COURT OUT BY GENIUS
Messi grabs his fastest-ever goal then scores his 100th Champions League strike to tame battling Blues
JUST ahead of kick-off, the locals unfurled a banner that stretched almost the length of the stand behind Marc-Andre ter Stegen’s goal.
IT read: GOD SAVE THE KING.
At its centre was a picture of a triumphant Lionel Messi. What was unclear was whether he was doing the saving or being saved, god or king.
What was clear after barely 20 minutes is that it was Chelsea who needed saving from Messi’s genius.
It would be easy to look at this result, this game, and use it as further evidence of Chelsea’s decline.
It would be easy to expand on it, to try to find an ever wider significance in the elimination of three of the five English clubs to reach the knockout stages.
But it is better to simply salute a talent the like of which many of us had not seen until the Argentinian came along.
The lucky so-and-sos inside this stadium get to see him every other week.
And they have seen far better performances than this one from him. Many of them. That is how good he is.
But this cameo was enough to emphatically dispose of Chelsea, a Chelsea who performed with no little credit, a Chelsea who battled manfully to recover from an early wound that was part Messi-inflicted and part self-inflicted.
It came from a combination of Messi’s alertness and defensive doziness, giving Barcelona the lead before Chelsea leather had barely touched the ball.
Marcos Alonso’s inadvertent diversion allowed Luis Suarez to send Messi away but even genius should not tell from such a tight angle and from relative distance.
Instead, Thibaut Courtois took an age to close his legs and it was 19 goals (soon to be 20) in his last 18 games against English clubs for Messi.
Timed at two minutes and eight seconds, it was the quickest goal scored by the game’s quickest feet for his club or country.
To their credit, though, Chelsea responded strongly yet the momentum created by a succession of halfchances was halted by Messi’s rapid thinking, rapid boots and unrivalled vision. Oh, and a belting finish from Ousmane Dembele.
Messi picked the pocket of a dawdling Cesc Fabregas, fizzed past Andreas Christensen’s lunge and then sidestepped Cesar Azpilicueta.
But that was just the half of it.
To recognise the best option was a longish reverse pass into the path of Dembele is what makes him the finest natural talent in world football.
The only effect of the
Courtois touch on Dembele’s meaty strike was to take it into the top corner.
It was that sort of night for Courtois, contrasting with the evening of Ter Stegen (right), whose save from an Alonso strike towards the end of the first half was significant, as was a bad hooked miss by N’Golo Kante and another Alonso strike, this time from a set-piece, that kissed a post.
That flurry typified Chelsea’s fate. Alonso threatened time after time but foundered time after time, even having a strong penalty claim waved away when he went down under Gerard Pique’s clumsy attentions. Olivier Giroud (right) was booked for protesting. Diligence was there, decisiveness was not. Among a myriad other qualities, decisiveness is a Messi speciality and it was his decisiveness that ended any Chelsea hope. Messi was heading only one way when collecting an innocuous-looking Suarez pass and that was past a couple of defenders in blur. He was doing only one thing, unloading a shot with such minimal backlift that Courtois, by his poor standards, was never going to be able to close those legs again.
By the time the final whistle came, it was a wonder Messi himself had not actually scurried through Thibaut’s legs.
After all, it is hard to think of what he cannot do.
A god? A king? Take your pick if that is how you like to think of your footballers.
Simply, though, he is the world’s best. And there is little shame in being put to the sword by the world’s best.