Granada at Barcelona, 3.20.12: Messi, There is No Second

I’ve been watching sports for a long time now. When I say that the first Redskins game I attended at RFK featured a Manning at starting quarterback for the opposing team, I don’t mean Eli or Peyton, but their father Archie. Nearly thirty years later, I saw Peyton play live in an AFC championship game, when his Colts were beaten by Tom Brady’s Patriots. I’ve been to three Super Bowls that included such Hall of Famers as Marcus Allen, John Elway, and Art Monk.

As for other sports, I saw Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park hit a double on his fortieth birthday, Jim Palmer pitch in Memorial Stadium, and Barry Bonds play in Candlestick Park. On TV, I reveled in watching Larry Bird’s Celtics play Magic Johnson’s Lakers and, later, Michael Jordan’s Bulls play virtually any team. I watched Arthur Ashe beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1975, then devoured the Borg-McEnroe years. I watched live as Nadia Comaneci scored her perfect ten at the 1976 Olympics, and in 1999 watched as Michael Johnson destroyed the 400 meter record.

The point is, I’m no soccer snob. I love almost all sports and have logged many hours watching them. And yet, I can’t think of any athlete that has so consistently amazed me with his brilliance as Lionel Messi. There is no second. I just watched a replay of today’s Barcelona-Granada game, whose rather bizarre 5-3 score line doesn’t begin to indicate Barcelona’s dominance.

Messi had another awesome performance, starting with an assist and ending with three goals. Each goal was unique, technically demanding, and aesthetically pleasing. The first was a one-time low shot off a deflected Isaac Cuenca cross. Messi timed the strike perfectly, hitting the ball cleanly with the side of his foot. The ball skipped off the turf like a stone off water before slamming into the far post and in. The second goal came off a Dani Alves chip behind the defense. (Alves and Messi worked beautifully together all night, including three sequences in which they exchanged multiple short passes amidst befuddled Granada defenders). Messi took down Alves’s pass with a quick and deft touch that transformed seamlessly into a quick and deft arcing shot over the sprawled keeper. Just about everything Messi does is quick and deft, almost amazingly so.

Messi’s third goal might have been his most impressive, but I simply don’t know. He made a run into the box and received another excellent pass from Alves. Messi proceeded to make a number of composed, inhumanly quick and sure touches on the ball, dribbling around the Grenada keeper and ultimately firing a high shot into side netting of the far post.

I could go on and on, just about this game. Messi’s passing and vision were as usual stunningly good, better even than his teammate Andres Iniesta’s. Messi’s long, accurate pass to Thiago in the 37^th minute, for example, almost certainly should have led to Messi’s second assist of the night. The same could be said of Messi’s sublime through ball to Cristian Tello in the 76^th minute. Messi’s equally sublime exchange with Iniesta, which ended in a savage Messi shot from about a yard off the end line, did lead directly to a rebound and a goal by Tello. Technically it wasn’t an assist for Messi, but really it was.

As virtually everyone who follows soccer already knows, Messi’s hat trick tonight moved him into first place on Barcelona’s all-time list of goal scorers, breaking a 57-year-old record. Messi himself is only 24. Given how many great athletes around the globe play soccer for a living—no other sport even comes close—the fact that Messi has so distanced himself from every other player in the world is not just remarkable, it’s scarcely believable. If you have a kid that likes sports, sit him or her down and watch Barcelona now, while Messi is in his prime. Years from now, that person will thank you.

Revolution v. L.A. Galaxy, 5.28.11 (and Barcelona!)

I’ve had this date circled on my calendar for weeks: Champions League final at 2:45 p.m. and Revolution at home against the L.A. Galaxy at 8:00 p.m. And so . . .

Far greater pens than mine have expounded on the merits of this year’s incarnation of FC Barcelona, which some put in the company of best-ever sports teams. The club’s season-punctuating thrashing of Manchester United will of course support those arguments. I was lucky enough to watch Barcelona play about a dozen times this year and I was always rewarded by amazingly good, some would say artistic, soccer. Here are a few observations about Barcelona that have been made before, but which may be worth laying out in a bureaucratic bulleted format, even by someone with my pedestrian knowledge of the game:

·      Messi virtually never leaves the field, even in garbage time of meaningless games. This might be the most amazing fact about Barca, given Messi’s diminutive size, the amount of talent around him, his importance to the team, his high salary, and the strength and speed of opposing players and attendant threat of physical harm. How cool is it that probably the best athlete now walking the planet refuses to rest?

·      Barca players rarely cross the ball in the air for headers in front of the goal, preferring instead to patiently pass in incredibly tight spaces in the offensive half of the field, biding their time for a shot. They even play most of their corner kicks short.

·      For large stretches of their matches, Barca effectively plays with only two defenders—its outside backs (particularly Dani Alves) almost constantly making offensive runs.

·      Barca players are tenacious defenders, pressing all over the field. In other words, they aren’t just more skilled than other teams' players, they outhustle them too.

To move from great teams to small, the Revolution lost another one today, 1-0 to the Galaxy. Despite getting blanked, the Revs had their chances. The first opportunity came early, in the second minute. Benny Feilhaber took a pass from Rajko Lekic and sprinted up the left wing. He then made a deft pass with the outside of his right foot, curling the ball back to a charging Zak Boggs, who had gotten in behind the L.A. defense. Boggs’s finish from close range was horrible, high and wide of the goal. The Revs wouldn’t actually get a shot on the frame until the 53^rd minute, which is one measure of their performance. Another is corner kicks: the Revolution took 0, the Galaxy 10.

Still, New England came tantalizingly close to tying the game in the final minutes. In the second minute of stoppage time, they had three—count ‘em three—excruciating near-goals in the span of about 20 seconds. It wasn’t the surreal end-of-game surge that Ghana laid on Uruguay at the end of that amazing 2010 World Cup match-up, but it was reminiscent of it.

The Revolution’s first shot of the sequence came off a ball ineffectively punched by the Galaxy’s lanky Jamaican keeper, Donovan Ricketts. Zack Schilawski stormed into the picture while Ricketts was laid out and made an accurate shot on goal. Schilawski was running laterally to celebrate his equalizer when L.A. defender A.J. DeLaGarza cleared the ball at the goal line. Sainey Nyassi eventually got that rebound and crossed the ball into the center from the right wing. Schilawski again charged onto the ball, elevated, and hammered a half volley off the cross bar. (The poor sap.) The shot caromed into the ground and bounced up to Shalrie Joseph, who seemed to tie the game himself for an instant with a header until Landon Donovan came out of nowhere to clear that ball off the line and preserve the Galaxy victory.

So the Revs came on late but again failed to finish. And after starting the same lineup for the third straight game (not including the sorry-excuse-for-a-soccer-match against KC on Wednesday), the Revs will now lose Feilhaber and (probably) Joseph to the Gold Cup. New England’s prospects of picking up points against Dallas and New York in the coming weeks don’t look good, but after their furious comeback attempt against L.A., I can’t write them off yet.