It’s heartbreaking, come back Messi

At 29? Really? After losing the final of Copa America to Chile, the third loss in a major tournament for Argentina in three years, Lionel Messi decided to hang up his national boots.

Do we now get to call him an all-time great? Or do we mourn over the greatest-ever-player-who-wasn’t? Messi, the what-could-have-been?

Fans and friends might turn him around yet. There may be a return from retirement. But the despair is unmistakable.

The world must have crashed around Messi for him to make such a decision.

This is not how greats go, not before hitting 30, certainly. This is not what sports is about. This is not the boy who fought unbelievable odds to win trophies and conquer hearts all over the world.

When Diego Maradona told Pele on 9 June that Lionel Messi lacks the personality to be a leader, he was half right.

Even if he had the Maradona-like ability to run across a pitch past half a team to score a goal, Messi is cut from a very different cloth.

Messi might have the divine touch, but the hand of God doesn’t guide him. Maradona could do anything to win, often traversing into the farcical.

Messi did not come through the rough and tumble of Argentinian club football.

We’ve all heard the story. The prodigy with a growth hormone disorder in Rosario, Argentina, who was signed up by one of the richest clubs in the world at age 13.

The painful relocation, the hormone therapy injections and the years of hard work, the flowering into an all-time great. Then the tragic counterpoint of the lack of international success.

At 29, he has several good years left in him. But the weight of failed expectations in an Argentina shirt has been accumulating for years.

Here was an opportunity for redemption, the Copa final on Sunday. There were 21 other players on the pitch, but all the attention was on him.

Yet, for 120 minutes before the penalty shootout, Messi failed to break the deadlock. His penalty sailed over the crossbar, way over.

Twice in this competition, Messi had beaten a wall AND a goalkeeper to score from a free kick. Up close, from the spot, is where greatness meets nemesis.

Nobody blames a great player for missing a penalty. Many of the greatest have misfired from the spot in big games.

But Messi disappearing in the final of a tournament is not a new story. The magic has deserted him before on the big stage in an Argentina shirt.

Manager after supportive manager has come and gone. Other players in the Argentina team have fawned and run hard, year after year, hoping to get at the end that one pass that defies physics and helps them lift a cup.

Like a loyal support crew, his teammates have flung themselves at challenges to recover balls, feeding Messi. They have got great rewards in many games, but on the biggest of stages, they have been left holding their heads.

The believers and worshippers are heartbroken. They wanted to walk away from the stadium - from their TV screens, more like it - with a sense of destiny and fulfilment. Instead, the knives are out. Post-mortems will be conducted. And in the midst of all this, Messi has announced his international retirement.

Messi’s staggering success with his club Barcelona is now held up against him when he dons the blue-and-white jersey. We are told he is successful only in Europe because he plays alongside a star cast.

Is it so, so easy to forget all the games he has won single-handedly for club and country, just because he hasn’t made the difference in an international final?

Raised in the Barcelona youth system, Messi is not the kind of player Argentina creates. Football in the South American country is under interminable grip of the mafia.

From manipulating violent fan clubs to getting cuts out of the transfer of promising young players to European clubs, the mafia owns the game in Argentina. South American teams have a reputation for brutal physicality.

Messi’s individual talent - that fiendish close-up ball control, those slaloming runs, them inch-perfect dribbles - have blended into the sophisticated regimes of European club football.

Besides, his team-comes-first attitude is out of place in a footballing culture that worships winning individuals.
International tournaments, moreover, are like annual fairs.

They are removed from the regular pattern of the sport, shaped in clubs. Which is why, several successful national teams have drawn from one or two dominant clubs (Germany in 2014 was built around Bayern Munich players; Spain in 2010 around Barcelona and Real Madrid).

Argentina sends its players far and wide. There is no club identity, because its best players are all over the globe.

Messi might return to play for Argentina after recovering from his current heartbreak. Or Argentina might find someone else, someone more effective and Maradona-friendly, to lead them to major trophy .

They don’t lack the talent. International tournaments, though, will lose some of their already disappearing sheen. For they have stopped being the showcase of the best football.