Yaya Touré is one of the giants in global soccer, while Lionel Messi is among the smallest. But it was their talent and temperament, and not their size, that divided them most in their latest Champions League games.
Touré scored a fine goal for Manchester City on Wednesday. Later, in a fit of ill temper, he struck an opponent and was red carded. It was the big, the bad, and ultimately the ugly representation of a City team that is the defending English champion, yet also on the brink of elimination in the Champions League.
Messi is about stealth and silent beauty. Physically, he may be diminutive, but his talent almost single-handedly put Barcelona through to the knockout stage of Europe’s elite competition. Messi scored twice as Barça beat Ajax, 2-0, in Amsterdam, striking first with his head and later with those skipping, gliding feet.
With those goals, Messi tied Raúl, the now retired Real Madrid poacher, for most goals in the Champions League. Messi didn’t say a lot after the game, but then again, he seldom does. “It’s a happy moment,” he told reporters. “It’s great that the team is into the next round.”
Pressed to say more, something personal perhaps about one of the goals, he replied: “I don’t remember one goal especially. In the end, it’s the sum total of them that I shall remember.”
It was like the words that Arnold Palmer’s father once said to the legendary golfer: “Don’t tell them how good you are, son — show them.”
Messi is right. Let the sum, and the performances, speak for themselves. His total now is 71 Champions League goals in 90 games. Raúl had 71 in 142 games. Cristiano Ronaldo is third, with 70 goals in 107 appearances.
Put another way, Raúl averaged 0.50 goals per game in the Champions League. Ronaldo is averaging 0.65, while Messi is at 0.79. But as Leo Messi’s comments imply, it is the team, not the individual, that wins or loses.
If only we could leave it there. If all that mattered was results, the winners this week are those clubs who already qualified for next round: Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Paris St.-Germain, Porto and Real Madrid.
Missing from that group of achievers is any team from England. The Premier League, which boasts that is the best league on earth, had four contenders in the tournament this week, and not one — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester City — registered a victory.
The English, with their array of big-money foreign owners and their galaxy of big-name foreign players, seem at this point to be less than the sum of their parts.
City, particularly, represents that collective failure. Touré, alas, personified it Wednesday. The Ivorian is having a troubled year. In June, while playing at the World Cup, he lost a brother to cancer. Touré has visibly struggled with injuries, not played up to his usual standards and suffered racial slurs from opposing fans this season. Yet his manager at City, Manuel Pellegrini, has stood by Touré through every tribulation.
Pellegrini is a diligent and a decent man. After winning the Premiership, he praised the players. After losing Wednesday to CSKA Moscow, an opponent nobody expected to win for the first time on English soil, Pellegrini was at a loss for words.
“It is difficult to understand why we played so bad,” Pellegrini said on television moments after the 2-1 loss. “We gave away two goals. We didn’t play. It is very strange to understand why, but we must find out why we had so low performances from important players.”
His lined up the same players who beat Manchester United in their derby last Sunday. That was no excuse, even though CSKA’s coach, Leonid Slutsky, did suggest that his club’s extra day of rest and recuperation after its Saturday game “probably had some impact on the match.”
Slutsky is too kind. He had started Seydou Doumbia, another player from the Ivory Coast who is struggling with constant injuries. Yet Doumbia, a 26-year-old journeyman who has played for clubs in Japan, Switzerland and now Russia, is City’s nemesis.
In four matches in the Champions League over the last two seasons, he has scored five times against City. His speed, while he can sustain it, is too much for Manchester’s defense. But to compound that, he was left free to strike, like Messi, once with his head and the other with his foot.
Doumbia’s first goal on Wednesday was a free header following a free kick in the second minute. Touré was supposed to defend Doumbia but left him alone to nod the ball over the line from six yards.
Touré atoned somewhat by curling a masterful free kick of his own with such power that no goalkeeper could have saved it. But then, an hour later, Touré was sent off for pushing his hand into the face of Roman Eremenko.
It was more petulant than brutal. Touré had himself been winded by a terrible body check from Pontus Wernbloom who had escaped with only a yellow card. Moreover, the Greek referee Tasos Sidiropoulos showed his inexperience throughout, not the least when Vernbloom made another crude foul, only for the referee to yellow card a different CSKA defender instead.
That, however, was not the cause of City’s implosion. Nor was the fact that the English side was reduced to nine men when Touré’s dismissal followed the correct red card issued to Fernandinho following two blatant fouls from the Brazilian in the span of five minutes.
The City players have no place to hide, no words to explain their recurrent failings in Europe. Several of them said on Wednesday that they let themselves, their manager and their club down. The same could be said across the board for English clubs paying world-class wages for paltry returns in the biggest club event on earth.
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