Dubai: Scoring goals, according to many football players and pundits, is the hardest skill in the game.
Indeed, even the most prolific of strikers on Planet Earth are, at times, afflicted by the sudden and inexplicable inability to hit the back of the net.
But in the rarefied realms of Planet Fantasy Football, the sole preserve of record-breaking Barcelona star Lionel Messi, frustrations such as goal-scoring droughts and fallow periods involving losses of form are non-existent. Instead, in Messi’s utopian universe, there are only torrents of goals and a rich harvest of consistently incredible performances.
For, to paraphrase Shakespeare, if goals be the food of football, Messi wants excess of them. It is this glorious greed for goal-scoring which led to him surpassing German legend Gerd Muller’s 40-year-old world record of 85 goals in a calendar year – a tally so seemingly untouchable that few football aficionados had heard of it – on Sunday with a brace in Barcelona’s 2-1 win at Real Betis. Messi now has 86 goals to his name in 2012 with potentially three games left to play before the year is out. No wonder Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, once said Messi was akin to a “PlayStation player”.
To further illustrate the scale of Messi’s extraordinary achievement, the great Brazilian Pele is ‘only’ third in this pantheon of great goal-getters with a ‘mere’ 75 goals to his name in 1958.
What makes Messi’s landmark feat all the more special is that he is not an orthodox forward in the vein of Muller, who was chiefly renowned for his predatory penalty-box poaching.
Indeed, Messi’s goal-scoring repertoire is far more stylish and varied than the man who was known as “Der Bomber”, the Argentine capable of making the net bulge in myriad ways unlike the more one-dimensional German.
Through his own sublime skill – the impossibly adhesive, scampering feet, lightning-quick changes of control, breathtaking bursts of speed and slaloming runs – the little magician frequently fashions chances from which he himself can score.
One of his most memorable efforts, a stunning, mazy dribble from the halfway line ending in a sumptuous finish against Getafe in 2007, bore uncanny similarities to Diego Maradona’s legendary strike for Argentina against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final.
It was arguably an even greater effort, given that the final touch to Maradona’s tour de force was applied via a sliding tackle from England’s Terry Butcher.
Like the great Bayern Munich and West Germany striker of the 1960s and 70s Muller, Messi is not averse to prodding home so-called ‘ugly goals’ from close range.
He is deadly from outside the penalty box, too, as Arsenal fans will recall after he lashed in a ferocious equaliser in a four-goal virtuoso performance for Barcelona at the Nou Camp against the Gunners in the 2010 Champions League.
This goal-scorer supreme has also developed into a prodigious taker of free-kicks, which was spectacularly illustrated in Barcelona’s El Clasico encounter with Real Madrid in October when he curled in a delightful set-piece from 30 yards out.
He’s therefore not just a great goal-scorer, but a scorer of great goals, even with his head – despite being a diminutive 5ft 7ins – as he showed when he nodded home Barcelona’s second goal in their 2-0 Champions League final destruction of Manchester United in 2009.
His boss at Barcelona, Tito Vilanova, perfectly encapsulated his star’s preternatural goal-scoring ability thus: “Leo continually breaks records. His goal tally is spectacular. It takes other great players seven or eight seasons to score the amount of goals he scores in one season. Also, some of his goals are absolute beauties.”
So, how has a singular striker like Messi turned into an incomparable goal machine?
It’s widely accepted that his status as the most potent player in football owes much to his former coach at Barcelona, Pep Guardiola.
When Guardiola took over from Frank Rijkaard at the Nou Camp in 2008, Messi was a mercurial winger who regularly cut in from the left wing.
Guardiola, though, sensed his talisman would be even more effective if unleashed in a central role, and therefore gave him licence to roam in a position which has become known as ‘the false nine’. In other words, Messi is not a traditional central striker, or number 9, who exclusively prowls the penalty area waiting for the ball to come his way. Instead, he drops deep into midfield when required to join in attacks, many of which he initiates himself.
It was a tactical masterstroke from Guardiola, which has yielded ever-escalating and jaw-dropping dividends year on year. In Guardiola’s first season, 2008-09, Messi netted 38 goals in all competitions for Barcelona. Since then, he has plundered 47, 53 and 73 goals for his club alone in the next three seasons up to the end of the 2011/12 campaign. The statistics he is compiling are quite outrageous. He is Barcelona’s all-time leading goal-scorer at the age of only 25 with 283 goals; holds the record for the most La Liga hat-tricks in a single season (8); and he scored the most goals ever in a single season with 73 in 2011/12. And that’s to name but three of his never-ending and luminous collection achievements.
It must be acknowledged, though, that Messi’s goal-getting is appreciably assisted by the fact that he plays in a team full of stellar talents such as Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta and Dani Alves. He can therefore feast himself on a bountiful supply of delicious assists and precision passes from his lavishly gifted teammates, some of whom he has played with since he was a teenager.
The rest of his sensational scoring prowess, though, is down to Messi and his God-given talents alone. He has an instinctive knack of engineering a position from which to score, is unerringly accurate when shooting at goal and is the personification of cool aplomb when faced with an onrushing goalkeeper.
In essence, scoring goals comes as naturally and easily to a man who lives and breathes football. Indeed, there is an exhilarating inevitability that Messi will score when he gets the ball within range of the box.
No less a finisher than the former England international Michael Owen was among the admirers left spellbound by Messi’s “duel” with Cristiano Ronaldo in October, when the two best players in the world showcased their clinical finishing by scoring both goals for their respective sides in Barcelona’s 2-2 draw with Real Madrid.
Writing on his Twitter account, Owen said: “It’s scary. It’s not like these boys get 10 chances and score 1 or 2. They literally finish every chance that comes their way.”
As he proved against Real, the current best player on earth has consistently delivered and scored on the grandest of stages against the greatest of opposition, netting in the Champions League finals of 2009 and 2011 for instance.
Like all great goal-scorers, Messi also possesses a “killer” instinct, an innate and undiminished hunger for putting the ball in the back of the net with metronomic regularity.
Watch him when Barcelona are coasting to victory at the Nou Camp and, even in the dying stages of the match, he remains razor-sharp and rabid in pursuit of a chance to increase his side’s winning margin.
It’s worth noting that statistics in 2012 have shown that Messi is at his deadliest in the final 14 minutes of a match, capitalising on the fatigue of opponents run ragged by one of the most ruthless footballers of all time.
Last year, his teammate at Barcelona, and fellow Argentina international Javier Mascherano, went as far as to describe Messi an “assassin” due to his relentless drive for goals and glory.
This description may be rather extreme, but Messi’s magnificence and refusal to let complacency affect him leave you forever groping for superlatives to describe his unstinting brilliance.
It’s simply astonishing that one so famous and decorated plays as if he is still just an exuberant schoolboy having a kickabout with his mates in the playground.
And while some goal-scorers of renown are consumed with scoring goals for their own personal satisfaction, it’s clear that getting on the scoresheet is never a selfish act for Messi. He is always at pains to stress in post-match interviews his efforts are all for the team’s greater good, for example, and constantly pays tribute to his teammates for helping him to achieve legendary feats.
His iconic and charming goal celebration – the crossing of himself and two-fingered salute to the heavens – underscores the fact that, despite his celestial gifts, Messi remains the epitome of humility and humbleness.
It is also worth stressing that Messi’s enduring excellence and phenomenal consistency – he plays 90 minutes of every game he is involved in unless injury intervenes – would not be possible if the Argentinian was not a supremely fit, model professional.
When he joined Barcelona as a youngster, the club funded injections for a growth hormone deficiency, which could have derailed a stellar career before it had even begun.
Barca also assigned a fitness and rehabilitation coach, Juanjo Brau, to work with him daily in a bid to prevent him from incurring frequent hamstring injuries; they also prescribed advice on what foods he should eat and how much sleep he should get.
Furthermore, his mentor Guardiola warned the impressionable youngster, after he had broken into the first team, about the consequences of continuing to follow the party lifestyle of his then teammate, the flamboyant Brazilian Ronaldinho.
“You’ve two options,” said Guardiola, who was coach of Barcelona’s ‘B’ team at the time. “Either you keep on partying, and you’ll be out of here in days. Or you start eating properly, quit the alcohol, go to bed early and come to practice on time. Only then might you become the best in the world.”
Diligently heeding such sound advice certainly paid off handsomely for Messi, whose injuries are now as rare as his goals are regular.
As such, all football lovers should, like Messi when he scores, thank a higher power for providing us with a footballer of such striking abilities.
