La Bajada’s Leo has come a long way

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From a very young age it was clear that Lionel Messi had a gift for football, and his early skills are engraved in public memory at La Bajada, a humble neighbourhood in the Argentine city of Rosario where his family still lives.

“He was different, he was different from them all,” Messi’s mother Celia Cuccitini told the German Press Agency DPA of the third of her four sons.
“He was a different kind of footballer,” Adrian Coria, his coach in the youth scheme of Rosario club Newell’s Old Boys, agrees. It was from Newell’s that Messi, born on June 24, 1987, moved to Barcelona in 2000, at age 13.
“One afternoon, I saw a small lefty who took the ball and looked like a weaver. That was Leo,” recalls Coria, now an assistant coach for Paraguay manager Gerardo Martino, who also played for Newell’s.
Little Leo “had a terrific shot, with that short sprint, that way of pulling away, that dribbling,” Coria says. “He had it all from the cradle.” That lefty is now the best player in the world, according to Fifa, and Argentina’s great hope for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
A goal that is still painted red on the wall of a house in La Bajada was witness to the first penalty shots from the young prodigy, as he played on the street with friends who were mostly older than him.
The owner of the house now says proudly that Messi used to practice there, although more than once he sent the young boy away at siesta time because the power of the shots made pictures shake on the walls.
The neighbourhood mechanic also speaks fondly of the talented kid. “It’s impossible to forget Leo,” he says.
Messi was discovered for football by Salvador Aparicio. He was short of a player to field a team, and he asked the Messis if he could use Leo. That was the first time that the kid, aged just five and a lot younger than his teammates, wore the orange shirt of the Grandoli children’s football club.
Grandoli is a small club near La Bajada, with a single, sparse-grass pitch and surrounded by housing projects.
In the small club room used as an office, as a changing room, for storage and to display photographs and trophies all at once, they treasure the first achievements of the pulguita, the little tick, as Aparicio called him. For many children, those pictures are a symbol of their hope for a future that is different from reality in lower-class Argentina. Kids in La Bajada smile when asked about Messi: Leo is barely 22, but he is already a legend in his old neighbourhood, even though most children there don’t even have a ball with which to copy their idol.
“He was playing a preliminary round of the Rosario league, and people came two hours early just to watch him. It was incredible what he did with the ball,” Coria recalls.
The coach says “it was impossible” to keep Messi “sitting on the bench for five minutes because the team needed him.” But occasionally he would not get to play, and that helped him learn that he was part of a team of equals, Coria adds. “Leo has a very important personality, he is a guy who knows what he wants, a guy that no one is going to break, a guy who always takes a step forward, even though since he was little he has been kicked from the tip of his foot to the head. And with his (small) build he did very well amid big centre-backs,” Coria says. “In the group, Leo never wanted to be the star, the sparkle, the player without whom the team would not be able to play. On the contrary, he was always low profile, calm. But he is a leader in football terms, I don’t know whether he is a leader in his head or in his character.” — DPA