Albert NgeneMessi officially tested positive for being the greatest footballer of all time._ – Arko Roy YouTube ‘commenter’ after Argentina lifted the 2021 Copa America trophy.
PELE
- Pele is not in contention for G.O.A.T because he played at a time that there were no videos. Let me explain with this illustration.
Harry Kewell was the greatest Australian export to the premiership. He was on fire for Leeds United but by the time he transferred to Liverpool in 2003 he was a dud. Because by that time coaches and defenders had studied reels of his dribbling style and had mastered it. When they met him on the pitch they easily neutralized him and made him surplus to requirement.
A coach today is supported by, among other things, experts including match readers and psychological profilers. To those we now add geeks who analyze the mechanics of a player’s style and leg movements. His runs off the ball. His dribbling style. Everything that can be gleaned just by watching 10,000 hours of a player running on the field. And I am not talking about videos from sports channels. I am talking about cameras trained on a player’s legs for 90 minutes and thereafter broken into a 10,000 slides for study in the conference room.
There are other players who lost their mojo when coaches and defenders decoded their mechanics or style but let’s save that for another day.
- Pele played in the 60s and 70s and if you wanted to understand the mechanics of his footwork you had no digital assistant. You did have to relocate to Brazil to watch Pele play for Santos FC. That’s all the help you gonna get.
Remember he never played for any club in Europe so he appeared at the next World Cup as the perpetual new boy on the block with his bag of tricks intact.
- Pele was athletic. Sturdy. Ambidextrous (just invented that to mean ability to strike the ball with both feet with equal facility.) High jumper. He read the game well and was a great passer. But football does not demand ambidextricity otherwise the goal Messi scored against Nigeria, in the 2018 World Cup, with his right leg would not count.
By the way, that goal against Nigeria will rank somewhere as one of the hardest goals Messi ever scored in the Mundial. Someone in light blue jersey sent a high lob from the center circle and Messi rose in the air to meet it, the ball died on his left lap. Messi turned, still in the air, and left his marker Kenneth Omeruo for dead. Yes all 6 foot 2 inches and 190 pounds of him. He landed, still on Kenneth’s blind side, and sped off to the lower right of the eighteen. Both Kenneth and Francis Uzoho, the keeper, knew he always paused to kick with his left foot. So they plotted walls of obstruction in the path of an imaginary ball struck with his left foot.
Not this time.
MARADONA
I am grateful to the gods of soccer that Messi had never attempted to play like Maradona – a one man battleship on a suicide mission. He just powers through legs. What defenders would later do to Maradona in Serie A may have driven him first to ethical, then to recreational, drug use. By the time Maradona died all the abuses had come to collect on his body.
That said, Maradona was a gift to the beautiful game. Coaches at Napoli and the national team mostly gave him balanced teams and played to his strengths. Who could forget his lethal partner in the Argentine team, Claudio Caniggia, who was always there to complete Maradona’s hard work? Defenders were always fooled by Caniggia’s Mick Jagger good looks until the _Son of the Wind_, as he is fondly called in Argentina, starts to sprint or goes airborne to nod in a goal.
CRISTIANO RONALDO
- Everything I said about Pele’s abilities applies to CR7 – athleticism, ambidextricity, aerial contest, and speed.
But for me CR7 tries too hard.
It was funny watching him fight with his teammates at Juventus for the right to take penalties. Is it a desire to win or a desire to chalk up his goal tally?
I have never called him *Penaldo* but sometimes it appears the beautiful game is an unpleasant chore for him. His Portuguese teammates are just mainly average but he drives them forward by sheer force of will. Or was there any player in Portugal’s run to Euro 2016 triumph whose name you remember?
- Comparing CR7 and Messi is like comparing apples and oranges. It is unfair and inequitable. Cristiano is an out and out striker with a striker’s mentality. Woe betide a coach who would assign him keeping duties, for instance. He will soon find his post empty. For CR7 will always be in the front line hustling for the ball and angling for shots at goal. He was born to score.
With Messi it is completely different. When Messi scores it is because strikers are not doing their job. Messi would rather stitch up the defenders and take them out of action so that his strike partner can score.
So let’s stop these silly comparisons between Messi the schemer and Cristiano Ronaldo the closer.
MESSI
Messi is the Greatest Of All Time (football) because he is the master of the Dead Ball Dribble._
In a space, no wider than a telephone booth, he will carefully thread the ball between the legs of defenders like those adult men were fresh-faced kids from the academy. Then he turns up the speed to deliver passes where his mates would be. Not where they are.
How many times has Messi nutmeged Spain’s most tested central defender, Sergio Ramos, in El Clasico? And if Ramos shouts, *Casualidad!* (Spanish for ‘Fluke’), Messi stops and does it again. It’s a small world said Lee van Cleef … So, Messi and Sergio Ramos are turning out for PSG in this New World order.
Please who knows how many reels of tape on Messi’s footwork that the La Liga has compiled. Yet every game is as fresh as a thing of beauty never seen before.
Never to be encompassed.
CONCLUSION
The public interrogation of a title that rightly belongs to Messi lies at the feet of Bartomeu (former Barcelona club president) and the Argentina football federation who have done their bit to sabotage his greatness by mismanagement or malice. Bartomeu let Neymar go. Neymar could have been a perfect understudy for Xavi and Iniesta in order to take the tiki taka game of Barca to a new level. Maradona was once brought in to coach Argentina and he demanded his forwards to bulldoze their way through the legs of defenders.
Who does that? Unless they are taking advise from Mona Flanders – “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
It is very fitting that it was Di Maria, his best friend, that broke the jinx by scoring against Brazil, and made it possible for Messi to lift the Conmebol 2021.
There are so many football greats up and down the scale of Time. But Messi stands head and shoulders above them (pun intended as Messi, the little man, is known to jump no higher than knee height as he runs hurdles to avoid deflated and disoriented falling bodies).
Messi is not The GOAT for the 672 goals he scored and the 266 assists he provided in 778 games for Barcelona over 17 years …
He is The GOAT because he brings the mystique to every touch of the ball; and he has played at the highest level for more than two decades now with six Ballon d’Or medals to show for it.
Ngene Writes from Atlanta
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