Lionel Messi the Don Bradman of football

Our very own Craig Foster AM did quite well this week with his "[Messi] is one of the greatest athletes ever to grace the Earth." Fozz, though, is exceptional at everything he does (what a popular first president of an Australian republic he would be!) and most of the spontaneously gushed Messi-praise has not been of that worthy standard.

Even this columnist, blessed with an athletic mind and with a vocabulary as big as the Ritz, had a go at singing Messi's praises in a recent column (this even before the great man's god-like display in the World Cup final) but was very conscious of not having done very well. Expression of the great big subject of the small man's genius and the joy it gives us rather bamboozles we stumbling wordmongers.

Just this week in an interview with The Washington Post the fiendishly intelligent actor Tilda Swinton, articulately discussing her new film The Eternal Daughter, said "[the film's producer] is a great respecter, as I would say I am, of inarticulacy, of silence, of the urge-to-speak but the inability to find the right words. So that's in [the film]."

One is grateful to Ms Swinton for inadvertently putting her finger on the nub of the Messi problem. It is that there are times when that urge-to-say-or-write things is thwarted, hornswoggled even by an inability to find the right words for what one wants to express.

And of course for commentators (such as newspaper columnists) it is not only an urge to express things in words, but, alas, a necessity. In a long, long career of writing for newspapers I have known many an occasion when I would have preferred to leave a dignified blank space below my byline rather than gibber on about some subjects so mighty or nebulous that words could not properly grab them.

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There are things about the matter of Messi's greatness that words alone struggle to wield. What if it would somehow be better and somehow less inarticulate to sing about Lionel Messi (even if just yodelling a kind of "la-la-la" to an appropriately fine melody) than to try to talk and write about him? One is reminded of the wise insight (sometimes attributed to the composer Claude Debussy) that "Where words fail, music speaks."

Somehow what the expression of love and admiration of the velvet-footed Argentinian requires is a kind of agnostic song of praise, a hymn. It could contain just a few words of praise, perhaps, but as with the best Christian hymns those probably inadequate words would be given lustre and oomph with music.

A proof of my thesis is the way in which in 1930 the famous gramophone recording (and sheet music) of Our Don Bradman, a popular hymn-song in praise of the Lionel Messi of cricket, was a fabulous smash hit. For a Christmas treat why not find and play it now on YouTube?

With Bradman's god-like cricketing achievements hard to just talk about the silly-sweet song, somehow managing tunefully to be both exuberant and reverent at the same time, hit exactly the right patriotic, Don-extolling spot.

Perhaps what we are all fumbling to define and articulate in Messi's case is a kind of gratitude, a sense of being privileged to have been around in these times to see (albeit on screens) live and in real-time this most beautiful exponent of the most beautiful of games. What joy it gives to see an extraordinary genius strut his or her wondrous stuff!

If only time travel allowed it today's Beethoven devotees (I am one of them) would bustle back to the Vienna of 22 December 1808 so as to be in the audience to see and hear Beethoven as the soloist in the public premieres of two of his mightiest works for piano and orchestra. Oh to have been there!

The Vienna of 1808, starring the GOAT (greatest of all time) of music is beyond our reach but in the meantime we have been able to ogle the probable GOAT of football.

But perhaps here I am illustrating the ways in which sometimes mere words won't wield a matter.

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