The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment

The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment

The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment
The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment “ By Anthony Lopopolo
”
When he was a kid, Lionel Messi used to take a one-hour siesta in the afternoon. He would sleep 10 hours a night. He wasn’t really bothered.
He is still a pretty calm guy at 27...
The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment “ By Anthony Lopopolo
”
When he was a kid, Lionel Messi used to take a one-hour siesta in the afternoon. He would sleep 10 hours a night. He wasn’t really bothered.
He is still a pretty calm guy at 27...
The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment “ By Anthony Lopopolo
”
When he was a kid, Lionel Messi used to take a one-hour siesta in the afternoon. He would sleep 10 hours a night. He wasn’t really bothered.
He is still a pretty calm guy at 27...

The Calm and The Storm: Lionel Messi’s Moment

By Anthony Lopopolo

When he was a kid, Lionel Messi used to take a one-hour siesta in the afternoon. He would sleep 10 hours a night. He wasn’t really bothered. 

He is still a pretty calm guy at 27 years old, by accounts of his teammates and those around him. “You see him warming up and he’s as calm as a kid who’s going to play on the field around the corner,” said Fernando Signorini, Argentina’s fitness trainer, in the book Messi: A Biography. The Maracanã, the World Cup final, is not exactly a game on a field around the corner, but it is his last frontier, the chance to be fully embraced by the country he left when he was 11, to share the same mantle as Maradona.

Messi understands this moment. “My hopes and dreams are being fulfilled due to the hard work and sacrifice of a team that has given everything from match one,” he wrote on Facebook. But this feels almost more about his own legacy than it does about Argentina.

This team is in service of him, almost literally. Messi has been involved in five of the eight goals that Argentina has scored in the World Cup. The coach Alejandro Sabella made sure it went this way.

Messi did indeed serve as his country’s captain in a World Cup game before 2014. It was Maradona who entrusted him with the armband in a match against Greece, which Argentina won, but it was only after Sabella took over that Messi became the true leader of this team, for every 90 minutes.

Javier Mascherano handled those duties before, and to some extent he is still the real leader on the field. But one day, years ago at Barcelona’s training ground, Mascherano approached Messi and said he would no longer be captain. It would be Messi. “I felt that he had to be captain,” Mascherano said in Guillem Balagué’s book Messi, “because of everything he represented for us.”

Messi would not accept at first, and maybe that’s because he did not quite know what he represented. Some back home did not consider Messi one of them. Messi did not sing the national anthem, and there was a perception that he didn’t feel anything for the shirt, that he didn’t feel enough for La Albiceleste. “It hurt to come to my country and hear that people said I felt nothing for our jersey,” Messi said. “Then I went to Barcelona, where I did everything fine and people loved me.”

The irony was cruel. As a teenager, Messi was called up by the Spanish football federation to play for its junior national teams. He could have realistically played for Spain after he received his citizenship. But he waited for a call for Argentina. He wanted to play for his country, even though, early on, Argentina’s football officials could not spell his name properly. They knew hardly a thing about him. And so it took years to restore that relationship.

Messi needs that support. He needs to be loved to perform at his best; he needs his surroundings to understand him. Sometimes he needs to be left alone—basically he needs people who can appreciate him.

So maybe he was too shy and too untrusting to be captain. He did not give much of a speech during his first match as captain, according to Balagué, but he began to have more conversations on an individual basis, and he would leave the tactics to Sabella. 

More than anything Messi gave his teammates some positive reinforcement. At Barcelona, Messi always fit right in; only recently has Messi found a comfortable spot in Argentina’s line up. He learned to suffer with them and win with them, and he was becoming “one of them.” Messi once received $200,000 in cash for playing in a friendly in India, but he divided it up and gave the rest to his Argentina teammates. “I suffer from the heat like you,” he said, according to Balagué’s book. “I’ve been on a journey like you and I’ve had vaccinations like you. This money is for everyone.”

(Messi plays some 60-plus games a year, playing for Barcelona, flying on tour for publicity, for friendlies in different countries, and he honours most if not all of these commitments. He is a pretty loyal person. He may seem a bit reclusive, someone without much personality, but if you’re in his circle, you’re in for life. That is the general feeling among journalists who try to get to know him.)

No wonder they love him in the team. It set off a good run. Starting a year ago, Messi started to score at his normal pace of a goal per game—in a system with Sergio Agüero and Gonzalo Higuaín and Ángel di María all serving him. Messi’s performances instantly improved under Sabella, and so did his relationship with Argentina. So many fans at this World Cup wore Messi jerseys, rows of people wearing his No. 10.

He has not played all that well in this World Cup, despite his four goals, and he has looked sometimes static, not covering as much ground. But he scored when Argentina really needed that moment of match-winning brilliance, a split-second move to create an opening. That moment came in the dying seconds and in the opening minutes. His timing was special.

Not at all has he looked truly nervous on the field, with the ball inches from his feet. He looks most vulnerable when he is on the bench, helpless, biting his nails; when he has to speak in public, when he accepts those Ballons d’Or, in that purple tuxedo, in the polka dot suit, grinning sheepishly. The man knows a million ways to score goals, but speaking about those and his success proves difficult. It’s mostly clichés. 

His first public appearance came in an elementary school play. The teacher decided to dress the students in costumes that reflected their personalities. Messi went on stage as a snail. He was slow and shy. 

Not so today, especially not on the field. He posts images online and shares more and more of his life with the world. He finally looks happy in La Albiceleste. Messi has won titles with Argentina before: the U20 World Cup and the gold medal at the 2008 Olympics. But the World Cup is the main prize. Its omission from his achievements is a gaping hole. “It eats away at him that, although he feels he is number one, he thinks he has not yet made history,” writes Balagué. “And he is possibly still clearing up an old doubt: that of feeling accepted.”

This piece was written by AFR Senior Writer Anthony Lopopolo, who you should follow on Twitter at @sportscaddy. Comments below please.