Messi and the original Ronaldo (Brazil) are the two best ever...
better than Maradona and Pele...Only nostalgia getting in the way of people admitting that.
If Messi win a World Cup, people will try to find something else to begrudge him.
Agreed..
For me, Messi is the greatest ever hands down. Better than all the names you mention there.
Even if Messi doesn't win a World Cup i will still say he is the best ever. And if he does win, people will turn around and say that his success was largely because of being on such a great team like Barcelona.
The international game is so different and so much more competitive now than ever before, that it is difficult for one single player to almost single-handedly determine the outcome of a tournament like Pele and Maradona did.. Even someone with the prodiguous talent of Messi.
For one, there are no more walkover sides in international football as the last World Cup showed. Teams like North Korea, New Zealand and Algeria giving traditional superpower teams a run for it. Tactical advances and the across the board improvement in the global quality of players means any properly coached and constructed team with heart will be competitve.
Also, the prominence of club football over international today means that national teams are not together as much as before. It means that there is not as much as a defined system that they adhere too. Couple that with the fact that the best players are entrenched in the brand of their European clubs, it means that the style of many national teams are becoming less distinguishable as they converge to a center.
For example, the Brazil of today is much more of a European adaptation with less dependency on flair and raw talent. Players like Ramires, Lucas, Elano could have never seen Pele's brazilian team. Another example is, the Italy of today is also an adaptation with less dependency on catenaccio based defensive ethic.. They now run a 4-3-3 and cannot keep clean sheets. Spain's success is largely because they have wholesaled the best club in the world, Barcelona. Holland and Germany also don't play a brand that is as evidently Dutch or German as it used to be back in those days, and Argentina still can't figure out what they want to do.
I might have strayed, but the point is that Messi is hamstrung by the lack of identity in his national team and hamstrung by the ineptitude of his national team coaches.
To recap, Pekerman basically threw away Messi's first chance of winning a World Cup with Argentina by subbing off Riquelme and Tevez against Germany and leaving Messi on the bench allowing them to take the game. Then Maradona with his clueless self was never going to win the 2010 World Cup with his questionable selections and even more questionable system. And then the last coach was trying to xerox Barcelona's system to accomodate Messi, but was trying to do so with players who simply do not fit and could not execute. Add in the sub-standard defenders on that team and it is unrealistic to expect Messi to do it on his own.
So lack of international success is not just about Messi. Until he gets a proper coach who can implement a system that best suits the talent that Argentina have at their disposal, Argentina will not win anything just from Messi carrying the side on his back a la Maradona '86.
