Rowan Ricardo Phillips “Lionel Messi is Walking Into History”

On July 16, IPK Fellow Rowan Ricardo Phillips published a guest essay for the New York Times titled “Lionel Messi is Walking Into History.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

By late Wednesday afternoon, the roads in Barcelona had begun to empty. I was still an hour from the place where I planned to watch the Argentina-England semifinal, checking the dashboard clock, afraid I would miss the beginning and more afraid that this beginning might be Lionel Messi’s last.

On the indoor, air-conditioned field in Atlanta, under a roof closed against the Georgia heat, Messi wasn’t hurrying. The semifinal began as a rock fight: churning legs, desperate tugs, lunging tackles, the ball repeatedly disappearing beneath the urgency of reaching it. England’s younger players pressed and collided and chased.

Inside all that motion, Messi walked.

At 39, Messi, one of the oldest players in the tournament, sprints less often than he once did and covers less ground. On Sunday, he will play what is almost certainly his final World Cup match. In past tournaments, Argentina has doubted his genius, blamed him for every failure. But he has, without doubt, transformed soccer; he changed not only what a player could do with the ball but what a player could see before the ball arrived. He made patience an attacking act.

A match contains more than one clock. There’s the official one, bright and remorseless, and there’s the quieter time in which a defender tires, a midfielder loses half a yard, a passing lane remains open one second longer than it should. Messi moves slowly enough to watch that second clock: who follows him, who stops following, where the next space will be. The running belongs to the match everyone can see. Messi waits for the one concealed inside it.

Messi doesn’t walk because he’s left the game.

He walks in order to enter it.

Read the full article here.

Illustration by Alex Pantling/FIFA, via Getty Images