Well, ho hum. Thanks for that Lionel, old chum. So much for those 71 minutes of precarious but wholehearted team defence. Pack up your anxious, scampering Arsenal counterattacks. Put any fragile hopes of an improbable two-legged team-mugging back in the box. Those divine, restlessly scurrying feet have decided enough is apparently enough.
At times watching Lionel Messi you get the feeling real sporting genius lies in being able to do the outlandishly good every day, to be routinely out of the ordinary. If there is a criticism, it is perhaps simply that on a night like this his match-turning moments can almost seem too humdrum, too reliably ever-present.
Messi scored twice in Barcelona’s 2-0 first-leg victory at the Emirates Stadium, the second a penalty he won himself. Still, regular Messi-watchers would probably rate his performance against the favourites for the Premier League title as merely average, median-Messi. The world’s No1 player has a habit of befuddling English teams, with a highlights reel of death-blows and whirling moments of brilliance, including a performance against Manchester City at the Etihad last year that for 20 minutes or so was surely as good as anything ever seen on a football pitch in England. At the Emirates he restricted himself to some more everyday miracles. It is a very generous kind of attacking brilliance, the kind you never tire of finding words to praise, and the kind that will probably only really make itself felt when he’s finally gone. For now elite football’s glossily packaged inferno of greed and short-term planning has simply lucked out, blessed with a stroke of defining good fortune, a hand that simply keeps on giving.
Perhaps, when Arsène Wenger has recovered from his post-match frustration, he may even take some heart from parts of his team’s performance. They came to see Messi, but for 71 minutes what they got was Per Mertesacker as Arsenal produced a show of wholehearted but doomed team defence. They had chances in the second half but lacked what Barcelona have in abundance: high-grade, relentless precision.
Messi alone has more than 400 club goals these days. Technically, his right-sided opposite number in red and white was Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who played with heart and discipline but also missed Arsenal’s best chance in the first half, and has 14 goals in five years at the club. There is, of course, no sensible comparison here but that is also the point. There is no comparison. Arsenal are a club cautiously on the rise. But for all the improvements and additions of the last two years, they remain as far off this Barça of the divine attacking trident as they have ever been.
It is wrong to focus entirely on Barcelona’s glittering frontline, razor edge of the fine footballing machine behind. Plus, despite the fine practices and sugary rhetoric, this is still an extravagantly acquired supremacy. Arsenal’s entire starting team at the Emirates cost around £130m, less than Barcelona’s second and third best attackers combined. Messi’s total earnings from wages and sponsorship are close to £1m a week, or slightly more than the weekly take-home pay of Arsenal’s first XI.
Some things, of course, are worth whatever you are able to pay. Here Messi made his way slowly into the tie on a night of quietly simmering intrigue. Before kick-off shiny cards were held up around the stadium as portentous incidental music played, this grand, cantilevered steel and glass bowl the perfect modern Champions League enormodrome, decked out with its end-of-days Gazprom billboards, its bespoke Uefa hoardings.
For most of the night Messi was an intermittent intake of breath, popping up now and then to scuttle about with terrifying purpose, then drifting to the right to wait again. With three minutes gone he picked up the ball and ran straight at the Arsenal defence, a reminder of his astonishing speed with the ball at his feet, the hypnotic lateral swerves, that cartoonish blur of legs.
Twenty min
