Messi's Brilliance Transcends His Numbers

Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers - NYTimes.com               Page 1 of 5

 December 11, 2012

 Messi’s Brilliance Transcends
 His Numbers
 By JERÉ LONGMAN
 It was Pep Guardiola, the former manager of Barcelona, who once
 suggested that Lionel Messi should be observed instead of dissected. He is,
 after all, widely considered the world’s greatest soccer player, not a biology
 project.

 “Don’t try to write about him,” Guardiola said. “Don’t try to describe him.
 Watch him.”

 Last Sunday, Messi set an international record by scoring his 86th goal in
 a calendar year, for both Barcelona and the Argentine national team,
 delivering an average of one goal every four days, more frequently than a
 starting pitcher takes the mound, as often as Starbucks opens a new store
 in China.

 But Messi is best appreciated, Guardiola admonished, in the virtuosity of
 the moment, not against the backdrop of history and statistics. Soccer, like
 figure skating, demands art as much as sport. This is not baseball, where
 numbers mean so much that they seem to carry a moral weight. Soccer’s
 beauty is that it surpasses mathematics, or, in Barcelona’s case, conjures a
 sublime human geometry of triangular passing and movement.

 International soccer is generally played from late summer, through the
 winter, and into late spring, the schedule defined by seasons, not by
 calendar years. So this record of 86 goals is an artificial construct, a figure
 that celebrates Messi but also reduces his achievement to mere quantity. It
 is inadequate to say that he has scored 75 times with his left foot in 2012, 8
 times with his right foot and 3 times with his head. Or that when he has
 scored in a Spanish league match since August, it has never been a single
 goal but always two or more. Such dry accounting pins him like a butterfly
 to Styrofoam, relegates his greatness to taxidermy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/sports/soccer/messis-brilliance-t... 12/12/2012

Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers - NYTimes.com               Page 2 of 5

 As Guardiola said, Messi, at age 25, must be watched to be fully
 appreciated. To be wholly valued for his vision and anticipation and
 enthusiasm and ruthlessness and humility. For the way he chips a shot
 over a goalkeeper as if his foot were a sand wedge. For the way he dribbles
 in tight spaces, the ball bound to him like an electron bound to an atom.

 The goals must be seen, and just as important, they must also be heard.
 For it is the excitable voices of the announcers that best convey Messi’s
 triumph over the parsimony of soccer. It surrenders so few goals to most
 others and so many to him. Only one response is appropriate,
 “Gooooooooooooal,” a prolonged, shrieking exhalation that takes the
 breath away.

 On Sunday, Messi received a no-look, back-heel pass from Barcelona
 teammate Andrés Iniesta and angled a hard, diving shot across the mouth
 of the goal, inside the far post, to break the record of 85 goals scored in
 1972 by Gerd Müller of Bayern Munich and West Germany. Messi’s verbal
 biographer, the English announcer Ray Hudson, erupted with his usual
 bombastic poetry, mixing his metaphors but not his uninhibited
 celebratory intent.

 “Lionel Messi rewrites the history book!” Hudson said, screaming. “And
 we were all there to witness it, to be privileged by this artisan! He does it
 in his own inimitable, brilliant way, Messi twisting, turning, like an
 alligator with a twitch, beautiful give and go! He takes a million pictures in
 that crystal ball that’s inside of his head! Beautiful from Iniesta, laying it
 on for the golden honor for this golden footballer, the most wonderful,
 stupendously magnificent, player in the history of the game! And he’s only
 getting better.”

 Anyone with 10 ½ minutes to spare can watch all 86 goals compressed
 and shelved in a video library on YouTube. The Web site goal.com has
 annotated each goal, date and manner of scoring. What these compilations
 do not directly show is that Messi has complemented his scoring with 29
 assists. And that he has great stamina, preferring to play from beginning
 to end without substitution. But the goals are there. And they have often
 come in clusters, like grapes.

 His first two goals of the year came in a Copa del Rey match on Jan. 4.
 After sitting on the bench with flulike symptoms, Messi entered in the

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/sports/soccer/messis-brilliance-t... 12/12/2012

Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers - NYTimes.com               Page 3 of 5

 60th minute for Barcelona. He scored twice, first on a stabbing header and
 then on a bending shot that left the Osasuna goalkeeper pounding his fists
 into the turf.

 The videos demonstrate Messi’s predatory confidence on penalty kicks,
 the sweeping power of his lesser-used right foot, the punching accuracy of
 his rare headers. And his decorous manner. Seventy-four of his goals have
 come inside the penalty area, but absent is the diving that often turns
 European soccer into a deceitful ballet.

 Messi is the world’s most prolific scorer, maybe the world’s most famous
 athlete, but he remains smaller than life, not larger than life, nicknamed
 the Flea, having needed injections of growth hormone to reach 5 feet 7
 inches. His celebrations are demure, no jersey-waving or dancing with the
 corner flag. What draws the eye to him after a goal is that he is mostly
 restrained while many around him, on the field and in the stands, are
 running and jumping and waving wildly.

 No doubt this calm aids him in pressured moments. On Feb. 26, with
 Barcelona tied, 1-1, against Atlético Madrid in the 81st minute, Messi
 curled a free kick from 25 yards with impeccable accuracy and clever
 timing. The opposing goalkeeper stood with his arms outstretched,
 baffled, incredulous. In another setting, he might have been a boy who had
 just seen a birthday magician pull a quarter from his ear.

 On March 7, Messi had a day that no one had ever had in the Champions
 League, Europe’s premier club tournament, scoring five times for
 Barcelona in a 7-1 rout of Bayer Leverkusen of Germany. Twice, Messi
 lobbed shots over the head of goalkeeper Bernd Leno. A third time, he
 tapped in a rebound that had deflected off Leno’s hands. Two more of
 Messi’s shots were driven inside the left post on a day when Leno could do
 little more than hop and roll as if trying to smother an invisible fire.

 “Messi is a joke. For me the best ever,” Wayne Rooney, the Manchester
 United and England star, wrote on Twitter.

 On June 9, before an exhibition crowd of 81,994 at MetLife Stadium,
 Messi delivered a hat trick as Argentina subdued its rival Brazil, 4-3. He
 scored the game-winner in the 85th minute, driving at the defense and
 curling a shot inside the left post from 22 yards, leaving Rafael Cabral, the

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/sports/soccer/messis-brilliance-t... 12/12/2012

Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers - NYTimes.com                 Page 4 of 5

 defeated Brazilian goalkeeper, on his knees as if searching for a lost
 contact lens.

 “Leo is supernatural,” Gerard Piqué, Messi’s Barcelona teammate, would
 tell the Spanish newspaper El Mundo Deportivo, after Messi broke the
 scoring record on Sunday. “He has no limits and we always have to
 remember everything that he’s given us. We have to enjoy him every single
 minute that we have him now.”

 It is a brilliance that can be as fragile as it is rare. On Nov. 11, Messi scored
 twice for Barcelona, surpassing the 75 goals that Pelé of Brazil scored in
 1958. Then, last Wednesday, as Messi drew within one goal of Müller’s
 record, he collided with goalkeeper Artur Moraes in a scoreless
 Champions League match against Benfica of Portugal. His left knee in
 pain, Messi shot weakly, saying, “I thought it might be the last time I
 kicked a ball in a long time.”

 Messi left the field on a stretcher and the crowd at Barcelona’s stadium,
 Camp Nou, grew silent. Alarmed headlines spread around the globe. But it
 was only a bruise, and Messi returned to Barcelona’s lineup Sunday for the
 two record-breaking goals against Real Betis. Team victory meant more
 than an individual record, Messi said, but with four games remaining this
 year, he continued, “I hope to add more to it so that it is harder for the
 next person to break.”

 Despite the record, some will find Messi deficient because he has never
 won soccer’s ultimate prize, the World Cup, as did Pelé and Messi’s
 countryman, Diego Maradona. But Johan Cruyff, the former Dutch great,
 wrote during the 2010 World Cup that soccer devotees should be satisfied
 that each era has its heroes, none of whom should be considered lesser
 than the other.

 “We will not see a player like this ever again,” Tito Vilanova, Barcelona’s
 current manager, said of Messi on Sunday as he spoke to reporters. “Not
 just for his goal-scoring capacity and for his ability to see a pass, but for
 the way he understands the game in attack and defense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/sports/soccer/messis-brilliance-t... 12/12/2012

Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers - NYTimes.com               Page 5 of 5

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/sports/soccer/messis-brilliance-t... 12/12/2012