At 22, a Veteran of the Madness

Published: October 18, 2009

Eventually, the madness of professional sports gets to everyone.
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Daniel Leiva/Associated Press

Lionel Messi, right, of Barcelona dueled for the ball with Valencia players David Albelda, center, and Jeremy Mathieu, left, during their Spanish La Liga soccer match in Valencia, Spain, on Saturday.

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Until this weekend, it might have seemed that Spanish soccer was outside the asylum. The national squad had completed the perfect World Cup qualification, winning every one of its 10 games before sending its sons back to their clubs.

And Barcelona had taken the extra precaution of sending a private jet to bring Lionel Messi back from Uruguay. It figured that €80,000, or $119,000, was worth every cent to fly its star player as far and as quickly away from the hysteria of Diego Maradona as possible.

Messi’s special flight across 10,000 kilometers, or 6,200 miles, landed at Barcelona’s El Prat airport at 4 p.m. Thursday. He trained with his club at 6 p.m., went on to Valencia and on Saturday played the full 90 minutes in a goalless draw that keeps Barça on top of La Liga.

He didn’t sparkle, he didn’t shake all of the travel fatigue or all of the mayhem out of his system in one go. But he did complete the fifth anniversary of his Barcelona first-team career in one piece.

At 22, Messi is a veteran of soccer’s ever more exhaustive demands on its players. The administrators keep finding new ways to squeeze the performers for the extra dollars.

The nations in the World Cup, the clubs that pay the weekly wages and, above all, FIFA, which sets the rules and the tournament schedules, push players to breaking point, then lament their inability to entertain at every occasion.

Don’t you sometimes wonder how players manage to concentrate on one ball at a time?

Pepe Reina, the No. 2 Spanish goalkeeper, was seeing double in the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, England, on Saturday. He was beaten by the most farcical goal of this or many a weekend, the only goal by which his team, Liverpool, lost, 1-0.

Down on one knee to gather a routine shot from Sunderland’s Darren Bent early in the game, Reina was suddenly confronted with two flying objects.

The white soccer ball struck a big, red beach ball right in the goalkeeper’s line of vision. He flapped. The beach ball went to his right, the soccer ball ricocheted to his left, and he caught neither.

Reina looked like a man who had just stepped off a flight from one end of the world to the other.

The goal stood because the referee, Mike Jones, did not apply the rule that play must be stopped in the case of an “outside agent” of any kind interfering with the normal course of action. Although the beach ball was almost twice the size of the regulation soccer ball and was on the ground six meters, or about 20 feet, from the net, Jones and his assistants apparently failed to spot it.

Sunderland celebrated, Liverpool was flabbergasted, and the boy in the crowd who had released the red beach ball had no place to hide.

The irony was that he is a Liverpool fan. The beach ball, Liverpool red and bearing the club’s crest, was instantaneously identifiable. So was the boy, because, while the BBC blurred his face to spare him possible repercussions from fanatics, Sky TV news broadcast the teenager in all his embarrassment.

One bizarre goal beat Liverpool, no goals were scored in Valencia, but six were scored in the Spanish capital, as Real Madrid beat Real Valladolid, 4-2.

Valencia’s miracle is that it is playing at all after a summer when the bailiffs called and the club, which had run up debts of more than €500 million, or $745 million, faced bankruptcy. At the 11th hour, the regional authority, acting like a government saving a failed bank, stepped in to give Valencia €74 million.

That amount is less than the club had been offered by Real Madrid, Barcelona and possibly Manchester United to sell its strikers David Villa, Juan Manuel Mata and David Silva. The three players, all members of Spain’s national squad, remain for the time being in Valencia.