Hundred year Messi

I quite fancy how they talk about floods. There are 20-year floods, or 100-year floods or just... floods. It all comes down to just how often these things happen historically. Of course the massive climate change we are affecting on The Planet is messing up those sorts of standards, but I'm still keen on the idea.

Sometimes I like to apply it to athletes.

Yes, I am going to talk about Messi.

No, you won't be able to stop me, but you can always go away and look at something else interesting on the Internet...

If you can find anything!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Good luck with that.




Hello?





Hello? 





Well, I'm surprisingly happy just talking to myself about Messi. Perfectly happy all alone. Messi is so entertaining after all, isn't he?






Oh, I knew you were here all along.

Last week Messi was playing soccer. At one point in a not particularly great game a much too high and fast pass came to Messi. He headed the ball at a very difficult angle to send it far up in the air. Then he positioned himself for it by backing into the defending player so it would land in front of him. Catching it delicately on the top of his foot he literally pulled the ball in that single move behind him, through the legs of a defender he cannot, obviously, see, then he pivoted physically around this defender to collect his own pass and race down the sideline.

When one sees this move in real time it doesn't look like much because it's so quick and it so defies what seems possible that one is inclined to ascribe it at least partly to accident. Only slowed down does a person say, oh, he meant to do that. Even still there is something hard to process about it.

I don't post links on my blog.

But what's a rule if one can't make an exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeaOIaA9KJs&feature=youtu.be

The world of soccer sort of knows how good Messi is, but I think they also struggle with it. His main competition, comparatively, is a player, still alive, whose heyday was the eighties, Diego Maradona. This would make Messi into, sort of, the thirty-year Messi. I don't see it though. There's plenty of footage, but it's sport, so there's a great deal of emotion and fandom. I may be guilty of such things myself. I have seen these brilliant, dazzling feats of Maradona, but, just, it's not as good. He's not as good. It's just that...

...what do you do in sports if there isn't a contest? What if there isn't really a viable argument? What if you get a hundred year player, the hundred-year Messi?

What if it's a thousand?