After accomplishing so many things, Lionel Messi is now downto the small numbers that define greatness.
He began this week by eclipsing Pele’s record of 75 goals ina calendar year, set in 1958. Now just one man, Gerd Muller, who scored 85times in 1972, stands ahead of Messi as the all-time accumulator of goals in asingle year.
Messi, Messi, Messi. The records fall to him like drops ofsweat off the brow of those who try to keep up with him on the field.
The Argentine is great. We know that, and we do not needmathematical justification to acknowledge it. He is a king of frequent flyermiles, too, after his trip to Riyadh be back in Barcelona by the weekend tostart the remaining nine matches of the club’s 2012 itinerary.
A goal a game “ well below Messi’s ratio “ would let himpass Muller.
So much for statistics. And so what? Muller is the third manin this equation, but the German was never the player that Pele indubitablywas, or that Messi is becoming.
Comparisons are unfair over different times because the paceof the game, the rewards, the fields, the diet and the conditioning of playershave changed.
I have respect, affection even, for what Muller made of hislimited talents in a body that was not made for aesthetic movement. He wasshort and squat, but he had a low center of gravity, and he could swivel andshoot with great power. He was more like Ferenc Puskas, the Galloping Major ofHungarian soccer, in that respect.
They lived for goals, and Muller apparently obeyed a voiceinside his head.
“Something told me Gerd go this way, Gerd go that way,” hesaid. “I did.” The trait of Der Bomber. A phenomenal, but a singular instinct.
When his goals dried up, Gerd did not know which way to go.He was in the United States, winding down his career, when he turned to thebottle, and perhaps the greatest achievement of his life was defeatingalcoholism with the help of his friends back at Bayern Munich.
As players, however, Pele and Alfredo Di Stefano and Diego Maradona,Johan Cruyff and George Best were more complete. Messi is in their class, ashis rival at Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo, might be, too.
Less than two weeks ago, Messi’s performance level dippedmarkedly. It was a Saturday in La Liga, and he was playing 24 hours after hisgirlfriend had given birth to their first child, a son called Thiago.
Would that new responsibility, new love in his life, changethe manner in which Lionel Andres Messi appears so consumed by his game? Forthat weekend, maybe. Since then he has scored once in the Champions League andtwice in the Spanish League, and now he is airborne pursuing more of the goalsthat, at last, have flowed in 2012 for Argentina.
Messi is 25. There is time for him, if he sustains hisfitness and desire, to go on and double the 273 goals he has scored in 346appearances at Barca. But he needs teammates, as all the greats did, to fillthe missing element to his unfolding greatness.
