Lionel Messi’s brilliance is almost cliche these days
There was once a time when every amazing thing he did was marvelled at by the stunned masses, unable to comprehend what they were witnessing with their human eyes.
Throughout the years, the Argentine demigod has switched between prolonged periods of outright brilliance and shorter periods of just plain brilliance, with recent years seeing him play at the latter level at a stupidly consistent level.
It is because of this alien consistency that we now watch Messi do mindblowing things with a football, regularly against world class teams, and often react like we are watching a really good TV show we’ve watched over and over again.
Yeah, Lisa’s Substitute still makes us laugh, but we’ve seen it about 10 times now.
Messi though, like The Simpsons, is never far away from reminding us that his brilliance, though we have watched it for years, is anything but familiar.
Lionel Messi is just an absolutely ridiculous human being. pic.twitter.com/2zCgzdkzTv
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) November 28, 2018
It’s freakish, generation-defining; the sort of thing we’ll miss when it’s gone, and Messi reminded us of that again on Wednesday night.
To some his goal against PSV Eindhoven will appear to be little more than a regular Messi goal; ghosting in and out of defenders – courtesy of a silky and devastatingly quick one-two – before doing that thing where he switches his body weight like a glitch on FIFA before belting the ball into the back of the net before the goalkeeper even realises that the ball has left his foot.
And to be honest a regular Messi goal is exactly what it was. He’s going to go and do something equally beautiful next week, and probably the week after. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a couple of moments to appreciate it now.
