Every day, thousands upon thousands of words are written and spoken about Lionel Messi. In newspapers, on websites, on radio stations and television.
If possible, we would listen to and read them all. No other footballer, perhaps, has ever done so much to deserve such fulsome adulation; reached such stratospheric levels, performed such abnormal, inexplicable feats with pelota and pie.
But in among all the praise, all the futile attempts to pay tribute to his genius with ink and hot air, none of which will ever be sufficient, there is a facet of the little Argentine’s being that is discussed less frequently than it should be: Messi, for all of his ability and technique and intelligence and dexterity, is hard as nails.
Not in the theatrical hard man way of English football of years gone by. He’s not Razor Ruddock, Julian Dicks or Vinnie Jones, is he?
But Messi is rugged, sturdy, robust, resilient. Tough as a pair of old boots.
He has been fouled literally thousands of times. But no matter how often he’s knocked down, he is back up again, like one of those round-bottomed wooden toys, expression unchanged, brow unfurrowed, magic boots still dancing to his own interplanetary beat.
As one of his opponents told The Guardian: “[Messi’s] incredibly strong, extremely fast. You can’t knock him over: you hit him hard and you don’t put him off his stride. Physically he is brutal.”
Silent, elegant, but brutal.
And if we are to discuss Messi’s brutality and fortitude and pluck, then there is one game and one goal that encapsulates it better than any other: El Clasico, April 2017, the 90th minute plus a little on top.
El Clasico is never without its tension and challenges, of course, but this one was edgier than most.
Barcelona were in a dark place. Not as bad as the ones they have come to know since, but a crisis by the standards of the previous decade.
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