“Messi is a dog”, the first viral story by Hernán Casciari on the 10 who moved the world

Hernán Casciari recounted a fragment of “Messi’s suitcase”, his new chronicle about ten, and also made the protagonist of the story move.

After listening to it on the Perros de la calle radio, the star of the Argentine national team sent a WhatsApp audio to Andy Kusnetzoff telling him that with Antonella Roccuzzo They heard it and started crying.

“Anto showed me about Hernán, what he wrote, how he told it, was impressive, we both started crying because everything that matters is very true, very emotional and I wanted to send a greeting to both of you” Messi told the host of the FM Urbana program.

Casciari, who participated in “Perros” from his home, did not hide his emotion either in telling his story or in listening live to the thanks of his idol.

The new chronicle of the Argentine writer will appear in its entirety in the next issue of his magazineOrsaibut thanks to the advance it was possible to know that he will deal with Messi as “the leader” of the battle waged by Argentine emigrants to maintain their Argentine identity as much as possible.

a historical tale

“Messi’s suitcase” will arrive more than ten years after the publication of a famous viral story by Casciari about ten: “Messi is a dog”.

In the story, published on 11 June 2012 on the Orsai blog and published in number 6 of the magazine, the author compares Messi to his dog Totín. One, passionate and blinded by the ball; another, impassioned and blinded by a yellow sponge.

Throughout the text Casciari refers to Barcelona; to Leo’s greatness as a person and a player; to his passion for football, the city and Messi; and the pride generated by being the same age as the “dog man”.

“Messi is a dog”, by Hernán Casciari

“The quick answer is for my daughter, for my wife, because I have a Catalan family. But if you seriously ask me why I’m still here, in Barcelona, ​​in these awful and boring times, it’s because I’m forty minutes by train from best football story.

I mean: if my wife and daughter decided to go and live in Argentina right now, I would divorce and stay here at least until the Champions League final. And it is that something similar has never been seen inside a football field, at any time, and it is very likely that it will not happen again.

True, I’m writing hot. I write this the same week that Messi made three for Argentina, five for Barça in the Champions League and two for Barça in the league. Ten goals in three games in three different competitions.

The Catalan press talks about nothing else. For a while, the economic crisis is not the starting point of the news. The internet explodes. And in the midst of all this, I just came up with a strange theory, very difficult to explain. Precisely for this reason I will try to write it, to see if I finish giving it flight.

It all started this morning: I watch Messi’s goals uninterruptedly on Youtube, I do it with a sense of guilt because I’m in the middle of closing magazine number six. You shouldn’t do that.

I happen to click on a collection of snippets that I’ve never seen before. I think it’s one video out of thousands, but I see right away that it’s not. It’s not Messi’s goals, nor his best plays, nor his assists. It’s a strange compilation: the video shows hundreds of images – two to three seconds each – in which Messi receives very hard fouls and doesn’t fall.

Don’t strip or complain. He does not shrewdly look for a direct free kick or penalty. In each frame, he keeps his eyes on the ball as he finds his balance. He makes inhuman efforts so that what they did to him is not a foul or a yellow card for the opposing defender.

There are many little bits of fierce kicking, blocking, stomping and snaring, tripping and sneaking; I’ve never seen them all together. He goes with the ball and receives a scythe to the shin, but continues. They hit him on the heels: he stumbles and continues. They grab him by the shirt: he moves, moves away and continues.

I was suddenly amazed, because there was something familiar about those images. I put each fragment in slow motion and realized that Messi’s eyes are always on the ball, but not on the football or the context.

Current football has very clear rules whereby, many times, falling to the ground ensures a penalty, or having the opposing defender booked is good for future counter-attacks. In these fragments, Messi seems to understand nothing about football or opportunities.

He is seen as in a trance, hypnotized; He just wants the ball into the opponent’s goal, he doesn’t care about the sport or the result or the legislation. You have to look him in the eye to understand it: he crosses his eyes, as if he has difficulty reading a subtitle; He focuses on the ball and doesn’t lose sight of it even if he gets pierced.

Where had I seen that look before? in whom? That gesture of excessive introspection was familiar to me. I left the video paused. I magnified her eyes. And then I remembered: they were Totín’s eyes when he lost his mind from the sponge.

I had a dog in my childhood called Totín. Nothing moved him. He wasn’t a smart dog. The thief came in and saw them take the TV. The bell rang and he seemed not to hear. I threw up and he didn’t come to lick.

However, when someone (my mother, my sister, me) took a sponge – a certain yellow dishwashing sponge – Totín went crazy. He wanted that sponge more than anything else in the world, he was dying to take that yellow rectangle to the kennel. I would show it to him in my right hand and he would focus on it. I moved him from side to side and he never stopped looking at it. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

It didn’t matter how fast I moved the sponge: Totín’s neck moved identically in the air. His eyes became Japanese, attentive, intellectual. Like Messi’s eyes, which cease to be those of a giddy pre-adolescent and become, for a fraction of a second, the scrutinizing gaze of Sherlock Holmes.

I discovered this afternoon, watching that video, that Messi is a dog. Or a dog man. That’s my theory, sorry you came this far with better expectations. Messi is the first dog to play soccer.

It makes a lot of sense that he doesn’t understand the rules. Dogs don’t pretend to trip when they see a Citroën coming, they don’t complain to the referee when a cat escapes above the median, they don’t look for the double yellow card to give the hardest. In the early days of football, humans were like that too. They were looking for the ball and nothing else: there were no colored cards, no advanced positions, no suspensions after five yellow cards, no away goals counted double. Before, we played like Messi and Totín play. Then football became very strange.

Right now, right now, everyone seems more interested in the bureaucracy of sport, in its laws. After a big game, a whole week of legislation is debated.

Did Juan exprofeso get booked to miss the next match and play the classic? Did Pedro really fake the foul inside the area? Will they let Pancho play under clause 208 which states that Ernesto plays for the Under 17s? Did the local coach send the grass to be watered too much so that the guests slipped and cracked their skulls? Did the ball boys disappear when the game went two-for-one and reappear when it went two-for-two? Will the club appeal Paco’s double yellow card to the Sports Tribunal?

Did the referee correctly deduct the minutes Ricardo lost for protesting the penalty Ignacio received due to Luis wasting time when he played at fullback?

No sir. Dogs don’t listen to the radio, they don’t read the sports press, they don’t understand whether a match is a friendly and insignificant match or a cup final. Dogs always want to take the sponge to the kennel, even if they’re sleepy or ticks are killing them.

Messi is a dog. He beats records of other times because only until the fifties the dog men played football. Then FIFA invited us all to talk about laws and articles, and we forgot that the important thing was the sponge.

And then one day a sick boy appears. As in his time, a sick monkey stood up and the story of man began. This time he was a Rosario boy with different abilities. Unable to say two sentences in a row, visibly antisocial, incapable of almost everything human picaresque. But with an extraordinary talent for holding something round and bloated and carrying it to a net at the bottom of a green plain.

If they let him, he won’t do anything. He always carries that white sphere on the three sticks, like Sisyphus. It is again. Guardiola said, after the five goals in just one game: —The day he wants he’ll score six.

It wasn’t praise, it was the objective expression of the symptom. Lionel Messi is ill. It’s a rare disease that excites me, because I loved Totín and now he’s the ultimate dog man. And he is verifying this disease in detail, seeing it evolve every Saturday, which I continue in Barcelona even if I prefer to live elsewhere.

Every time I climb the internal stairs of the Camp Nou and suddenly I see the glow of the illuminated grass, in that moment that always reminds us of childhood, I tell myself the same: you must be very lucky, Jorge, please, it really is one sport and you must be contemporary with its best version and, trascarton, that the field is so close to you.

I enjoy this double luck. I treasure it, I miss the present every time Messi plays. I am a fanatical fan of this place in the world and this historical moment. Because, it seems to me, at the Final Judgment there will be all the humans who have been and will be there, and a circle will form to talk about football, and one will say: I studied in Amsterdam in 1973, another will say: I was an architect in San Paolo in 1962, and another: I was already a teenager in Naples in 1987, and my father will say: I traveled to Montevideo in 1967, and once again: I heard the silence of the Maracana in 1950.

Everyone will proudly count their battles until the wee hours of the morning. And when there’s no one left to talk, I’ll get up and slowly say: I lived in Barcelona at the time of the dog man. And he won’t fly a fly. There will be silence. Everyone else will hang their heads. And God will appear, dressed as the Final Judgment, and pointing to me he will say: you, the plump one, are safe. Everyone else, to the showers.”