Do We Need A ‘Best Ever’?
Ok, I’ll admit it: during the week I got a little carried away when Messi scored a record amount of goals.
The soccer blogosphere and Twittersphere were prickly with debate. Fans and friends found fraught discussions at every turn. No dialectical resolution has been reached. No wonder. The purists cannot see beyond those of the golden ages and the young cannot see beyond a week ago. No one could agree who was the best of all time.
As sports fans in a neoliberal universe we have been conditioned to seek out the ‘best’. We need one stand alone athlete to represent that sport so that everything is more easily packaged, marketed and pulled up whenever we need to measure success in a sport.
Of course, it is harder than this, but we cannot see past it. With the fall of Tiger we have needed someone to be The One player in golf. We cannot comprehend that in modern terms the fields available to people are more vast; more varied; more contentious. In golf we are yearning for a rivalry of some kind. We want Rory McIlroy to rise, we want Tiger back and we want a battle for a gilded crown.
There is that phrase that sticks in my craw. The bile inducing term “Legend” will always grate on me.
It is overused, and even saying that it is overused has become a cliché. What we cannot comprehend is that not only is the field vast and that there is more than one person capable of extreme brilliance and evocative play, but that most of them, no matter how brilliant, will be largely forgotten in global terms in under a century.
For me the term legend means someone who will be remembered in time because they have come to represent a moment. The legends are those that are synonymous with an age.
Woods will be remembered much as The Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus, will. Of their time they were the best ever. Legends within a snapshot. Rugby has Jonny Wilkinson and Richie McCaw. These types will always be remembered. Tom Brady has his place in the annals. Wayne Gretzky will be discussed in the future.
So some are happy. Messi is the best in the world right now. Before him Pele and Maradona were the best in the World within their time frame. In order for Messi to reach the same thin-aired heights –that of the Legends –he must be the unequivocal representation of his time, though. He must also eradicate his competition so as to make the modernists happy.
In his piece on the argument Eric Imhof suggested that scoring five goals against Leverkusen was unremarkable due to them being a mediocre side. What I would say to this is that every year the Champions League throws up ties between giants and sides much smaller than Leverkusen. For example Man United recently played a game against the unknown quantity Oţelul Galaţi from Romania. No one scored five goals. Messi is the first ever player to score five goals in one game in the Champions League so that must rightfully be heralded as a monumental achievement.
However Eric goes on to point out that Pele stated, in a blaze of braggadocio, that he has scored a lot more goals and won three World Cups.
This point is why I have revised my statement, made in the fit of excitement following Messi’s torrent, that “he will be the best ever.”
He will become a Legend. One of three best ever. One of the few that will stand the test of time. In a hundred years from now it will be the triumvirate. The Southern Three. Two Ms and a P. Messi will be held up in the same esteem because he has done things that no other soccer player has ever done and because he will break more records, both scoring and in terms of club medals.
He may never win a World Cup with Argentina, this is true. However, his name will be stitched into the fabric of Spanish football. He will become the eponymous maverick. Not the line-leader like Pele or the driving force of a Maradona. He will be the jinking jester sliding in from the flank and popping up near the top after someone tried to nudge him aside.
He is only 24. This cannot be forgotten. Eric is right, the jury is still out. Yet it is out for the wrong reason. People, in their modern fervour for one name and one representative, want Messi as The One, but the jury should be there to decide “Yes. Now Messi is the best of the last few decades and he has now cemented his place in history. A Legend alongside Diego and the kid from Brazil.”
We do not need one person as the best, folks. There are no World records with skill. There is no tax on beauty. Every context is different and every Legend offers something sublime. How about we just wait for him to inevitably win a few more club titles, breaking records as he goes? Then we will rush to get a photo of Pele, Maradona and Messi together, put it up on our collective walls and intone that we were bloody lucky to be alive to see this.
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