Lionel Messi scored four goals in a single MLS game for the first time ever on Saturday, and he made it look so effortless that I’d bet a few of these Montreal defenders were still figuring out shin guards the first time he pulled something like this on somebody else. It was the eighth time in his professional career he’s put up four-plus goals in a match, and Inter Miami picked the perfect week to remember he’s still capable of doing exactly that to an actual MLS opponent.
Casemiro got Miami on the board first, and Montreal answered right back to make it 1-1, which is usually the part of these games where you brace for a slog. Messi didn’t let it get that far. He drilled a direct free kick just before halftime to put Miami back in front, 2-1, and that’s the goal that actually decided this thing — not the three that came after it.
Montreal spent the rest of the night finding out what that meant.
Messi added a dribbling goal in the 52nd minute, set up a Luis Suárez score not long after, then chipped in a third in the 83rd for the hat trick. He capped it with a second direct free kick in stoppage time, his fourth goal of the night, because apparently three wasn’t enough of a statement. Miami won 7-1, ripping off six unanswered goals across both halves once Montreal’s equalizer got erased, and the closing stretch felt less like a soccer match and more like a guy cleaning out his garage.
I’ll concede the obvious counterpoint here, because a piece like this is supposed to have one: Montreal is not a good soccer team, and conceding six goals in that stretch says as much about their back line as it does about Messi. That’s fair. It’s also beside the point, because bad opponents are exactly the setting where you find out whether a guy still has it, and at 39, in his fourth MLS season, not that far removed from his last World Cup run, Messi answered that question by turning a competitive night into a rout before most fans finished their second beer.
He’s now leading MLS in scoring with 18 goals, passing FC Dallas’s Petar Musa (16) for the Golden Boot lead, and this win snapped a five-game winless streak that had Miami fans sweating through August.
My grandmother judges every soccer player alive against Diego Maradona and whatever Napoli happens to be doing that week. She watched the highlights on my phone Sunday morning, shrugged, and said “of course,” like a 39-year-old scoring four goals against an MLS back line was the least surprising thing she’d seen all year. I didn’t have a rebuttal.
Fox Soccer had the highlight package up before most of us finished dinner:
https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/2093883904679879123
Watch the free kick as many times as you want. It still looks like he asked the wall to move and it just did.
Montreal will forget this game by Halloween. Everybody else is going to be replaying that halftime free kick for a while.
