Jack Tame: Messi is the greatest player in the greatest sport

Football is pretty much the only sport where I feel comfortable supporting Australia.

But tomorrow morning, even though they’re occupying that rarest position for any Australian sporting team – Underdog - I won’t be backing the Socceroos in the knock-out stages of the Football World Cup.

I’ll watching and hoping like anything that Argentina gets up. Not because I feel a deep, personal bond with Argentina, although any country whose identity centres on red wine, red meat, and tango is obviously good with priorities, but because I’m desperately hoping that this immoral World Cup might at least result in one of sport’s greatest fairytale endings.

For me, it’s simple. Leo Messi is the greatest player of the greatest sport.

Think about it: no team sport is simpler than football. No team sport has a lower barrier to entry. No team sport has a greater global appeal. Anyone, anywhere can play football. And that means no team sport requires a higher standard of individual excellence for a player to become the World’s best.

Lionel Messi’s story is everything a sporting fairytale should be. He was a small kid with a hormone deficiency, born into a poor family in Argentina. He was a prodigious talent as a child, left-footed, with a superhuman ability to dribble a football. If not for the hormone injections he received as a teenager, he might never have made it into the top men’s leagues. In 2022, the professional age, surrounded by supreme physical specimens, Leo Messi, the World’s greatest player, is only 5’7”.

But Messi’s size is an asset. La Pulga, they call him. The flea. Somehow he’s still fast enough. Still strong enough. And if you watch his highlights in slow motion, it’s obvious that part of his brilliance is his ability to shift his weight much faster than his bigger opponents. In a way, he looks like a boy playing with men, and he threads space and runs through teams with an unrivaled impossibility. How many times in the last 17 or 18 years have defenders, commentators, teammates wondered: how the hell did he do that?

You do not have to be a football fan to appreciate Messi’s brilliance. But contrary to his chief rival for the title of World’s greatest, Messi is not the hardest trainer. He’s not an underwear model. He isn’t remotely charismatic when he speaks.

What he does have is genius.

I was in the stands to watch Messi score at Maracena Stadium in the Brazil World Cup eight years ago. He was in his playing prime, but that cup wasn’t to be.

I was in Argentina four years ago in a packed public square when the South Americans were eliminated from the tournament. This is it, they said at the time. Messi’s last chance.

But here he is. 35, and surely at his last World Cup. My head says his team doesn’t have a good enough defensive line. They’ve already lost to Saudi Arabia. And in football years, Messi is an old man.

But my heart says something different. He might have won however many club trophies. He might have lifted his family from a poor neighbourhood in Rosario to a life of wealth and security. But sport is just a vehicle for stories. And what a magical final chapter it would it be if football’s greatest player ended his dazzling career by lifting football’s greatest prize.

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