It was the absence of the remotest complaint from Lionel Messi when Manchester United finally laid a glove on him that encapsulated the gulf between them and him.
It had taken every ounce of effort Chris Smalling could muster to barge in front of him to intercept a ball that the architect of this quarter final was about to take down. Smalling’s trailing arm struck Messi in the face and for a moment or two he just sat there, staring into space, dabbing the blood that had gathered on his left eyelid and was running from his nose.
There was a kind of nonchalance about that moment and the Englishman’s protestations of innocence were half-hearted at best. ‘Bring it on,’ Smalling had said on the eve of this match. Words which signified nothing when Messi materialised, buzzing around and in front of him.
Lionel Messi was left bloodied by a strong Chris Smalling challenge in the first half
Manchester United had reasons to believe that Messi would be out of their sight by now. When Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona submitted them to that mesmerising display in the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley – the 3-1 scoreline barely did them justice – Sir Alex Ferguson took comfort in the fact that he would not be around forever. ‘How long it lasts,’ was the question, he reflected in the aftermath. ‘Whether Barcelona can replace that team at some point. It's always difficult to find players like Xavi, Iniesta and Messi all the time, [so] probably not…’
Well, the last of that triumvirate is still the same force of nature as ever. This night demonstrated why Old Trafford has missed the regularity of Springtime evenings like. The stadium bounced. And yet the chasm was as great as the one that Ferguson discovered on that May night in London. Not the metronomic danger. Not the carousel which left the great man wondering how he would find a way. But still Catalonian football on another level.
You sensed that it might be a night when Luis Suarez, discovering peak form as Barcelona have all but clinched the La Liga title, might extract revenge for the visceral hate felt for him in these parts since the Patrice Evra episode of seven years ago, which saw him found guilty of racial abuse.
But United were still unable to contain the Argentine who set up Barcelona's match winner
His goal – an angular header of geometrical
