http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/jul/07/lionel-messi-argentina-copa-americaLionel Messi is an easy target for Argentina's collective failingsWhen the albiceleste underperform with Messi in the side, he's the one blamed. Against Colombia, they underperformed againPosted by Jonathan Wilson in Santa Fe Thursday 7 July 2011
He had his opportunity. With 10 minutes to go, Argentina won a free-kick by the right corner of the Colombia box. Lionel Messi stepped up. This was his chance to silence the grumblers, to mark his return to his home province with a deft assist, or perhaps even a goal. For a left-footer, the angle seemed inviting. He approached the ball – one step, two steps, three. Back went the left-foot, and ballooning high and wide went the ball, neither shot nor cross nor anything other than an indication of the lack of confidence that seems to submerge his game every time he pulls on the albiceleste shirt. As he trudged off at the final whistle after a goalless draw against Colombia, a smattering of boos rippled across the Estanislao López.
What makes it worse is that this was supposed to be his triumphant return home. It was only 110 miles to the south that Messi first kicked a ball. Some people say the boy's grandmother made the coach do it; Salvador Ricardo Aparicio himself says that he was a player short and asked the boy's grandmother if the five-year-old, who'd been kicking a ball against a nearby wall, would like to play. Everybody who was there on that dusty field in Rosario agrees what happened next. The ball came to the boy, clad in a shirt several sizes too big for him. He prodded at it with his right foot. When it came to his left, though, he started dribbling "as if he'd done that all his life", his grandmother said.
Those around reacted as if they'd seen a vision. Here was a pibe in action, the incarnation of the ideal of Argentinian football. The figure is an archetype that runs back to the earliest days of Argentinian football, from the days in the first decade of the 20th century when it first began to establish an identity distinct from that of the British ex-pats who had established the game in the country.
If Argentina wanted to erect a statue to its footballing spirit, the journalist Borocotó wrote in El Gráfico in 1928, it should depict "a pibe with a dirty face, a man of hair rebelling against the comb; with the intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh that does not quite manage to form on his mouth, full of small teeth that might be worn down by eating yesterday's bread."
The true embodiment of the pibe, of course, was Diego Maradona. Even Maradona accepts that Messi is his equal for skill, and he has a similar urchin build. Notably, though, Messi's hair no longer rebels against the comb – in fact, his may be the most sensible footballer's haircut since the days of Kevin Sheedy and Peter Davenport; a streak of European discipline has entered his soul.
It seems a trivial point, but it's not insignificant. Messi left Rosario for Spain at the age of 13, and there is a sense that Argentinian fans still don't entirely trust him. In that, he resembles another native of Rosario who found fame abroad and was never entirely accepted back home: Che Guevara. The move undoubtedly did Messi good, and not just because it secured him the growth hormones Newell's Old Boys could no long afford. It protected him, both against temptation – Pep Guardiola, then the reserve coach, quickly stepped in when he started partying with Ronaldinho – and against the machinations of agents, which may yet destroy the career of his contemporary Carlos Tevez.
But it also means that every time Messi underperforms for the national team – or, more accurately, every time the national team underperforms with Messi in the side – he is the one who takes the blame. In part that is natural for the best player in the team: he is the star, the genius, it's his shirt the counterfeit merchants are selling outside the grounds; therefore it's his job to drag the game the way of his side. But there is also a sense that whatever he does it will not quite be enough, that there will always be a suspicion that he doesn't quite give his all for Argentina. Given that he had the opportunity to play for Spain's youth teams and turned it down, that seems a little unfair.
To an extent the issue is generational. Younger fans accept that players leave for Europe as soon as they can; older fans seem still to find it hard to accept that the primera has become a diminished league. After the first game a taxi-driver even claimed that Argentina would be better picking only four Europe-based players if they wanted the team to play with pride.
There were chants for Messi before kick-off in Santa Fe but even here, the cheer for Tevez, rougher-edged and thus the more authentic avatar of pibismo, was much louder than the one for Messi when the teams were read out before kick-off. The stadium announcer neatly encapsulated the mood: "Con la 10, el mejor del mundo, Lionel Messi. Y con la 11, el jugador del pueblo, Carlos Tevez." Messi is the best in the world, but Tevez is the player of the people.
Messi, in truth, didn't look much like the best player in the world. He mooched around looking largely ineffective, perhaps all too aware that when he came deep in search of the ball it was not Xavi or Andrés Iniesta going ahead of him as it would be at Barcelona, but Esteban Cambiasso. Only once, after 34 minutes, as he slid a pass through for Ezequiel Lavezzi, was there a flash of his brilliance. The Napoli forward, though, described by Sergio Batista as Messi's co-pilot, was denied by Luis Martínez.
It's not Messi's fault, of course. Tevez, however popular he may be, was no more effective. This is an environment in which no player looked comfortable, anxious with the expectation and burdened by a tactical system that seems to suit nobody. As against Bolivia, Batista switched to a 4-2-1-3 late on, but Messi looked as uncomfortable as an enganche as he had as a false nine. This is a collective failure, tactical and mental, and ultimately Batista must take responsibility. It is Messi, though, the pibe with the European manners, who provides the easier target.
