Few aspects of football are as magical as a genuinely excellent strike-partnership.
When they work, they bring a sense of equilibrium that it’s fair to say can only otherwise be achieved in extended dream sequences, where every person you’ve ever fallen out with texts you to admit that it was all their fault. A perfectly constructed one-two between two strikers can soothe all that is wrong and put right all that is out of place in your world.
They’re slippery things, though, these striker partnerships—difficult to predict in advance. Two guys who you think will complement each other perfectly when pushed into combination very often turn out to be more Madison and Ungar than Yorke and Cole. There are semi-reliable prototypes that tend to make solid matches—little and large, clever and quick—but even so, very few forward double-acts go on to make memories together.
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The odds of watching a really smooth partnership develop are hampered even further in these dark tactical times, too, where one-up-front-thinking still reigns supreme. Nowadays it can often feel like striking is a solitary business, left to vicious lone wolves such as Diego Costa.
And even when the odd decent double-act does turn up within this inhospitable environment, such as Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez last year, player movement is so constant now that the pairing will so often only ever turn out to be ships passing in the night. Peak SAS was only allowed one full season at Liverpool before Suarez moved-on for big bucks.
All of which means that when Neymar and Lionel Messi turn up together, at a club big enough to keep them in that position for the foreseeable future, you ignore the fact that they aren’t exactly playing “up front” and simply rejoice that you get to watch two brilliant players forming a totally brilliant partnership somewhere in the vicinity of “up front.”
To put it at its most eloquent, Neymar and Messi are proper magic for Barcelona right now. They’ve got all the things that a high-end strike-partnership is supposed to have: each one knows where the other one is at all times; each one is prepared to pass to the other even when he might score himself; and between them they’re providing a near-constant stream of goals that could not have been scored without the existence of both of these players on the same pitch at the same time.
They did it again this Saturday against Elche. For the goal that would extinguish the notion of a game that involved two competing sides, Messi received the ball 30 yards out, skipped past one man and pushed a pass into Neymar’s feet at precisely the moment when he wouldn’t be offside but would be racing free and clear into the penalty area. He in turn slipped the ball into the net and made it 3-0.
Before that, Neymar had won the penalty that Messi would go on to convert. After it, Messi played Neymar in again; this time his pass lobbed over the top of the Elche defence for the Brazilian style-guru to volley in.
Awesome, right? Since the turn of the year it’s the kind of thing that the two of them have done to defences on repeat. They’ve exchanged goals and assists against Deportivo La Coruna, Elche (three times) and Atletico Madrid—and even that ignores the plethora of neat combinations that don’t quite materialise into finished products. Together, they’re a near-constant existential threat to defenders which flickers all the more regularly into statistical fact.
And, clearly, their magic doesn’t operate in isolation. Their combined brilliance, now at its peak after a season and a half’s worth of stewing, has occurred at the exact moment when Barcelona and manager Luis Enrique needed it most.
At the beginning of January, Real Madrid was in the ascendency in the league and favourite in the Copa del Rey, while Enrique’s position at Barca was slowly being placed under discussion. Neymar and Messi’s link-up has propelled both club and manager beyond all that bad stuff, to the point where they look like knocking Atletico out of the cup, while Real Madrid is already out, and they’re winning 6-0 in the league, while Madrid is crawling over the line against Cordoba.
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Simply put, a partnership that has the empirical weight of goals behind it that this one does tend to phase all other problems into the background. And so you have to wonder: if Neymar (14 La Liga goals) and Messi (21) can keep up this kind of pace in tandem, will it, in the end, be good enough to outgun the more singular efforts of Ronaldo (28), Benzema (9) and Bale (10) at Real Madrid?
The numbers might currently favour Real’s cohort of more lonely wolves, but in some ways those numbers are a residual effect of Real’s explosive early season form, rather than reflective of where the momentum now lies. With Messi and Neymar on this kind of simultaneous and interrelated form, much more seems possible than at the time when Real and its forwards sped off into the distance in La Liga. Now, they look as though they could win anything.
The magic of the genuinely excellent strike-partnership makes it so. Numerical, aesthetical and existential value pours out of whichever two footballers are involved, instantaneously making anything possible and everything alright.
Which is why we have to realise what we’ve got on our hands here. Our responsibility as the audience is to enjoy it—like Neymar and Messi are—because equilibrium is always temporary. The only alternative is to go back to those dream sequences.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter