With 11 minutes gone at Stamford Bridge Lionel Messi did his first extraordinary thing, picking up the ball in the centre circle at ambling speed, then flicking the switch on those waddling nitroglycerin jets. Pedro was shrugged away in conventional fashion. N’Golo Kanté was evaded with a jink.
At which point Antonio Rüdiger made the mistake of panicking. Never panic around Messi. He wants you to panic. He smells your panic and runs right into it. As Rüdiger flailed out of the backline Messi didn’t so much dribble round him as glide into a different slipstream so that suddenly – how? – he was behind him, with Rüdiger left whirling and stumbling, just another gif-humiliation, another note in that endless bad-techno YouTube reel of the Messi skill vaults.
With Messi in town the urge is always there to focus on his contribution. His presence is an event in itself. Even a failure to influence a game is a major plot-line, a plan enacted, someone else’s seasonal high point.
And so the Messi observer is faced with a familiar difficulty, the desire to describe his every touch, that deliciously soft, oddly knowing way he takes the ball, leaving a little bit of Messi on it with every tickle of his boot. Pitch-side at Stamford Bridge, the most striking thing was how startlingly close to his opponents Messi stands with the ball. At times you kept imagining the whistle must have blown. But no. Messi really was walking right up to Kanté with the ball on his toe, standing in front of him, daring the rest of the world to blink first.
And yet, for long periods, this looked like one of those occasions when Messi’s influence could be stifled by an opponent with the will and the defensive guile. From the opening minutes Chelsea played at a pitch of hustling energy, severing the supply line between Messi and the disappointing Luis Suárez and leaving Barcelona with plenty of impotent possession.
Chelsea took the lead deservedly on 62 minutes, Willian shooting low and hard past Marc-André ter Stegen. And for a while, as successive blue-shirted XIs have tried, this Conte-issue team shrank the space, sucked the air out of the game and made the pitch a crowded, difficult place. Right up until the moment Messi scored and changed the gravity of this tie completely on 75 minutes.
It was classic unforgiving Messi. A poor pass by Andreas Christensen was intercepted and shuttled on instantly. Messi’s left-footed shot was the usual precision affair, wiffled into the net with merciless low-backlift power.
And so that non-existent hoodoo was finally not lifted. Before tonight there had been a degree of fate-tempting around Messi back at the Bridge. The best club footballer of his generation came to west London with 545 career goals but none against these opponents, with the suggestion that a goal against Chelsea is, alongside a World Cup winner’s medal, the one thing still keeping Messi from unarguable footballing ultimacy, the final notch on his personal Everest.
This is, of course, a load of nonsense. Forget the goals. It was against Chelsea in 2006 that Messi announced himself in England with a brilliant performance back in his dribbling-ferret mode, the Mullet Years when Messi and Guardiola were busily reinventing the patterns of elite attacking football. Messi won at Stamford Bridge that night. Three years later he could be seen hugging Andrés Iniesta after the latter’s wonder-equaliser sent Chelsea out on away goals.
Here he took another step towards something similar, starting in the role Eden Hazard would perhaps have preferred for Chelsea, gliding about just behind Suárez as a classic No 10. And for a while the patterns looked familiar as Messi dropped deep and began to flick the ball to Iniesta, finding that old mesmerising rhythm.
Steadily Chelsea began to drag the game their way. Kanté got close to Messi, sniping in with Piranha-like malevolence. Despite making 306 fewer passes in the first half Chelsea almost went to the break with a deserved lead, Willian veering inside and producing a hard, flat, swerving shot that smacked Ter Stegen’s left-hand post, then hitting the other post a few minutes later.
Messi entered one of his walking phases for much of the second half, expending over that middle period considerably less energy than Antonio Conte on the touchline. As Messi stroked in the equaliser Conte crumpled dramatically, staring at the ground like a man stabbed in the guts, but stabbed in the guts in slow motion, a blow that had been hanging in the air just out of sight ever since the draw. The tantalising prospect of a Messi whiteout may have been snatched away. But Chelsea will still travel in hope: a match for this Barcelona team, if not quite for that enduringly sui generis human being in the No 10 shirt.
