Pedri is Messi's smile

Messi has connected with Pedri. Beyond 0-3 in Valladolid, which does not remove the Barça of his indefinite position between the wars, and that he cannot assure anything due to his irregularity, the connection between the captain and the most exciting player of a team that tries to rebuild, is shocking. It was not only the association of the 0-3 play, it was also Messi's smile when Pedri connected with him from more than 40 meters in a first-half action. Messi did not manage to define before Masip, but his gesture because the canary would have understood him at such a distance; Like his final hook in the play that sentenced the game, it was a long-unknown reaction in the Argentine.

Beyond what Messi can say in that interview that is expected with expectation for this Sunday, something is sensed in the gestural language of the six-time Ballon d'Or a few days ago. Especially in good harmony with Pedri. In doors, and on tenterhooks, as everyone is to know what the future of the Argentine will be, who ends his contract next June, a strange element can change the equation. Messi has been seen more involved in games for weeks, more involved with what may happen to the future of the entity and, especially, more involved in the pitch. The person in charge is a boy of 18 just turned 18 who, it seems that almost without wanting to, he has been able to re-ignite the competitive spark in Messi. It is not only the play of the 0-3 in Valladolid. Neither did that smile after the action not finished in the first part. It is the confirmation that Pedri knows what language Messi speaks on the field. And Pedri, it may just be that intuitively, he has it. What space to occupy when Messi has or does not have the ball, or how to interpret his movements. There is no doubt that, at least, Messi likes the way Pedri moves on the pitch and what football he develops.

It is easy to interpret in that symbolic hug after the 0-3 that there is something in Pedri that Messi likes. It is easy to compare it even with that symbolic moment in which Ronaldinho carried Messi on his shoulders after his first goal in LaLiga, back in the 2004-05 season. It does not have to do in a sense. Pedri is not going to become a substitute in the production of goals or continuous emotions, because his specialty has much more to do with being a benchmark as a generator of a good ecosystem in the team, without fanfare. But it did sound like a complicit hug, from a veteran who feels in tune with a boy who has just arrived and whom he feels like sponsoring. Pedri is today a player with a low profile, without much lobbying and who only speaks wonders about his football. Surely and, in part, Messi sees reflected in him his early years, in which he was not expected but that he was a player who represented La Masia, not that tremendous giant that he became. The characteristics of both, Messi and Pedri, as players, do not have much to do with each other, but Messi was never happier on a lawn than next to players who did not have the goal as their final goal, only to generate play. Perhaps Messi had been waiting for a partner who understood that so well for a long time. Maybe it was the player you were waiting to sponsor. Even the one that gives him a first reason to continue playing for more years at Barça. That which seemed so difficult a long time ago.