THE WINK

Messi's wink at Neymar

Brazil and Argentina would face each other in a friendly game in the United States. It was the final stretch of the Brazilian team's preparation for the London Olympics. At that time I worked at Folha de S. Paulo and covered most of the games in Brazil. However, in this specific game, the newspaper had already signaled that it would not take any photographers to cover the match.

Knowing this, I annoyed my boss at the time, saying it was a very important game:

- We can't stay out of this game! Brazil x Argentina, Messi x Neymar, Adidas x Nike – I enumerated. They said they would think about it, but it was difficult. The expense would be a lot to cover a friendly game that in their view was not worth much.

Anyway, they decided they were going to send me at 48 of the second half. So, let's go to NY.

When I got there, I did two training sessions, one for each team. I had already photographed Messi twice, last year during the Copa America in Argentina and also at the Club World Cup in Japan, where the Argentine's Barcelona beat Neymar's Santos in the final. Due to the rise of Neymar (who was champion of the 2011 Libertadores) and Messi's sequence of FIFA World Cup titles, a “rivalry” was created between the two stars.

I had this in my head for the game. Thinking about making a photo that somehow represented this “duel”.

Arriving at the stadium, I did the usual thing: I organized my cameras, got the computer ready to transmit the photos and made some clicks of the warm-up. A little before the start of the match, I positioned myself on the side of the field, at the height of the center of the lawn to photograph the posed teams. Before that, came the performance of the national anthems. That's when I had a “light”: “Damn, it's going to be hard to take a picture of the two players during the game. Even for the positions that they act in the field, the probability of disputing a ball is very small. So after the anthem, when all the players greet each other, it might be my only chance. That's it! Maybe hug each other, talk a little, I don't know”.

Well, the result was the photo below. Yes, it was luck. Good luck. I remember that when one approached the other, “I felt my finger”. I must have taken like 10 pictures in a row. I was using a 400mm, which closed the scene well. In the position I was in, the frame was practically from the height of the players' shoulders to the top of their heads.

At the time I didn't really see what had come out. I got up quickly from where I was sitting and headed towards the back line, in my position to photograph the game. When I got there, I sat on my stool and started to see what I had achieved. And I started to smile: after all, it had been worth it to go to the United States to do that “friendly match”.