07 November 2011
When considering the career and talent of Lionel Messi, the question is no longer whether or not he is the best player in the world, because he has removed any doubt; he is.
The question is now where he belongs in the pantheon of all-time greats. Just how great is Messi, and where does he stand in relation to the players generally accepted to be the greatest of all time: Pele, and more interestingly, given their shared nationality and one-time coach-player relationship, Diego Maradona?
It is, obviously, impossible to compare. Football has changed so much in the years between the end of Maradona's career and the start of Messi's. But I believe the biggest difference in terms of the effect upon the performance of an attacking player whose gifts centre around exceptional dribbling ability is in refereeing. Maradona played in an era where physical challenges were accepted as part of the game. Tackling was harder and more aggressive, many defenders made reputations on their fearsome ability to hurt opposition players (this is no exaggeration) and referees offered "skill" players little or no protection. Pele, Cruyff, Platini, Zico, Best; they all suffered through the same situation -- kicked and intimidated throughout games over the course of their careers.
To watch just about any highlights reel of Maradona in action is to marvel at the horrific tackles he had to evade on his slaloming, surging dribbles. It sometimes looks like nobody ever tried to tackle him, they just went straight ahead and tried to kick him. His low centre of gravity, sublime balance and body strength gave him the ability to ride tackles that would have cut down many other players, which contributed to years of painkilling injections as those bruised ankles and shins took their toll with age.
These are tackles that would break Messi in two. Not that he doesn't have the balance, pace and strength Maradona did. He does, but he is slighter than Maradona; less barrel-chested and powerful. Players try to foul him in the modern game, of course, but generally without the outrageously blatant violence of the challenges in Maradona's era.
The great peaks of Maradona's career are remembered for his moments of brilliance and cunning, but watch any of them back now and you will be shocked at the way he was targeted. One of the triumphs of the 1986 World Cup is the way he rises above the constant fouling on pure ability, but every single game is near-disfigured by the opposition seeking to hurt this impossible little genius. There seemed to be literally no other way to stop him. The early match against South Korea is memorable for a shocking tackle, a straight red card and possible ban in the modern game, but back then only a yellow and a long, worrying period on the turf receiving treatment for Maradona.
The legendary victory over England is marked by the two historic goals, but earlier the two Terrys - Butcher and Fenwick - had both brutally fouled the little Argentinian, with only Fenwick receiving a booking. Today both offences would be punished with straight reds.
The final against a German side determined to stop Maradona was marked by players lining up to kick him - sometimes almost literally - and the double-marking he received restricted his influence to some astonishing runs through hacks and raised studs and the remarkable assist for the winner. If Messi were similarly treated today, the media outcry would be deafening in its outrage.
There are two views on this. The first holds that creative players should be protected, indeed must be protected, in order for football to remain the beautiful game it is and for imaginative, skilful football to thrive. The second contends that football without strong tackles, without the physical dimension once so central to the spirit of the game, is no longer football at all. Whichever view you held, it seems indisputable that the game has changed, which has benefitted Messi.
La Liga produced a fascinating statistic last year, reflecting the dominance of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in relation to their own club sides and the Spanish League as a whole.
If all of the many goals those two players scored were taken out of the season, if Real Madrid and Barcelona were deprived of their respective talismans, then the difference in points earned would have made Valencia La Liga Champions. Of course the reality is more complicated than that; they would have been replaced by other players who would doubtless have made their own contributions to the title race, and neither Madrid nor Barca are exactly lacking in depth of talent.
But it raises the question: why have these players not been more deliberately targeted? Maradona was, after all.
His June 1982 move to Barcelona for a then World record fee of £5 million had made Maradona something of a marked man. The World had been somewhat unimpressed by him during the 1982 World Cup where defending champions Argentina, a little shell shocked by a confrontation with the televised reality of the Falklands War removed from the shield of propaganda created by the Argentinian junta and unable to smoothly integrate their young Number 10 into the remnants of the exciting side who had triumphed in 1978, were unceremoniously dumped out in the second round.
Maradona - and the rest of the team, to a lesser extent - had been targeted then; most memorably by Italy’s Claudio Gentile, but also by a wonderful Brazil side, who had no qualms about combining their wondrous football with some thuggish foul play. Maradona snapped, kicked out and was sent off.
Expectations were high at Barcelona. But that was a brief era of Spanish football dominated by the Basque clubs. Real Sociedad won the league in 1981 and again in 1982, then Athletic Bilbao won it two years in a row in 1983 and 84. Bilbao, historically the most "English" of Spanish clubs due to their high-intensity, direct, physical football, were an intimidating team under then-Coach Javier Clemente. Capable of exhilarating, powerful attacking football, they were also brutally tough, as Maradona found out in a game at Camp Nou in September 1983. In his autobiography Maradona suggests that Andoni Goikoetxea tackled him in such a manner because a few moments earlier Berndt Shuster had gone in hard on the Basque centre-half. Goikoetxea had badly injured Shuster a few seasons before with one of his sledgehammer challenges - some claim that after that particular injury, Shuster was never quite as good again - and here he got his revenge.
With the stadium chanting Shuster's name and Barca leading 3-0, Maradona said he tried to calm down a furious Goikoetxea, who was promising revenge. A moment later, Goikoetxea took it out on Diego instead. Launching himself at an accelerating Maradona, his foot punches the Argentinian's leg sideways and his ankle twists under him at a sickening angle. Maradona said he heard it snap, like wood.
Goikoetxea remained on the pitch, Maradona was stretchered off and was out for three months, in which time many speculate he first tried cocaine. His Barcelona career never really caught fire in the way it had at Boca Juniors and would at Napoli, and that injury certainly didn’t help. He forgave the Basque for the "axes blow", not that Goikoetxea sought forgiveness. Instead he placed the boot he was wearing on display in a glass case in his house, exulting in his reputation as "the Butcher of Bilbao".
Such behaviour seems outlandish in our modern era, but it nicely demonstrates how lucky Messi is to be playing now. If an opponent were to deliberately foul - and injure - Messi (or Cristiano Ronaldo) today in the same manner, a season-long ban, at the very least, would probably be the result. I wouldn’t argue with that, and suspect few would. But it seems that the game, for all that people complain about how cynical it is, how obsessed with money and scandal-ridden, about how so many players cheat and fake their way through games, retains some sense of honour. Otherwise, why wouldn't one of the clubs regularly clustered together twenty points or so beneath Madrid and Barcelona - Valencia, Sevilla or Bilbao for instance, the clubs who complain with justification about the inequalities in the Spanish League due to the sale of television rights - deliberately set out to eliminate Messi from the equation? Why don't they, say, send out a battered old defender in his last season at the club and instruct him to break Messi's ankle? Or smash Ronaldo's knee?
I'm glad they don't, but it would certainly level the playing field in Spain, for a season or so at least.
I'm glad that football, for all its manifest flaws, is not quite that game anymore. Skill and artistry are still the qualities we admire most, and they should be protected to some extent, even if it means La Liga becomes more and more like the Old Firm. But then, there is the chance that even if an on-pitch hit man was commissioned to crock one of the World's two best players, he wouldn’t be able to catch Messi. So few players can these days.
by David Nolan (https://twitter.com/#!/conanriquelme)
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