Lionel Messi does not need BBC adulation and nor do those of us watching at home

Lionel Messi scored for Argentina to help their win against Australia, but from the BBC’s coverage of the game you’d have thought he was their only player.

It speaks volumes for the state of modern football discourse that I feel the need to say this, but that isn’t going to stop me.

I am now, and have always been, pretty neutral on the matter of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. They were both wonderful players but neither are in their prime. That’s just ageing. But I obviously recognise that they are among the finest players ever to have played the game.

Comparing players across different eras has always felt like a bit of a fool’s errand. A diverting conversation in the pub, but almost impossible to judge on a serious basis. You’re simply not comparing like with like. On the only metric that really matters – ‘who’s the greatest of their era? – my honest answer is that there may have to be room on that podium for more than one.

But personality and character matter and I guess if I’m reluctantly in Team Messi then it’s probably on account of this, although I wouldn’t truly consider myself to be a paid subscriber. There’s not-great stuff in his past, of course. The tax evasion and the shilling for countries run by autocrats, for example. But broadly speaking he’s simply a blank slate. My primary opinion on Cristiano Ronaldo is that were I intended to be his target audience, he’d want to hire new PR representatives.

But the level of obsequiousness towards Lionel Messi from the BBC during the match between Argentina and Australia was at a level that started to sound shrill. This was a match that exploded to life in its last 20 minutes, a fascinating game which nearly ended in what would have been one of the World Cup’s great comebacks. There wasn’t any need to turn this into a eulogy for one player. There was something galling about seeing every other player being implicitly reduced to that of a bit-part player in the story of somebody else’s life.

His performance was dramatically improved in the second half, though ironically his goal came in the first half, during which he was otherwise an extra himself, and a pedestrian one at that. His second-half performance saw him step up a gear and he improved enormously, but it wasn’t so good that Argentina didn’t twice come within inches of throwing away a two-goal lead.

The overall question of why the BBC should have taken this stance is something of a mystery….