Messi, Messi, Messi and, Again, Messi

Albert Gea/Reuters

Lionel Messie celebrates one of his four goals against Arsenal on Tuesday. The Barcelona forward has scored eight times in the Champions League this season.

By ROB HUGHES

Published: April 7, 2010

Lionel Messi is transcending his own game.

The Times's soccer blog has the world's game covered from all angles.

Go to the Goal Blog

On Tuesday night at the Camp Nou, the stadium in Barcelona where he has grown up, he responded after his team went down a goal to Arsenal in the Champions League by scoring within three minutes.

He then did it again, and again, and again. Four times this little Argentine darted and floated between the Arsenal defense, four times he scored goals that would have been beyond most players. And he scored four times despite slowing to a walk for long periods. Barça needed to conserve its energy; it has the biggest match in the Spanish calendar, at Real Madrid, on Saturday.

The scoreboard might have read: Messi 4, Arsenal 1. Yet his demeanor when talking to media after the game was far from that of a star.

What goes through the mind of a player creating his own history in such a theater of sport?

“We started badly,” said Messi. “But we fixed it.”

Hefixed it, surely?

“The team is making history, like we did last year,” he insisted.

To be sure, he’s right. Soccer is a team game, always will be. Messi is gifted beyond all but a handful of men who ever played the sport, but he is what he wants to be, a team player.

What he showed on Tuesday is that he is not simply a performer who knows he is gifted beyond the norm. He is a fighter.

There have been a handful of players — but no more — who could do with a ball, and within a team, what Messi did to Arsenal on Tuesday night.

Think of Alfredo di Stéfano, Pelé, Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona, and maybe George Best, maybe Eusébio. Then consider that Messi is 22, he hasn’t yet found anything in life that means more to him than playing his game nor, thank goodness, a defender who can break him the way Andoni Goikoetxea, the “Butcher of Bilbao,” broke the ankle of Maradona when he was the wonder of Barcelona.

Even Argentines are lost for words to describe Messi. “He is not of this planet,” Osvaldo Ardiles, the playmaker for Argentina in the 1970s, told the BBC.

As the eulogies continue to flow through a season in which Messi has already accumulated 39 goals, and made many more, his manager, Pep Guardiola, has given up trying to describe what he has the privilege of “coaching.”

“There are no words,” Guardiola told the media. “You just have to see.”

And what you see is ballet in soccer shoes. Take one goal, any one of the four, all of which were different. Put yourself in the place of Manuel Almunia, Arsenal’s Spanish goalkeeper.

Messi has done what you least expect him to do — won the ball in the air against far taller defenders. Then, he has outpaced another defender on the ground and put himself into a position to receive the return pass in the penalty area.

Almunia comes to him, Messi makes one touch with the left foot, then another. He’s teasing, playing with the ball at high speed while the goalie has to make up his mind whether to come all the way or stay closer to his net. Too late. Almunia goes down on one knee, Messi impishly chips him.

“You try to anticipate what he is going to do,” Almunia said. “But you can’t because he has so many skills, he can do whatever he wants.”

And what Messi wants right now is to win the Champions League, the Spanish League, and then go to the World Cup. His coach there will be Maradona, but he, Messi and the national team have yet to recreate the harmony of Barcelona.

Barça is built from its academy upward.

“We lost to the best team in the world,” Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal coach, said. “And to the best player. He makes the impossible possible.”

With one more attempt to talk about the collective, Guardiola concluded by saying: “I congratulate not only this team, but this institution, because in five years we’ve competed in four Champions League semifinals.”

His next opponent, José Mourinho, is a man who knows some of Barcelona’s secrets because he was once a translator and then an assistant to the former coach at the Camp Nou, Bobby Robson.

Mourinho’s present club is Inter Milan. He was hired to win the Champions League. His team advanced, comfortably, by beating CSKA Moscow, 1-0, twice.

The second victory, on CSKA’s plastic field, was typical Inter, with a typical goal from a free kick by Wesley Sneijder that struck the leg of Moscow’s Keisuke Honda and deviated into the net.

CSKA, said Mourinho, was deflated by that early goal, and seeing out the 1-0 victory was easy for a team from Italy that knows how to close out a match. It was made even easier when Moscow brought on a substitute, the Nigerian Chidi Odiah, to try to fix it.

Odiah earned a yellow card for a rough foul on Sneijder, and within minutes, a red card after an ugly lunge at Samuel Eto’o.

Eto’o survived the assault and will return to the Nou Camp in the semifinal to oppose a team he was a part of until Barcelona sold him last summer.

His new coach, Mourinho, makes clear, he is using his time in Italy to show his coaching ability for a return to England. And having eliminated CSKA, having expunged his former team, Chelsea, in the previous round, Mourinho offers no apology for pragmatism.

You score one goal, you shut out the opponent. Mourinho no doubt has a plan to contain Barça. It starts with Messi, who has now joined just five men in the history of European club competition to score four times in one match.

The others were Marco van Basten and Andriy Shevchenko, both for AC Milan, Simone Inzaghi of Lazio, David Prso of Monaco and Ruud van Nistelrooy of Manchester United.

Statistics, though, are not the story. You have to see it.