Free Messi by Guillem Balagué Page A

way.
    Leo left his neighbourhood for the first time at the age of 11. It was a Saturday in spring. He caught the bus with his friend Diego Vallejos, who is, incidentally, the brother of Matías’s wife. He was from the same neighbourhood. The two youngsters made their way half an hour out of town to Villa Gobernador Gálvez, in the south of the city.
    To visit his grandmother’s grave.
    Leo was at Grandoli from the age of five to almost seven. In that team of ’87 he wore the number 10 and his cousin Emanuel was the goalkeeper. Two things in particular kept repeating themselves during this period: they won practically everything that was going and, well, Lionel always had the ball.
    Each practice, each game, was the most important ever, and before every practice, every game (and each one was the most important of all), Leo prepared in the minutest detail and without any assistance from anyone. First the boots, cleaned with water then a cloth and a brush. Then the ankles were bandaged. He was like a professional, small and deadly serious.
    Salvador Aparicio was his first trainer and in his sessions he made them jog, then asked them to loosen up a bit and then introduced the ball. In those days the entire enterprise consisted, really, of playingplaying and playing.
    Salvador, ‘Don Apa’, had a wonderful story – he was not the man who discovered him, rather the conduit for an unstoppable talent. The former railway worker who died of a brain fissure in 2009, aged 79 (according to some people, you could hear the air escaping from his head), never presumed to be any more than that: ‘I didn’t discover him. But I was the first person to put him on the pitch. I am proud of that.’
    Don Apa, like hundreds of anonymous trainers and technical directors, convinced dozens of children from the neighbourhood, aged between 4 and 12, to come off the streets for a while and spend time with Grandoli where they would learn a certain order and happiness. His are the videos of a Leo, small and going at full pelt in his red and white shirt, dribbling around defenders, getting the ball in his own box and taking it into the opposition’s, scoring, then collecting the ball from the net to put it back on the centre spot to start all over again.
    ‘He scored six or seven goals every game. He positioned himself in the middle of the pitch and waited for the goalkeeper to kick the ball. The goalie kicked the ball, one of his team-mates would stop it, he would then take it off him and set off on a dribble. It was something supernatural.’ This is how Don Apa, in various interviews, remembered Leo. ‘When we went to a pitch, people would crowd in to see him. When he got the ball he owned it. It was incredible, they couldn’t stop him. Against Amanecer he scored one of those goals like you see in the adverts. I remember it well: he dribbled past everybody, goalkeeper included. How did he play? Like he plays now, with freedom. He was a serious boy, he always put himself beside his grandmother, he was quiet. He never protested. If they whacked him, sometimes he would cry but he would always pick himself up and carry on running.
    ‘Every time I see him play I start to cry. When I see the Maradona-type goal he scored, the one he got against Getafe, I remember when he was little, so little …’
    David Treves, who replaced Don Apa, is today president of Grandoli. He proudly displays the trophies won by the club and the team photos. Messi is the one wearing the shirt that is too big for him. ‘It was very rare for a boy of his age to do all this,’ confirmsTreves. ‘It was said that we had the next Maradona. The best footballer in the world began here, and his first football shirt was ours.’
    ‘He would get the ball and the move would finish with a goal. He made the difference even if they kicked him. This is how it is: if you’re small and you play well, they break you.’ So recalls Gonzalo Diaz who played with Leo during the time he was