swimmin' upstream

"Messi cannot head." - yours truly, to everyone, all year.



Or so I thought, god damn. There's one replay of it there, the last one where Xavi's brilliant orbital ball, a dradel spun from the heavens, cascades down the shot until it seems as though it's to be lost out of frame and sight, to fall to the earth left incomplete and wanting. But then, a banked figure rises from the depths, caroms the ball aloft again and into the nightmares of ManUligans worldwide.

Why was Messi holding his boot in the subsequent celebrations, you might ask? Look one more time; he torqued his entire damn body to two o'clock to reach the ball, legs included, and couldn't reverse back to noon in time before his spikes reacquainted themselves with soil. Stoned-as-shit Alaskan salmon were watching his feat of nature in HD in some river, only able to look at each other and exclaim, "...fuuuck". He challenged physics, lost, and came up with the Treble instead. He really didn't actually even "head" the ball, no neck or shoulder thrust to be found; he more floated his dome in the one pocket of space to which the ball's course would realign towards the desired and foolproof location, far right corner, like if the nail were to meet the hammer halfway. It's not an uncommon technique, at least not until employed by someone diagnosed with GHD at 11 and -- from the multiple games I've seen him shank point-blank aerial opportunities in alone -- shown to be the most effective with the ball at his feet (which is anything but a slight, since he's better with the ball at his feet than literally everyone else filing their taxes under "professional footballer"). What's Xavi anticipating Leo will do with his masterstroke when he decides its a worthy enterprise, though, that's the real question. A chest-down, a volley; couldn't have been a header, right?


I'm more interested in the end of the season now than when it was actually happening, sadly. Maybe because no matter how hard I try (which isn't very, but still), I just plain do not like the thought of Gareth Barry at City, and probably because I'm duped every morning into thinking Soccernet or whoever else's homepage will have something more interesting than Kaká+Ronaldo-to-Real coverage. Probably even more so because I know the next two months are going to continue to only be about the previous two Ballon d'Ors and second-place team in La Liga, whereby everyone will forget the-soon-to-be Ballon winner, the La Liga and European Champions, and the tropical rapture they've provided us so often since August. It almost seems like Chelsea's trophy was played up in significance, more as atonement for their Norwegian massacre, as though Barca's triumph deserved an asterisk or something dumb like that. I know that the entire year has basically been one long anticipatory suckfest in Barca's honor, most of it before they had done anything (I hate how guilty I really am of this), but in its defense, how often does a side basically go wire-to-wire on top, in both theory and then reality? The Cavs won 66 games this year, LeBron hit his own Shot, angels wept, and yet yesterday I witnessed two different companies scrambling to amend their boy-cried-wolf marketing schemes.

ESPN's magazine had Messi, not Ronaldo, on its cover the issue released before the Rome final. (They'll probably claim they knew something we didn't.) The story is intended for the would-be-could-be-fair-weathers, like the rest of our soccer coverage stateside, and provides the more invested little true insight into anything they didn't already know, besides maybe the mainstream sports media's vacillation concerning how exactly to deal with the budding cult of soccer in America. But there is one quote, one important enough they enlarged and boldfaced it for hors d'œuvre:

"I never think about the play or visualize anything. I do what comes to me at that moment. Instinct. It has always been that way."

Nothing revolutionary, I know. Kind of reads like a stock quote for a great player's explaining his gifts, really. They just come to me, I don't know. Plus, soccer's predicated largely on spontaneity anyway. But with Messi, under all the circumstances, "gifts" has almost never needed the precursor "God-given" more, and so his take on them seems that much more genuine than all the rest. The ESPN cover claims the presumed CL triumph will be the kickoff to the Year Of Messi, but that would be to discount his achievements of this year, and thus Barca's as well. For he who was supposed to stand a Colemanesque four and a half feet, he who turns 22 in three weeks, he who up until his instinct told him differently couldn't head the ball for shite -- well, he listened, he leapt, and he gave 08/09 its punctual image (even more so than Iniesta's strike), featuring the sport's best player at his impeccable best, pushing his own boundaries and team to heights unseen.