The need to anoint Lionel Messi the greatest player there has ever been every time he has a good game is becoming rather tedious
Yes, Messi is a genius. Every time I see him play live, it is a privilege. I try to make sure the memories are burned into my consciousness. He is the kind of player who lifts the spirit with everything he does. He is a quite prodigious goalscorer, a wizard of a dribbler and a provider for others.
And yes, he was mesmerising against Manchester City at the Nou Camp on Wednesday night. The way he nutmegged James Milner, the way he turned Bacary Sagna before Joe Hart saved from him at point-blank range, the caressed curling ball to Ivan Rakitic for the Barcelona winner. It was all magical.
It is normal for people to want to believe that what they are witnessing has never been matched before. ‘Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home,’ said Arsene Wenger once, and now everybody believes there has never been a footballer as pretty as Messi.
What saddens me about the relentless championing of Messi, though, is that the idea there has never been anyone to match him has become such an aggressive orthodoxy. Any dissent is met with untrammelled scorn and dismissive disbelief. It is as though Messi has become a god and the idea that he might have a rival is sacrilege.
As a football fan, I worship Messi, too, but I don’t think he’s the best there’s ever been. It’s too early for that. He’s only 27 but he has not yet achieved what many of the other greats of the game achieved, either for club or country.
A graphic circulated on social media recently that showed all the records Messi had broken. La Liga top goal-scorer, Barcelona top goalscorer, Champions League top goalscorer. The list goes on. It’s breathtaking.
But individual stats are not everything. Sport, ultimately, is about winning things. If you are a great individual player, there is a wider test of greatness in inspiring your team to win trophies. In the argument about football’s best ever, Messi is vulnerable here.
Pele, for instance, scored 1,000 goals in his career. But the test of his greatness was that he won the World Cup three times with Brazil. Three times over a 12-year span. It might have been four if he had not been hacked out of the 1966 tournament.
Messi has never been able to lift Argentina to a World Cup victory as Diego Maradona, another rival for the ‘best ever’, did in 1986. At last year’s tournament in Brazil, where Argentina made the final, Messi produced some wonderful moments but he was not even his team’s best player. Javier Mascherano and Angel di Maria shared that honour.
Messi’s zealous champions point out, with some justification, that international football is not as prestigious or as important as it was a few decades ago. That ignores the fact that most players would still consider winning the World Cup the pinnacle of their careers. But it is true that the club game has risen in influence and players’ priorities have changed.
Messi is vulnerable in this regard, too, though. He has played for Barcelona, the team almost universally regarded as the outstanding side of the last decade and yet, remind me, how many Champions League titles has he won? That’s right. Two. The Champions League is now seen as the ultimate test of a player’s greatness and Messi has only won it twice. It is still a fantastic achievement but it seems like an anomaly for someone who is supposed to be the best ever, especially when you consider the achievements of others.
Paolo Maldini won it five times, Raul won it three times, Clarence Seedorf won it four times with three different clubs. In its incarnation as the European Cup, other greats like Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff won it three times.
Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano, two more players that some old fuddy-duddies think were the best they ever saw, won the European Cup eight times between them.
We all have our own ideas of what constitutes beauty in football and Messi fits all of mine. But if I had to single out the most beautiful thing I have seen in the game, it would be Brazil’s fourth goal in the 1970 World Cup final.
In particular, it would be Pele’s part in it. The way he stops the ball from Jairzinho, waits and then strokes it into the path of Carlos Alberto. It was the stunning simplicity of it. It epitomised the way a man who was also a genius was ready to subvert himself to the team ethic.
Pele’s the best for me but I won’t pour scorn on you if you stick with Messi. Just remember that in the same way English football did actually exist before the Premier League, great players populated our game long before Lionel Messi walked this earth.
0 comments:
Post a Comment