decides it."
Messi as a No. 10, a glimpse of the Messi to come perhaps. The pass to David Villa remains mind-blowing, no matter how many times you watch it. "When we got into the dressing room after the game we gave ourselves a standing ovation," Xavi later admitted.
England, European Cup final, 2009... and again in 2011
When Messi leaped to head in the second goal against Manchester United in Rome, the commentator on English TV shouted something like "he's scored against an English side now," as if that is the ultimate yardstick for a footballer. As if Messi had been thinking: "Well, this European Cup thing is OK but what I really, really want is to score against an English team." Two years later, he faced United again. And scored again. Two European Cup finals, two winners' medals, two goals. English victims both times. The second of them in England, at Wembley.Champions League semifinal, first leg, vs. Real Madrid, 2011
Somewhere in the midst of the kicking and a gouging in the mud and the blood was a moment of genius. When people look back on that "World Series of clásicos" -- four of them in 18 days! -- talk tends to turn to the confrontation, the tension and the arguments. The fault lines remain and the battles still get talked about, especially when it comes to the Spanish national team. At the European Championships over a year later, Real Madrid and Barcelona's Spanish internationals launched into another long debate about Pepe's red card for the foul on Dani Alves, after Pierluigi Collina turned up at their Gniewino HQ in Poland to advise them on the officiating.Mourinho's por qué paranoia has been recalled, over and over, while the dastardly UEFA/UNICEF axis of evil is an idea others have made their own; it lives on. Meanwhile, the images of the challenge have been slowed down, sped up and zoomed in on endlessly. They have been watched over and over and talked about constantly, discussed and dissected ... far more so than Messi's second goal. It is striking how little it has been talked about: After all, here was a moment worthy of the hype that surrounded the games, a truly brilliant individual goal, one of the European Cup's best, ever. In a semifinal, against Barcelona's greatest rivals, and at the Santiago Bernabéu.
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