He has what is known locally as "viveza," an ability to get by on his wits. Some Argentines prefer the roguery of Maradona, too. Many in Argentina will tell you that Messi will forever live in the shadow of Maradona unless he delivers a World Cup. Maradona grew up in the 1960s in a shack with no running water or electricity he used to scavenge for pesos as a kid by selling scrap and the foil wrapping from cigarette papers, among other enterprises. It's a hardscrabble neighbourhood, although it's not a shantytown like, say, Villa Fiorito, where Maradona sprung from in Buenos Aires. There weren't many cars careering around the streets of Messi's barrio in the south zone of Rosario when he was growing up. He always wanted the ball."įalleroni holds a Newell's jersey signed by Messi. Or if he didn't get passed the ball, he got angry. Even if he won-if the team won 7-0-but he didn't score a goal, he got angry. "He used to go crazy when he couldn't score a goal," remembers Falleroni. Messi was grumpy when he didn't score in a game, like a gambler being wrenched from the rails. I ask Adrian Coria-who coached Messi in 10th grade, the final year he played for Newell's before leaving to join Barcelona at age 13-if it is true that Messi scored more than 500 goals for Newell's during those years as a kid. It was the only way to stem the bleeding. The game would have to stop once six goals had gone in. They bullied teams so badly-racking up 10, 12 and 15 goals a game-that some opponents put a 6-0 limit on the scoreline. Sometimes Newell's own goalkeeper was so bored during the beatings his outfield teammates were administering, he would sit on his backside in the box. "In five or six seasons, we only lost about three times," says another teammate, Gonzalo Mazzia. In 2000, Newell's won their championship by at least 20 points, according to Franco Falleroni, one of the team's strikers. They won every tournament they entered, plundering fields across Argentina and competitions as far away as Peru, on the other side of the continent. When the club graduated to the 11-a-side format at age 11, with more space to play with on the bigger pitches, it was more of the same.
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