San Lorenzo  1  Argentinos Juniors  2

How joyous it must be to have the best player in the world pulling on your club shirt. They had that for a while at Argentinos Juniors when on the 20^th October 1976 a stocky, young cherub ambled nervously onto the pitch. Diego Armando Maradona went on to play 166 games and score 115 goals for the club, before moving on to big city rivals, Boca Juniors.

I’ve never met him but by all accounts, Diego is what people here call a boludo. I’m not quite sure how this word translates into English, but it’s not nice. However, Maradona is a legendary boludo, a much-loved boludo, held dear to the hearts of millions of Argentines for the wonderful moments he gave them wearing the shirts of both Argentinos and Boca Juniors. Fans of a certain age talk with tears in their eyes about those golden days when they saw, or claim they saw, the Number 10 perform his magic. It’s something to tell the grandchildren.

I was never a QPR fan and can’t quite remember why I was at Loftus Road on a wet Wednesday night in November some time in the nineteen-seventies. I don’t remember the team they were playing or the score or, for that matter, where I’ve put my coffee cup. But firmly etched on my obviously soddled brain are a couple of moments of exquisite play by QPR’s Stan Bowles. I was close to the touchline, so was he. It’s moments like those that restore and maintain your faith in football, especially when you’re waiting at a bus-stop in the rain after a one-nil home defeat.

You tell yourself that you’re giving up football, that you’re not wasting your money on any more games, that next time you’ll stay at home and find spiritual enlightenment by baking bread, or something. Only you do go, always hoping for a Stan Bowles moment.

But you don’t get any of that with Lionel Messi, at least not in Argentina. He may turn out to be better than Diego, he may be the best the world has ever seen. He might even achieve legendary status if he can help Argentina to lift the World Cup. But he’ll never have the same place in Argentine hearts as the podgy, obnoxious Maradona.

And that’s because almost no-one here witnessed his early days. No-one can tell their grandchildren about the magic he weaved in the last minute against Independiente to clinch the title for Newell’s, or how he humiliated River Plate with three goals in ten minutes, leaving their defenders dizzy and bumping into one another. Because he was gone, out the door before his voice had broken, him and his family whisked away from the poor neighbourhood he’d grown up in in the city of Rosario and installed on the other side of the globe in Barcelona.

Sid Lowe, in an excellent article in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/mar/22/leo-messi-barcelona-la-liga-spain), recently wrote how they’d run out of superlatives in Spain to describe Messi’s awesome performances. We catch all of that second hand here in the newspapers and on the tele. But the real dilemma in Argentina is why young Leo can’t reproduce his club form at national level.

One theory is that the team coach, that very same Diego Maradona, the man with an ego bursting out of his belly, deliberately plays him out of position and ensures that he doesn’t get the service he requires so that, at international level at least, Messi will never overtake him on the road to footballing sainthood.

Another theory, recently explained in the newspaper, Pagina12, is that having gone to Spain so young, Leo doesn’t have any affinity for the sky blue and white of Argentina and can’t really be bothered to break sweat for the national cause. So he employs his unknown twin brother, Jose Messi, to play in his place. Only Jose is no good.

A far more plausible, but much less entertaining theory, suggests that Pep Guardiola simply understands how best to play Messi and ensures he gets adequate service from his teammates. And Diego doesn’t.

In the run-up to the World Cup, foreign film crews are flocking to Rosario to tell the world where this footballing prodigy came from. You may not know this, but the collective term for a pack of journalists is a ‘shitload,’ as in ‘there’s a shitload of journalists heading to Rosario to do the Messi story.’

They’re interviewing his former teachers, neighbours, distant relatives, football coaches, the owner of the shop where he bought his first football boots, pencil case, socks etc. in the search for something, anything, that might point to what made Messi Messi.

They won’t find much among the fans of Newell’s Old Boys, the club where he played his way through the junior ranks. Because they didn’t realise they’d had him until he’d gone.

Foreign scouts roam along the touchlines of pitches in the shanty-towns and clubs of Argentina, like paedophiles in the park, looking for the next Messi, their sweaty hands firmly grasping the binding contract that will whisk little Jorge or Claudio and his wide-eyed parents across the Atlantic in search of a dream.

Argentines will get behind their national team more passionately than most during the World Cup, they always do. And if Messi produces the goods, then he’ll be hailed as a hero. No-one doubts his nationalism.

But I suspect that in years to come, they won’t be naming football stadiums after him, or hanging his picture on the greasy walls of bars and cafes in the far-flung corners of Argentina, as they do with Maradona’s.

Because Argentines have never really seen him close up. He’s never given them stories to tell or dreams to dream.

And talking of dreams…ours is still well and truly alive after a 2-1 victory at San Lorenzo in a game that Argentinos Juniors didn’t really deserve to win. Thousands of Argentinos fans trekked across Buenos Aires to see San Lorenzo take the lead in the first half after some defensive chaos from the visitors.

The good players, especially Nestor Ortigoza, did not play their best, passes went astray and there was confusion in defence. But champions win the games in which they play badly. And if Argentinos Juniors do emerge as champions then they may look back on this game as a crucial one. Two goals from Ismael Sosa in the second half making the difference.

This is now a two-horse race. Godoy Cruz lost to Rosario Central and Independiente were beaten 3-2 at home by Boca Juniors. Estudiantes are still leaders after beating relegated Chacarita 2-1 and Argentinos sit just a point behind them with two games to go.