EL CLÁSICO (Part One) REAL MADRID v BARCELONA:When it comes to goal scoring in top-flight football only Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo can match Barcelona's Lionel Messi, writes RICHARD FITZPATRICK, but, as some have argued, Messi's feats on the pitch 'bring us closer to the miraculous'
EVERY GENERATION has its soccer star. In the 1950s, the indefatigable Alfredo di Stéfano led Real Madrid to five European Cups. During the sixties, Pelé saw off a host of pretenders, including Eusébio, Georgie Best and, towards the end of the decade, Johan Cruyff. Diego Maradona was peerless in his day while Zinedine Zidane vied, occasionally, with the sporadic genius of Ronaldo, the Brazilian.
Ronaldo’s namesake, or Cristiano as he’s known in Spain, and Lionel Messi are unique in that they jointly dominate their age, and, barring injury and ennui, look set to continue doing so for the next five years. Ronaldo is 26 years old; his Argentine rival is only 24, although he has already won two Ballon d’Or awards and looks odds-on to win a third in January, once again nudging out Ronaldo who won in 2008.
It is a sustained rivalry, a subplot in soccer’s most historic feud between Barcelona and Real Madrid. It captures the imagination like Ali v Frazier or Borg v McEnroe. They cannot escape each other. When Ronaldo landed in Sarajevo last month for Portugal’s Euro 2012 playoff against Bosnia-Herzegovina, he was met at the airport by a gang of gougers chanting, “Messi! Messi!”
They share similar upbringings, products of the assembly line system that churns out the modern-day footballer. Both were whisked hundreds of miles from their homelands on the cusp of their teenage years for life on the football academy’s fields. The survival of such a wrenching experience forged a steeliness that explains, in part, the focus and determination that continues to drive them unlike, say, the joie de vivre philosophy of Ronaldinho, whose mesmeric, preeminent days in the middle of the last decade were fleeting.
Messi’s family joined him in Barcelona when he arrived as a 13-year-old in February 2001. Suffering from homesickness, however, his mother, two brothers and sister returned to their hometown, Rosario, birthplace of Ché Guevara, later that summer.
Messi’s father, Jorge, who looks a ringer for his son and manages his financial affairs to this day, stayed in Catalonia to chaperone him. Messi, who had summered in Argentina, was asked repeatedly what he wanted to do; he decided to return to Barça of his own volition. He also, famously, overcame a growth hormone problem at this time. He admits he was so miserable at times that he used to cry in his house, alone so that his father wouldn’t see.
Ronaldo, meanwhile, was born in February 1985 on the island of Madeira, which is about 600 miles from Portugal, closer to Africa than it is to mainland Europe. He was named after his father’s favourite actor, Ronald Reagan. He’s the youngest of four siblings. One of his sisters eked out a music career on the back of his subsequent fame by using the stage name, Ronalda. The family wasn’t impoverished – his father, who died of an alcohol-related illness in 2005, was a gardener; his mother, a cook – but money was scarce enough that they lived in a bungalow so small that the washing machine was kept on the roof.
At 12 years of age, he was picked up by Sporting Lisbon and took his first plane ride to the Portuguese capital to enrol at the club’s youth system. Suddenly thrown into a dormitory with nine other boys, he was mocked for his strange accent. He, in turn, had trouble understanding everyone else. When it came to phoning home, he used to tearfully watch the units bleeding from his phone cards. He was eventually so homesick that the club sent for his mother to be with him.
As a teenager, he used to tie weights onto both feet and practice his dribbling, believing it would help him to be even faster with the ball without them. Ronaldo, of course, loves to dribble. His mother said his nickname was “cry baby” as a child; that he used to cry if his friends didn’t score when he passed the ball to them, which might explain why he likes to dribble so much. During the award ceremony for the 2007 Fifa World Player of the Year, he was on the verge of tears when it was announced he had trailed in third behind Messi and the winner, Kaká.
Despite his arrested development, he is a resilient man. On the pitch, he is courageous, has largely forsaken his youthful habit of diving, and is strong in the air. Xabi Alonso, his team-mate at Real Madrid, points out he’s a workhorse when it comes to rummaging for the ball, something that is uncommon for players of his ilk. “When a team loses the ball, some superstars wait for their team-mates to get it back for them. Not Cristiano. He fights, he runs, he helps us in midfield.”
Ronaldo, nonetheless, is one of the great narcissists of modern sport, seen as often in celebrity magazines as he is on the back pages. He once bragged that he does a thousand press-ups a day to maintain his rippled abs. Off the pitch, he owns a couple of clothes boutiques; on it, he likes to pop his collar, wear a pink strap for thigh strains and unveil experiments in hairstyle every other week.
People wonder at his self-love. “I think that being rich, handsome, being a great player, people are jealous of me,” he said in a televised interview in September, trying to account for why opposition players like to hack him down in matches. It was as if he were listing some of the chemical elements from the periodic table. This kind of arrogance might offend some; others are grateful for his spikiness, for having the personality to provoke while most of his peers in soccer, like Messi, for example, excel at saying nothing.
There is no dirt, it seems, about Messi. His pals at Barcelona are adamant he is an even better person than he is a footballer. His lone rebellious period at the club, when he sauntered off to a couple of parties with Ronaldinho during the Brazilian’s last years at Barcelona, was nipped in the bud by Pep Guardiola. The Barça chief was manager of Barcelona’s B team at the time. “You’ve two options,” he threatened. “Either you keep on partying, and you’ll be out of here in days or you start eating properly, quit the alcohol, go to bed early and come to practice on time. Only then might you become the best in the world.”
The writer Brian Phillips reckons the majority of people prefer Messi to Ronaldo because of his small stature, that his feats on the pitch “bring us closer to the miraculous”. What is, perhaps, the most arresting thing about Messi is not his size (for Diego Maradona is an inch and a half shorter) but his speed. Frank Rijkaard, who gave Messi his league debut for Barcelona in 2004 at 17 years of age, says Messi has better acceleration than Maradona, who, of course, he played against many times. In fact, Messi’s running speed is 4.5 strides per second, which is faster than the 4.4 of Asafa Powell, who has broken the 10-second barrier in 100-metre races more times than anyone else.
When it comes to goal scoring in top-flight football only Ronaldo can match him. They have both averaged a goal a game for the last couple of seasons. Ronaldo, to his credit, has scored most of his Real Madrid goals for a team in transition. He knows his importance. Late last season, he told a Real Madrid fan site that, “if it were not for me, you would be at least 20 points behind Barcelona”. He ended the season having scored 40 goals in La Liga, surpassing by two the league’s previous all-time record.
In Real Madrid’s dressing-room, they call him “The Anxious One” because of his obsession with his goal-scoring duel with Messi. It is a subject the Spanish press hype endlessly.
Ronaldo, some argue, is, in cricket parlance, “a flat track bully”. Messi, in contrast, has a habit of scoring when it counts. He has led the Champions League scoring charts for the last three years. In Ronaldo’s nine clásico matches, he has only scored three times. Messi has scored 13 in 15 outings. The bones of half a billion people will be watching events tonight to see how those stats might alter.
HEAD-TO-HEAD
Lionel Messi(Barcelona/Argentina)
Date of birth: June 24th, 1987
Height: 5ft 6in
League appearances: 192
League goals: 136
International appearances: 66
International goals: 19
Major honours – Club: League (5); Kings Cup (1); Spanish Super Cup (5); Champions League (3); Uefa Super Cup (2); Fifa Club World Cup (1);
International: Fifa Under-20 World Cup (2005), Olympic Gold (2008)
Goals in La Liga 2011/2012 season(matches played in brackets): 17 (15)
Ballon d'Or: 2 (2009, 2010)
Google search results(approx): 46,700,000
Cristiano Ronaldo(Real Madrid/Portugal)
Date of birth: February 5th, 1985
Height: 6ft 1in
League appearances: 298
League goals: 170
International appearances: 87
International goals: 32
Major honours – Club: League (3); FA Cup (1); FA Community Shield (1); League Cup (2); King's Cup (1); Champions League (1); Fifa Club World Cup (1)
Goals in La Liga 2011/2012 season(matches played in brackets): 17 (14)
Ballon d'Or: 1 (2008)
Google search results(approx): 108,000,000
