Left, David Davies/Associated Press; Manu Fernandez/Associated Press
Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo, left, and Barcelona’s Lionel Messi are two of the best players in the world.
By JERÉ LONGMAN
Published: May 26, 2009
ROME — The debate has been raging since the Champions League final was set, so it was hardly unexpected Tuesday when a reporter asked Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, whether his forward Cristiano Ronaldo or Barcelona’s Lionel Messi was the best soccer player in the world.
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Ferguson asked whether the news conference query should be repeated in Ronaldo’s native Portuguese. Ronaldo smiled and motioned at his manager, as if to say just hurry up and answer in English. Everybody else in the world seemed to have an opinion. Ronaldo wanted to hear Ferguson’s.
“They are two fantastic footballers, both with the ability and courage to attack defenders all the time,” Ferguson said diplomatically. “No matter how many times they get tackled, they get up and want the ball. Physically, they are different, but at the end of the day, how can you divide them? It’s very difficult.”
The outcome Wednesday of the premier European club competition could go a long way toward settling the issue, at least for now. Giddy anticipation promises soccer that will be artful and elegant, and the Ronaldo-Messi debate will serve as a kind of game within the game.
Messi, 21, a native of Argentina, has often been called the next Diego Maradona, but he has never enjoyed those comparisons to his wondrous and troubled countryman. Yet neither has Messi shrunk from the pressure of expectation.
In March, Maradona, now the Argentine national team coach, awarded Messi his former No. 10 jersey for a World Cup qualifying match — homage to a familiar low center of gravity, ball control, acceleration, change of direction, instinctive passing and flair for gasping brilliance. It was Messi’s pass to midfielder Andres Iniesta that put Barcelona into the Champions League final on an impossibly late goal against Chelsea.
“The most important game of my life,” Messi said of Wednesday’s match.
Three years ago, Messi was recovering from a thigh injury and did not bother to celebrate as Barcelona won the 2006 Champions League final over Arsenal in Paris. Last year, in the tournament’s semifinals, he was quieted by Manchester United’s left back, Patrice Evra. In fact, he has never scored against an opponent from the English Premier League, with its rigorous, physical defenses.
Even so, Messi has delivered 37 goals in various competitions this season and has offered the opinion that Barcelona deserves to win because of its beautiful attacking style featuring himself, Samuel Eto’o and Thierry Henry, who was expected to be available Wednesday despite a twitchy knee ligament.
“The world can see that he’s the boss,” Xavi Hernandez, the Barcelona midfielder, said of Messi, adding, “You can’t compare him with anyone else because they will end up getting burnt.”
Nicknamed the Flea, Messi is only 5 feet 7 inches and needed treatments of growth hormone as a pre-teen, a costly therapy that Barcelona agreed to underwrite after scouting him in Argentina and inviting him to a tryout at its youth academy in 2000. According to FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, Messi was so impressive as a 13-year-old that Barcelona hurriedly signed him to a contract on a paper napkin.
A former teacher of Messi’s once said that the only thing he liked about school was the bell, so he could run out and play soccer. As he turned 18, Messi was the top scorer for Argentina when it won the 2005 FIFA world youth championship. A year later, he became the youngest Argentine to play in a World Cup; already Maradona had begun to see in Messi something of himself — the way Messi escaped tight spaces and kept the ball so close while he dribbled, as if it were a pet obeying a leash law.
“The ball remains on the upper part of his foot, like it is glued to it,” Maradona said of Messi before the 2006 World Cup. “He feels the ball, and that makes him different from the rest. He’s also got another gear, a sixth gear.”
Quiet and largely unforthcoming, Messi keeps his words as close as he keeps the ball. His one display of youthful ostentation, a mane of long, stringy hair, has been shorn into a businesslike trim. His counterpart, Ronaldo, who has 26 goals this season, prefers a more metrosexual look in keeping with a personality that can be operatic and preening. Asked by a Brazilian newspaper last November who were the top three players in the world, Ronaldo smiled and said, “I am the first, second and third.”
Ronaldo, 24, is much bigger than Messi at 6-foot-1, and he may be more resourceful. He mesmerizes and menaces defenders as he runs at them, stepping over the ball in a kind of soccer River Dance, feinting and darting. He is threatening on headers. He can lash the ball on free kicks. And he will face a wounded Barcelona defense, which will be missing Daniel Alves, Eric Abidal and Rafael Marquez because of either red-card suspension or injury.
Ronaldo is “a great forward” who dribbles with speed and swerving ease, Messi told reporters. “And he has a great medium-range shot. We’re conscious that we can’t give him time to think or get a shot in from distance.”
This season at Manchester United has been accompanied by a prolonged drama about whether Ronaldo will soon leave for Real Madrid. In proclaiming last week that he was staying, Ronaldo did it in typically flamboyant style, saying, “My heart is here,” and calling Ferguson “a second father.”
Gerard Piqué, the Barcelona central defender and a former teammate of Ronaldo’s at Manchester United, told The Guardian of London that while Ronaldo was “a little vain when it comes to fashion and looking at himself in the mirror, he’s great fun and a very likeable person.”
Piqué added: “Ronaldo has everything — dribbling, shooting, heading and goals. He is one of the best players in the world. Only Messi can challenge him for that.”
Ferguson has suggested that Ronaldo’s greatness lay not in gaudy display, but in his workmanlike refining of his skills in those unseen moments alone after practice, when the cameras and the crowds are absent.
“If the big talents rely only on their natural ability, they won’t have that extra edge,” Ferguson said. “They must do something extra on their own.”
That is exactly what the soccer world is expecting from Ronaldo and Messi on Wednesday — to produce something extra and fantastic on their own.
“I don’t care about that,” Ronaldo said about being considered the world’s best player. “What I want more is to win the Champions League and that’s it.”
Hyderabad, Nov 24 (IANS) A 
