Lionel Messi, a dog, bronca, and the loneliness of lost innocence

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend” – Edith Wharton, the Age of Innocence

The Dog

Hernan Casciari once wrote an article with the premise “Messi is a dog”. Before you start foaming at the mouth, let me explain what he meant. An Argentine married into Catalonia, Casciari’s premise was not meant as an insult. Far from it. An ardent fan, he likened Messi to his pet dog in the single-minded focus both had for an object of their desire. In his dog’s case it was a sponge, in Messi’s... well you know what it is.

Nothing else mattered – not the larger context nor what, or who, was around them; nothing. I am not going to pretend like it’s a thought that suddenly popped up inside my head, nor that I can explain it better than Senor Casciari, so I’ll leave it to him:

For those can’t see the video, this is the essence of what he wrote (this has been roughly translated from its original Spanish, so forgive the grammatical transgressions) –

Football, today, has very clear regulations by which, a lot of times, going to the ground could mean securing a penalty, or getting an opposition player booked, because it could be useful in later counter-attacks. In these clips, Messi seems to not understand anything about football or about opportunities.

It seems like he's in a trance, hypnotized; he only wants the ball inside the goal. He doesn't care about the sport nor the result nor the laws. You have to look carefully in his eyes to understand it: he squeezes them, like if he was struggling to read a subtitle, he focuses on the ball and doesn't lose sight of it not even if he would get stabbed.

Where did I see that look before? It looked familiar to me, that gesture of unmeasured introspection. I paused the video, zoomed into his eyes and then I remembered: the eyes of Totin when he lost his mind for the sponge.

When I was a child I had a dog called Totin. Nothing moved him. He wasn't an intelligent dog. When thieves broke into the house, he just looked at them while they carried the TV away. But when somebody (my mother, my sister, myself) grabbed a sponge -a yellow sponge to wash the dishes – Totin went mad.

He wanted the sponge more than anything in the world, he died for taking that yellow rectangle and carry it to his dog bed. I showed him the sponge with my right hand and he focused on it. I moved it side to side and he never stopped looking at it; he couldn't stop looking at it.

It didn't matter the speed at which I moved the sponge; Totin's neck would move at identical speed through the air. He's eyes turned into attentive, intellectual eyes. Like Messi's eyes , which stop being the eyes of a scatterbrained teenager and, for a few seconds, turns into the attentive sight of Sherlock Holmes.

Messi is a dog among men.

Casciari had a lot of cojones to call Messi a dog – in Argentina (as it is most parts of the world), to call a player a dog is a great insult, denoting the player’s utter lack of quality. But he had an insightful, unique way of looking at it, didn’t he?

For anyone looking for the original clip that inspired Senor Casciari, here it is –

You can see it now, can’t you?

That single-minded obsession to hold on to the ball, that insane, pure desire to score no matter what. That was the basis of his game, the solid foundation upon which the world’s greatest footballer built his illustrious career.

Right from his days with Barca’s youth team, he was different; he wouldn’t complain. He wouldn’t ask the referees – politely or otherwise – to wave cards at his assailant’s faces. He rarely dived out of the way of an impending challenge. He dusted himself him, head still bowed, eyes only for the ball... and got on with it.

For some, though, all that was simply not good enough. Including me.

Bronca

That’s what Diego Maradona called it. Bronca.

When used as a verb in its original Spanish it translates to “to fight”, while as an adjective it refers to “a person who is always seeking out and finding fights” – picture Mario Puzo’s immortal character Luca Brasi here.

But in Argentina and across swathes of Latin America, the word has a slightly different connotation. In those areas, the word refers to an emotion that is a bit of a mix between anger, fury, hatred, resentment and bitter discontent. And anyone who has bronca walks around with a chip on their shoulder, like the whole world is out to get them.

No one epitomised that better than Maradona himself. As he explains in his autobiography, it acted as his motivator, his fuel, his driving force.

It’s what made Maradona so relatable, what makes Carlos Tevez and Luis Suarez such enigmatically “I-want-them-in-my-team” characters.

It’s also the one quality that everyone demanded to see in Messi. You see, for a lot of people, Messi wasn’t relatable enough – on any level. When people kick you, you get angry, you get frustrated. That’s human nature. That’s something we can empathise with. But here was this guy who just got on with the game, head bowed, unsmiling, unemotional.

Worse than that, he appeared unaffected by defeats, incapable of inspiring those around him.

At Barcelona, when he first walked into the senior team dressing room, hey called him ‘el mudo’, the mute one. And for nigh on a decade, it seemed like he’d hardly changed. At Argentina, it was even worse because La Albiceleste are used to being led by inspirational figures, and this lad, this lad was not one of those.

It didn’t help that two of the game’s most venerated figures saw it that way too:

"He's a really good person, but he has no personality," Maradona said. "He lacks [the] character to be a leader."

Pele responded: "Ah, I get it, he's not like we were back in the days. In the 70s we [Brazil] had really good players like Rivellino, Gerson, Tostao. Not like Argentina now, which depends only on Messi. He [Maradona] is saying that Messi is a good player, there's no doubt about it, but he has no personality."

That’s the first time in living memory that those two have ever agreed on something.

You see, Messi just didn’t have Bronca. And that was always going to be his greatest failing. In a world that demands its leaders be virile, vocal, capable-of-making-you-go-to-hell-and-back-for-him inspirations, Leo Messi was none of that.

We never let him forget that. So finally, he gave up.

Or rather, he gave in.

Loneliness

When Messi removed his shirt in that now-iconic celebration, showing the Bernabeu his name in a display of unprecedented defiance, the watching world went absolutely bonkers. Everyone welcomed this all-new avatar of Messi... this angry, defiant, rebellious, bearded alpha male stereotype of a Leo Messi... with open arms.

This is exactly what was required, people said. Many even declared that he’d unleashed his inner evil, channelled his aggression properly. Others proclaimed that he’d been inspired by his great friend Suarez to discover his passion.

The most iconic celebration ever.LIONEL MESSI. Say no more.#ElClasico #Messi pic.twitter.com/ua3ymRtikl

— Vikas Thakur (@MomentsOfMirth) April 23, 2017

As one writer, Nate Scott of Fox Sports, concluded brilliantly;

“On Sunday, in the biggest moment of this La Liga season, Messi introduced the killer to the world. He was no longer the precocious boy, the young genius who they could admire from afar. He was a man now. A bad man. He had ripped their hearts out, and there he stood, forcing them to look at his name.”

In essence, he’d found his inner Bronca and was being swept away by it.

Yes! Finally! That’s what all of us, me included, had been wanting from him, right? To be more relatable? More ‘one-of-us’?

It’s been a week now... Osasuna have come and been swatted away, Espanyol were brushed aside with the special kind of irreverence that their mighty neighbours reserve for that derby, but it’s still the Madrid game that haunts me.

Nay, not haunts. Rankles.

Signs that he’d snapped were evident from the moment he missed the penalty that gave Chile the Copa America Centenario, leading to La Albiceleste’s third final loss in three years. When he insulted the Mestalla with screams of “you sons of a thousand wh****”. When he asked the referee to re-evaluate the occupation of his mother after a typically violent South America World Cup Qualifier against Chile earlier this year.

In that ‘clasico’ that lived up to its name, it all came to a head. It wasn’t just the celebration, that open proclamation that screamed: “Look at me, I am your king.” It was the triple barrel roll that Messi executed after being smashed into by Ramos, it was the number of imaginary cards he waved in the direction of everyone who assaulted him, it was the air of anger that surrounded him.

He’s still the same genius footballer, but... he isn’t the same.

Now this is rank amateur psychology on my part, and I could be way off the mark, but I believe the new Messi, the angry Messi, the one who insults referees and rolls around after getting fouled, the one that beseeches the officials for his opposition to be sent off and screams vulgar profanities at spectators... he isn’t the real Messi. I think he is pretending. So that we get off his back... so that we accept him.

He doesn’t really want to do all this, does he? He just wants to get a football and run. He just wants to play the game – the purest incarnation, in living memory, of sport the way it was intended to be played... without malice, without after-thought, without the cunning gamesmanship that seems to have consumed it.

In her magnum opus, ‘the Age of Innocence’ the great Edith Wharton wrote that true loneliness lies in living amongst all these kind people who just want you to pretend. To pretend to be the kind of person they want you to be – regardless of whether that is an accurate reflection of your true self.

For me, now, Lionel Messi is the loneliest person on the planet.

I wanted him to be more loveable, more relatable, more human. I really did. I’ve got what I wanted, but I’m left asking myself – was it worth it?