Misfiring Lionel Messi is feeling the pressure, so will he come good for Argentina?

After David Ospina had pulled off the save of the Copa America to somehow deny the Argentine just his second goal of this Copa America, the No 10 discussed it all in a much franker way than he usually does.

“When I saw [Ospina] on the ground, I thought he wasn’t getting up,” Messi said of that remarkable first-half moment in his side’s quarter-final elimination of Colombia. “Then, when I saw that he’d gotten up to make the save, I wanted to die.”

The words stand out for reasons beyond their bluntness. For pretty much all of Messi’s career, his most profound strength other than that transcendental talent has been his mental resolve. It means he can so relentlessly apply that same talent in a way that not even Diego Maradona managed. There’s an almost mechanical consistency. Very little seems to affect Messi, and there’s so little hesitation to his game.

You don’t usually get the sense that he dwells on bad moments in the way others do - but not on this occasion. Here, you could sense Messi replaying the save over and over again in his head like any normal misfiring striker. He also went even further, effectively revealing that it has become something of a psychological hang-up.

“It’s incredible how difficult it is to score a goal for the national team.”

It’s even more incredible, and more difficult to comprehend, how it’s got to this. Someone who hit 58 goals in 57 matches for Barcelona last season has managed just one in four in this Copa America. Worse, that effort was from a penalty, meaning the best player in the world has now gone 828 minutes without scoring a goal from open play for his country.

How is that possible? How has someone who usually defies the doubts and droughts of more mundane careers suddenly succumbed to them?

It is by now well-known Messi is obsessed with winning that first trophy for Argentina in a way that’s never really had to concern him with Barcelona. After they let a two-goal lead slip against Paraguay to only draw their opening game 2-2, he apparently couldn’t sleep, and spent most of the night pacing up and down.

You could almost see the accumulation of all these pressures and the effect of that Ospina save, towards the end of the game.

First of all, on being put through for what should have been a one-on-one, Messi took a bad touch to spoil the opportunity.

Secondly, on being given another clear header from a corner, he hit it into the ground and over.

For one or two of these incidents to happen to even an all-time great like him would be normal. For three of them to happen in such a run suggests something else.

It’s difficult not to think a degree of anxiety about it all crept in, that he was trying to force it and wasn’t as clear-minded about it all as he usually is.

It would also be a mistake, however, to conclude that it will define his displays in the tournament.

Even if Messi isn’t as abnormally focused as usual, much of this is still just a by-product of the freak games Argentina have played.

They have created a huge amount of clear-cut chances in the last two games, hitting the bar or post four times, and it is really just blind luck that they have scored so little. The same applies to even Messi’s miss against Ospina. It might be said he would have buried it had it been a domestic game against Cordoba rather than a quarter-final against Colombia, but it’s still hard to see what he could have done differently. With that kind of chance, that close in and all happening that quickly, getting it on target is usually enough.

It’s also not like the subsequent anxiety totally sullied his game. The very next time Messi had the ball on the edge of the box, he powered the cleanest strike in the game at Ospina, and one in which he seemed to so determinedly funnel all that frustration. Again, he was just unlucky it hit the back of one of the many Colombian defenders barring the way.

The match also ended with Messi going on the kind of wondrous run that would be hailed as one of the moments of the tournament had it come from anyone else.

Any doubt, then, is only partial. Any such drought should only be temporary, and largely coincidental.

A more mundane scorer, albeit still one of the best in the world, offered Messi the kind of perspective from such situations that the No 10 wouldn’t usually require.

“I tell him to be quiet, the goals will come,” Sergio Aguero said.” You have to be patient.”

This Copa is waiting for him to explode. It’s now overdue.