Region:
Europe
Category:
Sports

Messi's genius is enough for Barcelona to win the Champions League

  • Lionel Messi leads Barcelona past Manchester United, into Champions League semis
    A Genius in Full Bloom Lionel Messi leads Barcelona past Manchester United, into Champions League semis
Region:
Europe
Category:
Sports
Publication date:
Print article

A Genius in Full Bloom: Lionel Messi leads Barcelona past Manchester United, into Champions League semis.

For the first few minutes of Tuesday’s Champions League quarterfinal second leg between Barcelona and Manchester United, it looked like the Red Devils might just be able to recapture the magic that allowed them to overcome a two-goal loss at home last month and upset Paris Saint-Germain in the round of 16.

Lionel Messi had other ideas. The world’s best player put an end to United’s unlikely Champions League dreams by scoring twice in a four minute span in the first half, sending Barca to a comprehensive 3-0 victory (4-0 on aggregate) and the final four of Europe’s top club competition for the first time since they last hoisted the trophy in 2015.

Still, they gasp. Still, after all this time, after all he has done, long after his brilliance should have become commonplace, after our expectations should have been adjusted and our capacity for surprise dulled, Lionel Messi can still draw the breath and dazzle the eyes and bring a crowd of nearly 100,000 to its feet.

Even when everything is in flux — when a bright, young Ajax team can go to Turin and beat wily old Juventus, when Cristiano Ronaldo can miss out on the Champions League semifinals, when guards seem to be changing and eras ending — a 3-0 second-leg quarterfinal victory over Manchester United featured soccer’s one great, enduring constant: Messi beaming, Barcelona winning, opponents left staring, hollow and glassy, at a genius that defies belief.

This is, at a rough estimate, the fourth iteration of Messi, the latest in a series of upgrades. It is easy to forget, given the scale of his achievements since, that the Messi who first emerged all those years ago was a winger: the Messi who was considered too small, too slight, who roamed Barcelona’s right flank, away from the monsters of the middle.

It was Pep Guardiola who took the risk, demoting two of the great strikers of their generations, Samuel Eto’o and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, so that Messi might play centrally. It was a move so radical, so unorthodox, that a term had to be coined — or at least borrowed from Italy — to explain it. Messi’s first rebirth was as a “false 9.”

There is no easy distinction between eras, no clear and distinct cauterization, no moment when he stopped being one thing and became another. By the time he picked up his fourth and most recent Champions League trophy, in 2015, he was something else again: a striker and a schemer combined, a 9 and a 10, with Neymar to one side and Luis Suárez, his friend and neighbor, to the other.

What is remarkable is that each version has been, arguably, the finest exponent of that position in history; each and every one has been captured by a moment that confirms his mastery of that role, that suggests he had completed that particular task and was ready for something new.

New York Times -Yahoo Sports