Messi is as good as Maradona: the time has come and the case is finally resolved

After the first two years of Messi with Guardiola in Barcelona, ​​everyone, especially in Italy who enjoyed El Pibe in the good years, opened the case, so hot that one wonders how Hollywood hasn’t made a series of them yet. The theme is: Messi can become better than maradona🇧🇷 Put it like that, very simply. The data were there, there were the victories and all the rest, in fact there was no confrontation with the clubs. A final but necessary condition was needed: Messi should win a World Cup like Diego, perhaps not from a one-man band like El Pelusa in 1986, but with a specific weight that weighs heavily on the shoulders and words of posterity. With the initial thesis in mind, we sat down on the sofas at home, took the scale that connected eyes, brain and feelings, put Diego on a plate and started weighing Messi.

If the 2006 World Cup in Germany cannot be considered, because Messi was a little boy and nothing else, in South Africa it was a massacre. Diego was on the bench, Messi didn’t even look at him out of respect, devotion, almost fear. In that World Cup, Lionel Messi tried everything and achieved nothing, not even scoring a goal. The comparison was there, present, alive, perhaps too much🇧🇷 Diego tried to instill strength and leadership in him, while still wanting all the spotlight, causing a short circuit in which the Selection exploded. Argentina reached the quarter-finals by virtue of inertia, then everything fell apart with Germany’s 4-0 victory. Messi cries in the locker room at the end of the game. How am I going to be that statue that screams, despairs but is loved even in defeat?

Let’s go to Brazil, four years later, Maradona is no longer on the Argentina bench, but he put the idea of ​​the “cold chest” into play, or that Messi had zero personalityin this way, according to Maradona, he has no possibility of leading the others to victory in a World Cup.
Brazil 2014, however, is a different World Cup. Messi had been targeting this World Cup since his first contracts with Barcelona, ​​asking for an economic serenity that would last at least until 2014, when he felt he “had to play against Maradona” and win.

He also trusts the new manager, Alejandro Sabella and the team is very good. Lavezzi, Higuain, Mascherano, Demichelis are at their peak and the team wins, even without a stratospheric Messi. He scored consistently in all three group stage matches, then managed small leads in the round of 16 and quarter finals to win an awful match against the Netherlands on penalties in the semi-finals. In the final, an entire country wants to violate the temple of great opponents, win the World Cup in Maracanã. Nothing to do this time either. Once again Germany wins with a goal by Götze in extra time and, despite having come close to dreaming, the balance still hangs a lot.

He doesn’t move, in fact he loses his balance even more after 2018. Another very confusing World Cup for Messi and Argentina. After the first two games, a draw with Iceland and a 3-0 loss to Croatia, Argentina are one step away from the group stage and the players face coach Sampaoli. Messi drags the strong team to the round of 16 with a magnetic goal where Mbappé and France literally shook each other. The speech is over: Maradona was the soul, body, heart and creative brain of his Argentina. Messi is many things to the team and his teammates, but he cannot swallow the whole world to put it under his feet.🇧🇷 He doesn’t want to be Maradona maybe, that’s the mystery we never solved.

At the start of this World Cup in Qatar, the case seemed closed. Meanwhile Maradona is dead, his legacy has even expanded with his physical absence, Messi left Barcelona in flames, went to Paris Saint Germain where it is said quietly, but it is said, that he is even the third best player on the team. How can he think he’s the greatest of them all now?

These whispers become clearer and clearer after the first group stage match, even though lost to Saudi Arabia, and after the first 64 minutes of Argentina-Mexico. Then, a ball arrives 20 meters from the goal of the Mexican goalkeeper Ochoa, Messi controls it with his left foot and shoots it into the most hidden corner to the left of Memo. a resurrection🇧🇷 This goal that puts Argentina on the road changes things and starts a new path. That journey, goal after goal, game after game, performance after performance, takes Messi to the world final and reopens the investigation archives: who is the best?

Messi in these World Cups has looked Maradonese in many ways, not just on the pitch. But it was precisely in this specifically extra-technical dimension that the greatest differences were noted. Messi was a centralizer not because of the acquiescence or benevolence of others, but because of an achieved and recognized monumentality, he did not hide behind the Mascheranos, the Tevez, the Riquelme and he made a bad, moody and combative face in the face of the impassive classic that and that that he wears for very few moments of happiness after the goals scored. The team noticed him and not only accompanied and protected him, but looked at him with new eyes, loving and trembling eyes, eyes of those who see to admire, to be carried in the hand and also to grow. If until now Messi always looked like someone’s son and even in the ideal relationship with Maradona he seemed to wait his turn even if it was now the end of the shift, today he was a Messi-father, a leader who also wants to be heard in silence.

However, it was necessary to remove the doubt and the final against France was not an appendix, it was the end of the soap opera. And if you get the ending wrong, maybe you wrote War and Peace, but whoever reads it and tells it to posterity does so with that foundation that suffocates the greatest glory. After more than a thousand games and a disproportionate number of goals, At the end of his career, Messi had to prove in just one game that he was the best of them all.🇧🇷 For many, this phrase does not make sense, a player cannot be judged in such a short time. For many others it is the pure truth, because lifting that trophy or not, as the other did, changed perspectives. We didn’t remember a World Cup so focused on a single man and his path of crisis, rebirth and race towards infinity. Tonight Messi reached infinity and from now on all Argentines can sing his name along with Diego because he is there on the same throne, a throne of greatness and uniqueness.