Messi the boss

So when Argentina doesn’t play as Messi wants, he speaks with his body. He stops running into space, receives passes motionless, and barely tackles back after losing the ball. Against Iran he covered just 7.77 kilometers, less than any other outfield player on the field who completed the game. In short, he detaches from the situation. He concentrates only on finding his moment. In Argentina’s two opening victories, his World Cup amounted to two beautiful moments: those long-range goals against Bosnia and Iran.

Yet intimates say he is obsessed with making this World Cup his moment. No matter how many more trophies Messi wins with Barcelona, if he is to enter the pantheon topped by Pelé and Diego Maradona, he must do it this month. Yesterday he turned 27. Still just about in his prime, he is playing a World Cup on his own continent.

Much of the world is willing him to show his full genius here. Will he?

I first saw Messi one afternoon in 2005 in the Dutch town Utrecht. Argentina was playing John Obi Mikel’s Nigeria in the youth World Cup final, and its center-forward was a child with a flowerpot haircut who looked as if he’d won a competition to join Argentina’s team for a day. Of course he scored both Argentine goals, both from penalties for a 2-1 win. Chelsea’s ancient scout Piet de Visser, sitting beside me in the stands, murmured: «Maradona….» But De Visser admired other Argentines too, especially the gracious little playmaker, Fernando Gago, then with Boca Juniors but being chased by Real Madrid and Barcelona. «Never a wrong pass,» marveled De Visser.

That team also included Pablo Zabaleta and Ezequiel Garay, currently at this World Cup alongside Messi, plus Gabriel Paletta, who changed nationality and is here with Italy.

In 2008, a young Argentine side beat Nigeria again to become Olympic champions in Beijing. Nine of the players would reappear in Saturday’s 1-0 against Iran. We thought, in short, that this was a golden Argentine generation. But it has turned out to depend on Messi.

Gago is now back at Boca, after a failed European career. Argentina has come to this World Cup with what resembles an English lower-division defence, and pursuing just one strategy: make Messi happy. When the Argentine football federation’s 82-year-old president Julio Grondona showed up at practice, the first thing he did was give Messi a hug.

Coach Alejandro Sabella made Messi captain, and now forever tries to divine what the guy wants. As Messi doesn’t talk, Sabella usually asks his confidants since boyhood, Angel di Maria and Sergio Agüero. When it emerged that Messi wanted Gago and Gonzalo Higuain in the team, to improve Argentina’s leaden passing, Sabella complied. A democratic fellow and inexperienced coach, Sabella was appointed precisely for his willingness to obey Messi – though he possibly only realized this after the World Cup began. Soon, in an echo of the 1970s’ «player power» of Franz Beckenbauer or Johan Cruyff, Messi was giving press conferences about Argentine tactics.

He' s a surprisingly bossy little chap: at Barcelona he once had Zlatan Ibrahimović exiled to the wing, because he wanted to return to central attack.

Yet even the reformed Argentina isn’t good enough for Messi. His chums pass too slowly. Maradona, frowning in the stands during the Iran game (this time the organisers let him in), never used to worry much who was playing alongside him. Almost solo, he made an average Argentine side world champions in 1986.

But Messi, raised at Barcelona since age 13, is a more collectivist European player. He doesn’t want to do it alone. Watching him detach from games here, you can understand Argentines saying that he doesn’t love his country, won’t «sweat the shirt» – though as he often insists, he’s a patriot. It’s just that after spending almost all his career in the world’s best club team, he can’t seem to cope with lesser teammates. Even last season in a fading Barcelona, he zoned out of matches. He’s used to getting the ball quickly, 25 metres from goal; but his Argentine teammates often walk it into his feet near the halfway line. At least he hides his irritation better than Cristiano Ronaldo, who’s always making dismissive hand gestures at inferior Portuguese teammates.

No team here is invincible. The world champion will be a flawed side, so it might as well be Argentina. That last-minute winner against Iran (as if he’d planned all along to finish on a climax) was the template of how it could happen: Messi by himself, like Maradona in 1986.

Først publisert på Josimar.

Simon Kuper er prisbelønt britisk journalist og forfatter som jevnlig skriver for Josimar. Har skrevet bøkene "Football against the enemy", "Soccernomics" med Stefan Szymanski, "Ajax the Dutch" og "the War: Football in Europe During Second World War". Skriver jevnlig for The Times og Wall Street Journal.