Magic Messi makes fools of us all...
LAST season Lionel Messi looked tired. I’d never seen the little maestro walk around a football pitch quite as much as he did.
He was still an unbelievable player but it was not the same Messi of four or five years ago. The spark had gone.
Injuries troubled him and I wondered if he was saving himself for the World Cup. But in Brazil he was not the player we knew he could be. He dragged Argentina to the final and somehow won Player of the Tournament but he looked leggy, even bored.
Hamstring injuries are like kryptonite to pacy players. Sometimes they are never the same again. It happened to Michael Owen and for a while it l ooked l i ke Messi’s sharpness had been blunted. I feared we might never see that same explosive, dynamic genius again. I needn’t have worried.
This season Messi has been incredible. His performances have been absolutely outstanding and he has made fools of those who doubted him, myself included.
Barcelona struggled last season too, which left plenty of people asking if the era of tiki-taka was over. But the system wasn’t broken — Messi was just not at his best. Is he now? Just ask Jerome Boateng.
I said on the night that what Messi did to him should be illegal. You shouldn’t be allowed to do that to another player, let alone a top centre-half. That moment will live with Boateng forever but that is what Messi can do to people.
The club has helped him manage that injury and now he looks fitter than ever. Luis Enrique deserves great credit, too, for playing him on the right. Telling the greatest player on the planet that he will not be operating as a central striker is not an easy conversation to have.
The easy option for Enrique would have been to put Luis Suarez on the right — where he played at Ajax — and let Messi play through the middle. But from the right-hand side he is devastating. Suarez runs beyond defenders, so keeps them occupied and stretches the play. That creates little pockets of space for Messi to work in, isolating the full-back or allowing him to cut in from the right to whip in shots with that deadly left foot.
Neymar performs the same role from the other flank and the three of them have been sensational. They are unbelievable technicians but work so hard for each other.
The i mpressive thing i s that Neymar and Suarez are superstars, but they are still happy to play supporting roles to Messi.
Is he the best ever? It’s an impossible question to answer. If he played 25 years ago, I’m sure somebody like Graeme Souness would have sorted him out.
But now the rules, the pitches and the way the game is played all work in the attacker’s favour. Sometimes you can feel you’ve seen it all before in sport, but I never get tired of watching Messi. You never know what he might do.
And I love seeing my kids trying to copy what he does.
But it’s almost not worth it. Messi is a natural-born genius. He has the kind of talent you just cannot teach.