Wednesday's game prompted Wayne Rooney to describe Lionel Messi as the best player ever. SID LOWEagrees
THE CLUE is in the name: football is a game played with a ball and with your feet. Yet for two of the world’s great footballing communities, there is no greater symbol of the pursuit of perfection than the hand. From the manita or Little Hand to the Hand of God, for Argentina and for Catalonia there is nothing that defines a sporting era like it. On Wednesday night Lionel Messi brought them together – two epochs, two congregations, five brilliant goals. Five more. Two hundred and twenty-eight in all.
The hand as an icon of a game played with the feet: from 1986 and the symbol of Diego Maradona, Argentina’s greatest talent in a generation, in any generation, to the almost mystical symbol of FC Barcelona’s greatest nights. A manita, a goal for every finger: the 5-0 against Real Madrid with Johan Cruyff the player in 1974; the 5-0 against Madrid with Johan Cruyff the manager of the Dream Team in 1994; the 5-0 with Leo Messi leading the Team That’s Better Than The Dream Team in 2010.
On Wednesday in the 7-1 win over Bayer Leverkusen, Messi invoked them both with a Little Hand of his own – each digit worthy of El Diego. The parallel was unavoidable on both sides of Spain's great footballing divide and beyond. "The little hand of God," declared the cover of Marca, while El Mundo Deportivoremoved the diminutive to shout simply: "The Hand of God."
Messi has made the extraordinary so routine that his brilliance often goes overlooked. But just when you think he can no longer surprise you, he does.
“This was,” said Santi Giménez in the sports newspaper AS, “like Chamberlain getting 100 points in a game, Ali knocking out Liston, Beamon flying in Mexico.”
Messi did not beat anyone else; he beat himself, he broke the limits. Again. He found something he hadn’t yet done and did it: there have been two fours and 14 hat-tricks but this was the first time he had scored five in a match.
It was the first time that anyone had in the Champions League and it left Messi on 12 goals in this year’s competition – seven ahead of his nearest rival. If he finishes as top scorer it will be the fourth consecutive season. His fifth goal on Wednesday night was his 47th of the season and he is on 49 European goals, as many as Alfredo di Stéfano. He is just seven away from César, FC Barcelona’s highest ever scorer. And here’s the real killer stat: he is only 24.
Besides, these were not just five goals, they were five wonderful goals; goals that prompted Wayne Rooney to describe him as the “best player ever” and Radamel Falcao to ask: “Sorry, was that a Champions League game or Messi playing on the PlayStation?”
He has scored every kind of goal imaginable: earlier this season he even nodded one over the goalkeeper having first controlled the ball with his head, like some kind of performing seal. And it is not just the goals, it is that he can do everything.
“Show me a player as complete as him,” Guardiola once said. You can’t.
On Wednesday night, the Bayer Leverkusen coach, Robin Dutt, said: “Whoever plays football knows that there are no words for Messi. He is a category all of his own: the best player in the world, another galaxy.”
“One day I will be able to say I coached Messi,” smiled Guardiola. There is not much you can add; the superlatives ran out years ago. Swearing worked for a while. No more.
How do you come up with something that has not been said before? A new language? A symbol?
Only one symbol resists him: the Hand of God. And that one may not for much longer. The day Maradona turned up at Barcelona he walked into the dressing room and saw that the socks had been left rolled into a ball; three hundred kick-ups later his new team-mates’ jaws were on the floor; Messi’s first day in the dressing room was marked by nerves.
On the pitch, though, the comparisons are inevitable and Messi is starting to win the battle. One of those 228 goals was a carbon copy of Maradona’s second against England; there is a handball too. And trophy after trophy. More trophies than Maradona won. There is no World Cup yet, sure, but there was no World Cup at this stage of Maradona’s career either – he was 26 when it won it – and, uncomfortable though it may feel, it could be argued that the pinnacle of world football is the Champions League now. It is a pinnacle Messi climbs over and over.
“You could have put Maradona in with Cameroon, Spain or Nigeria and he would have won the 1986 World Cup,” says Maradona’s Barcelona team-mate Marcos Alonso, hinting at two things that evade Messi – the World Cup and the ability to carry a team alone. But, Alonso, adds: “Diego did things I had never seen anybody do. Now you see things from Messi that are very, very Maradona.”
The coach of that Argentina team in ’86, Carlos Bilardo, says: “Messi defies the laws of anatomy, he must have an extra bone in his ankle.”
“Messi is better than Maradona and Pelé,” says the Argentinian coach, Carlos Bianchi. “Every week he shows that he is capable of things that no one had done until now.”
Pablo Aimar, one of that long line of “New Maradonas” that could not compete with the old one until Messi turned up and could, says: “For years I thought that there would never be a player like Maradona. But now Messi is at his level.”
Even in Brazil, Messi has supporters. “Messi is better than Maradona; he is more complete, more consistent, more spectacular,” says Tostão. “He is reinventing the game.”
"Don't write about him, don't try to describe him," Guardiola once said. "Watch him." It is good advice. Guardian Service
