Rarely is the term deserving of use. Pele was a football genius, Diego Maradona was a football genius and perhaps, just perhaps, Lionel Messi may be the third person to add to that category.
I know precisely who I am overlooking here. Such luminaries as Alfredo Di Stefano, Michel Platini, Johan Cruyff, George Best, Marco Van Basten and Zinedine Zidane. As awful and heartless as it may seem and as talented as these players were, they fell just (in some cases, a hairs breadth) short.
The difference between them and the likes of Maradona and Pele cannot be measured in purely football terms. It is a mystique, an aura that these players have. The expectation fans have when they went to see them knowing that they may well witness something that they have never seen before, or will ever see again.
For me Pele’s genius is confirmed not in any of the 1000+ goals he scored, his world cup medals or his status in the game. One moment for me confirms Pele’s genius and that is when he dummies the Uruguayan goalkeeper late in the World Cup quarter final, allowing the ball to run past him and the keeper, while he raced past the keeper on the opposite side before hurtling round to drag his shot wide.
It didn’t matter that it didn’t go in. We’d witnessed a moment of pure genius then. The outcome didn’t matter, it was the moment that sealed his place. The genius was in the thinking of it and the execution. The result...well it didn’t matter that it went wide in the end. In some ways it makes it even more poetic.
Maradona’s status is earned on his raw, unsurpassed talent alone and the fact that it was his abilities solely that elevated what was an ordinary Argentinean team to lift the 1986 World Cup. It wasn’t just his performances in games, it was the level he performed at in most of them from start to finish. It was the greatest set of performances by an individual in a World Cup competition that we will ever likely see. That comes from an Englishman who still winces at that handball goal, but who can fully recognise the genius of his second against England that day. That summed Maradona up for me, the first we saw the rotten cheat and the second we saw the genius that showed that he didn’t really need to. Poetic once again? Perhaps, but not for an Englishman!
And now we have Lionel Messi, Barcelona’s 22 year old Argentinean following in the footsteps of his national team manager. Messi’s performances for the last two years for Barcelona have elevated him to being unquestionably the best player in the world at the moment.
However Messi has some way to go. His genius at club level has been proven. Now he needs to take the next step and prove it at the World Cup finals. If he can do that in 2010, Argentina will be anointing a new football God and Diego Maradona may well have to make space for a companion on the throne of Argentinean soccer.
Lionel Messi is a genius, he just hasn’t proved it to quite everybody at international level just yet.
But I have no doubt that soon enough, he will.
Comments