*sigh*

Here's a goal you may have seen once or twice before. The second replay here is my favourite way to watch it, because you get to properly see the two best parts. First: the way that, after Messi beats the first set of challenges and sprints into the space behind, the defenders converge on where they wish he was, a panicked swarm which contrasts with the second, better, delight: once Messi is through on the keeper, he not only slows down but seems to switch into another mode altogether. He's just legged it for fifty yards, dodged two lunging tackles and is about to face the ultimate moment of this already extraordinary passage, and he looks — just for a second or two — as if he's all alone, nowheres in particular, doing nothing special. A football game is a swirling sequence of pockets of space expanding and contracting; the energy spent in trying to shut these spaces down makes their serial exploitation a pressing concern, a ferociously difficult task. And the penalty area is, of course, the most fiercely defended patch on the field. The not-incorrect but humdrum explanation for this moment (hah! humdrum!) might be that he was facilitating his next move — fucking with the keeper's head, essentially. And I'm sure that there is some stuff about how elite athletes experience time differently to merely excellent ones that would fit just nicely here. But when I recall this goal, this is the moment I think of: when Messi created a bubble apart from what surrounded him before returning to our world.

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