Messi Celebrates 200 League Appearances With Four Goals

It was hard to believe that the match between FC Barcelona and Valencia on 19th February 2012 marked Lionel Messi's 200th Spanish league appearance. It hardly seemed any time at all since he had been a young 17-year-old making occasional first team appearances and showing what a talent he was going to be; but nobody thought that his talent was so big. Since his first appearance in 2004 he has matured immensely, but despite his talent he has remained modest and unassuming. Valencia started the weekend nine points behind Barcelona, who themselves were 10 points behind Real Madrid. However, Real Madrid beat Racing Santander 4-0 on the Saturday and so Sunday's match saw Barcelona 13 points behind their arch-rival. It took a little while for the Barcelona players to really get into the match and the Nou Camp was silenced when Piazzi opened the scoring from Valencia in the eighth minute. However, that seemed to focus the players' minds and they started to put together some worthwhile football for the Catalans. Valencia are always a worthwhile opponent and a victory against them can never be taken for granted. Lionel Messi scored Barзa's first in the twenty-first minute to equalise and put Barcelona into the league just five minutes later. Barcelona was leading Valencia 2 goals to 1 at the break and when they came on again came close to making it three goals from some excellent play by Cesc, who got past four Valencia defenders only to hit the post. It wasn't until the 75th minute that Messi scored his third goal of the night and then almost 10 minutes later he made it his fourth. While it looked like that was all to be done on the night, Xavi scored a goal of his own in the last minute for a final score of 5-1 to Barcelona. While Barcelona remained 10 points behind Madrid they now opened up the gap with Valencia. Realistically neither Barcelona nor Valencia had any chance of closing the gap and it already looked a dead certainty that Madrid would take the Spanish league, la liga, in 2012. However, Barcelona still had the Copa del Rey final to play against Athletic Bilbao, and their win against Bayer Leverkusen meant they were likely to go through to the next round of Champions League, hoping that they would become the first team ever to successfully defend their title and win the Champions League for the second year in a row.