Stayed awake to watch both legs of the Arsenal-Barca tie.It was heart breaking to see Wenger's young guns booted out of the the Champs league but on the other hand it was heartening to see Messi's performance.It gave me hope that there can be billions of IPL matches and Lalit Modi may reckon that IPL will be bigger than the EPL and football soon but, as long as the likes of Messi,Rooney,Ronaldo etc. have something to say about it football will always hold sway.You know that a performance is special when even the opposing team fans applaud and praise you.Right from Wenger , to the players to fans like me there is a general feeling in the Arsenal world that there was no shame in those losses and we lost to an exceptional team with an exceptional player.
On the other hand this Wednesday Rooney delighted the neutral with his mad dog perfromance against Bayern in the CL QF.it was obvious that he was playing in pain but the drive and hunger for being on the field was there for all to say.Rooney is an absolute delight to watch and i find him to be a very selfless player.
The structure of both these players makes for interesting reading that seems to tell kids around the world that "if we can so can you"
Rogan Taylor on Leaders in Football makes a very intersting point.
Genius in football very rarely occurs in players with the 'ideal body' for the modern game. If you're looking for tall strapping athletes in that supreme class of men who jostle for the 'greatest ever' mantle, you won't find any. What you will find is quite a few little fat guys, and skinny ones too; from Puskas to Pele, Cruyf to Maradona and, well, maybe Messi too.
This is an Argentinean boy with a growth hormone deficiency who arrived at Barca, aged 13yrs, where they picked up the bill for his treatment. Then there's Wayne Rooney, for whom the opposite was true: no problem with growth (or any other) hormones as a youngster. In fact, he looked a man before he was a teenager, but he looked (as many of the family of 'battling Rooneys' do) like a boxer, not a football player. He looks like the opposite; a muscled, squat, middleweight, almost square in shape. They say Liverpool FC turned him down as a kid on the basis of his body.
But Rooney is on the verge of greatness too; certainly the only English player in the running; a complete 'natural'. I was there at Goodison Park at his debut, and before he had sprinted five yards onto the pitch from the tunnel, he appeared more of a pro than many around him with years of top football under their belts. These days, his touch, pace, vision, shooting and passing are almost invariably superb. Almost impossibly, it seems, even aerial power is at his command, despite looking like a machine that could never fly.
It is this physical democracy that gives football its great charm - everyone has a chance, not just to play but to dream of being eventually in that special chamber where the greatest of all are gathered. Almost any kid in the world can look in the mirror at an unprepossessing body and think: I can make it - Messi and Rooney did.
It may be that the complete unlikelihood of ever being able to properly control a ball with the distant lumps on the end of your legs is the very aspect of the game which allows the most unlikely looking physical types to succeed at the very highest level. The fact so many millions of the rest of us around the world play the game willingly every week is a testament to human optimism.
In the end, football is like Peter Crouch - the miracle is that we can play it at all.
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