Lionel Messi has rarely hit the heights for his country that he has regularly for his club, Barcelona. Photograph: Alejandro Pagni/AFP/Getty Images
It is tempting, looking ahead to Argentina's World Cup opener against Bosnia and Herzegovina, to take the wilfully perverse approach, to focus on some aspect of this mixed and talented - if slightly ageing - Argentina squad that is consciously non-Lionel Messi. The range and spread of Fernando Gago's passing, perhaps. The indomitable spirit of Pablo Zabaleta. Or the triple-lunged stamina of Ángel di María, a player who in Argentina's formation must almost be in two places at once in order to make those two banks of four and six function properly. And once you've finished doing that it's probably best to take a moment, tear out the entire page and get back to talking about Messi again.
Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. If it walks like the world's best player on the verge of a World Cup watershed and quacks like the world's best player on the verge of a World Cup watershed ... well, you get the idea. Indeed it is a tribute to the uniquely relentless nature of Messi's attacking talents that even when he has already been the story for so long he will carry on being the story for as long as people are still captivated by the spectacle of pure, uplifting talent in pursuit of some as-yet unconquered peak. In fact, with Messi in the vanguard, it is tempting to see a broader scene of end times and last knockings in this Argentina squad.
Alejandro Sabella's starting lineup in the Maracanã could contain five members of Argentina's fabled 2005 Uefa Under-20 tournament team, a generation now in its late 20s that genuinely deserves - notwithstanding the small matter of not winning any further international medals - to be described as golden, but which also looks right now more like the end of something than the beginning.
First, though it is necessary to wade through the inevitable Diego-isms. Messi's status as the greatest attacking club player of all time looks almost unarguable. With 243 goals (many of them exceptional in some way) in 238 starts for Barcelona, plus an apparent invulnerability to the pressure of big matches, it is hard to see what more he could have done with his talent. And yet there will always be reservations about his contribution with Argentina, if only because of the unique heights scaled by Diego Maradona. Which is where, this time around, the temptation to draw parallels with Maradona's mensis mirabilis in 1986 start to arrive.
At Mexico 86 Maradona was 25, a year younger than Messi now. Like Messi at Barça Maradona had just had a season of relative consolidation at Napoli. Like Messi, Maradona entered that World cup with some lingering doubts over his conditioning: for Messi a slight return in the last year of those hamstring injuries and a suggestion of a transformation in his basic role; for Maradona a knee injury that, it was believed, would seriously inhibit his mobility (his total recovery was deemed near-miraculous by some observers). The team Maradona carried to the World Cup final was perhaps not as mediocre as is sometimes made out. It had strong leaders in Jorge Valdano and José Luis Brown, while Jorge Burruchaga provided a hard-running support act to Maradona, as Di María will hope to do this time around.
For all that, this is still a comparison that pretty much goes nowhere. Instead the most interesting parts of any Messi-Maradona head to head are the irreconcilable differences, the changing times that render the exercise skewed. Football has changed a great deal in the past 28 years. Watch any of the many Maradona highlights reels on YouTube and almost every piece of pirouetting left-footed invention involves a feat of rare muscular balance just staying upright while a failed attempt is made to hack him down; or alternatively ends up being curtailed abruptly by a successful one. Maradona's best moments tended to end in an agonised rub of the shin, where Messi's invariably end with a goal. Football was a different place, an outlaw country where invention was strictly policed and the sight of a player dribbling past world class defenders was hair raising indeed. Plus of course there is the tempering of football's surrounding environment.
To compare Messi and Maradona is a bit like comparing the progress of an Eton scholarship boy and a star pupil at the local borstal. Messi has spent his entire mature footballing life in the company of expert European coaches, sports scientists, teachers, elders, aides, helpers - not to mention Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and the rest. Maradona spent his prime footballing years never far from the company of hucksters, hustlers, egomaniac club owners and licensed and unlicensed drug pushers. He was a self-made troubled superstar, and a genuine Argentinian malandro in spirit. Messi could not have scored his - outrageous, instinctive, utterly bogus - first goal against England in 1986: he's just not like that (he could have scored the second though, and in fact does every six months or so, albeit not with Terry Fenwick's forearm chopping him across the windpipe).
Back to 2014, then. This is a nicely seasoned Argentinian team with a spine that has grown together. Messi, Sergio Agüero, Gago, Zabaleta, Lucas Biglia and Ezequiel Garay all played in that champion 2005 youth team, as did Gabriel Paletta now of Italy, a remarkable feat of sustained progression compared to the usual fall-out from such tournaments (Spain's team contained David Silva and Cesc Fábregas: Brazil's is unrepresented at this World Cup). Not only was Messi Argentina's joint youngest player, he was also the best on show, winning the golden ball and the golden shoe and scoring both goals in Argentina's defeat of Nigeria in the final. Fast forward nine years and this World Cup represents pretty much a final push for one of the great youth teams of recent times, at a tournament in which, true to the founding spirit of the spine of 2005, Argentina have again placed pretty much all their eggs in a Messi-shaped basket. The absence of Carlos Tevez, it is said, has a little of Messi behind it. In his absence the main creative relationship in attack is between the captain and his old friend - and room-mate in Brazil - Agüero.
At the same time it seems poignant that Argentina's previously fecund youth system has begun to run dry a little, creating a kind of talent vacuum below that class of 2005. The youngest players in this squad are all around 24 years old a reflection more than anything else of the lack of talent pushing through beneath the Messi generation. If the years after Maradona's World Cup triumph brought with them various miniature virtuosos - Gabriel Batistuta, Juan-Román Riquelme, Ariel Ortega, Javier Zanetti and the rest - quite where the next lot are coming from right now is not immediately clear.
So the captain is under additional pressure to thrive, as he has in recent times with 19 goals in his past 19 matches, where the previous 23 had brought six. With Messi to the fore Argentina topped South America's 16-match qualifying group, scoring more goals than anyone else in the process. And for all the wider context, Argentina have both an excellent squad and a friendly draw that should see them win Group F and play one of Switzerland, Ecuador and Honduras in the next round. With Messi the central creative force in a well-grooved 4-3-3 Argentina will shuttle the ball to their conductor via Di María's running power and Gago's fine-tuned passing, with Messi playing a little deeper than he does for Barcelona, starting attacks from closer to the halfway line.
There are weaknesses, most notably in goal and in defence, where some believe Argentina are vulnerable in the air. But the real story will always be elsewhere. The prospect of Messi playing as Messi - not World Cup Messi, but Barcelona Messi - remains the key factor in a final tilt at something bigger for the class of 2005, a team of champion players who have been champions together just the once.
Post By http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/14/lionel-messi-argentina-potential-world-cup
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