Lionel Messi and Argentina excel at football’s most difficult skill: keeping it simple

The expression ‘moving in pairs’ has been around in coaching circles for a long time, and anyone who has experienced training exercises around that theme knows that Lionel Messi is your perfect partner.

Both of Argentina’s goals in their opening Copa America win against Canada came down to the relationship between Messi and a teammate – their movement, his pass – and also served as a reminder that the simplicity of a diagonal ball and a straight run, or a straight ball and a diagonal run, is often a winning formula.

Argentina excels at those pairs interactions, turning 11-a-side football into two-player matches through straightforward but hugely effective ways to outwit opponents.

For those of you interested in coaching, Dan Wright, Brighton’s academy coaching and pathways manager, hosts an excellent session on The Coaches’ Voice on this topic, showing academy players how to use a variety of methods to to succeed in this. a two-on-two scenario – and only one of them involves taking on an opponent.

Both passing combinations mentioned above feature, as do underlaps and overlaps, and an old Messi favorite that set up two goals in Argentina’s final pre-Copa America warm-up match against Guatemala: the one-two to be eliminated.

That kind of cunning and guile to open up a defense seems so ingrained in Argentine football culture, where the mix of skill, humor and imagination in their attacking play makes them such tough opponents to contain. One wrong step and they punished you. Just like they did with Canada.

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In a sense, the build-up to Argentina’s second goal against Canada was completely out of sync with the way Thursday’s match in Atlanta was played.

Canada played a disciplined mid-block for much of the evening, initially in a compact 4-2-4 shape and later in a 4-3-3, leaving the onus on Argentina to respond to them. But as time ran out and Argentina almost provocatively went all the way back to goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez after initially being on the attack, Canada changed tactics and pushed high and aggressively. In doing so they played into Argentina’s hands.

Cristian Romero’s cross-field pass to Nicolas Otamendi was slightly loose and gave Canadian Jacob Shaffelburg further encouragement to chase hard, leaving Lisandro Martinez free in the process. It was a gamble that was therefore not rewarded. Otamendi lifted the ball over Shaffelburg’s head to Martinez and with the Canadian substitute out of the match, Argentina suffered a three-on-two overload on the left. A pair of one-touch passes from Martinez and Giovani lo Celso, the first via the head and the second on the volley, saw Argentina take full advantage.

As Marcos Acuna drove the ball over the halfway line and passed to Lo Celso, everyone ran for Argentina. Everyone except Messi, that is.

Messi walked. Walking like a man who knew there was no chance the plane would leave without him.

He watched the panicked defenders retreat – Richie Laryea sprinted past him on his outside, prompting Messi to glance to his right to weigh it all up – and by the time he received the ball from Lo Celso, he was in the middle on the field halfway to the Canadian border. half had deflated.

That area – a huge area – belonged to Messi.

Essentially, there would have been no space for Messi to run into, but plenty of space for others to leave for him. In that sense, it feels like a lesson in the art of standing still to receive the ball or, in Messi’s case, barely putting one foot in front of the other.

“He is not running, but he is always watching what is happening,” Pep Guardiola said in the 2019 documentary This Is Football. “He smells the weaknesses in the back four. After five or ten minutes he has a map in his eyes, in his brain, to know exactly where the room is and what the panorama is.

If that’s the case, Messi might have worn a blindfold in the 88th minute against Canada. Either way, it was clear that Canada was in trouble from the moment it gained possession. A man who needs little time or space to choose a pass had plenty of both.

Lautaro Martinez made it even easier for him by making an excellent diagonal run over Moise Bombito and behind Derek Cornelius, who was drawn to the ball and preoccupied by Messi – there are the four participants in your two-on-two mini-game – and the Inter Milan forward converted.

There were a total of twelve Argentine passes in a move that went from Front to Back and, to quote Lionel Richie, Back to Front and eight different players (as shown in the image below). But it was the devastating connection between two of them at the end that did the damage.

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Argentina’s first goal was remarkably similar, albeit the run was straighter and the pass slightly slanted. Once again Messi was the architect, this time after Stephen Eustaquio noticed he was outnumbered on a throw-in and, crucially, lunged forward to attack Rodrigo De Paul, leaving Messi free. Eustaquio didn’t move much, but he moved enough, and the same went for Messi to receive and turn.

It was as if a switch went off in Alexis Mac Allister’s brain at that moment: he started his run behind Bombito before Messi took shape to play the pass (Messi had almost certainly already thought about playing it), safely in the knowledge that the ball would be played. come. Messi’s ball was perfect and although Mac Allister was punched by Canadian goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau, he managed to poke the ball towards Julian Alvarez a split second earlier.

That mutual understanding between the Argentinian players is such a nice feature of their game.

Six days earlier, Messi combined beautifully with Enzo Fernandez to create a goal for Lautaro Martinez against Guatemala, this time via a one-two that took an entire defense out of the game and worked so effectively as the Argentine captain scored a total came in. different direction (forward) than where he passed (sideways).

There is a clear progression in all this in competitions and also in the aforementioned ‘moves in two’ training.

Introduce another player, who can only move laterally, to deflect the balls before scoring, and you have everything in place to encourage the kind of clever third-man running that led to Argentina’s eventual goal in their 3 -0 win over El Salvador in March (illustrated below).

Like a snooker or billiards player thinking two shots ahead, Lo Celso is already on the move before Leandro Paredes has played a pass into Martinez’s feet, as the Tottenham Hotspur midfielder anticipates (or perhaps he should). dictate) what will happen next. Martinez pushes the ball neatly into the path of Lo Celso and Argentina has scored.

Argentina is not reinventing the wheel with any of these moves, but as Johan Cruyff once said: “Playing football is very simple. Playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”

(Top photo: Hector Vivas/Getty Images)