Can Lionel Messi actually slow down time?

A patriot (and writing on Thursday ahead of Sunday's game) I will have watched this match with about 95.5 per cent of my heart and soul invested in hopes of an Australian victory, while a treasoning 4.5 per cent of me will have been invested in adoration of Messi, in hopes the game (in what is likely to be his last World Cup, for he is a venerable 35) would be enriched by some glimpses of his legendary genius.

Because the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and this contemporary Australian columnist agree the unexamined life is not worth living, I've been delighted by a new online essay that helps to explain why Messi is so footballingly brilliant.

The essay will have taken on an added, rueful relevance for Australians if typical Messi man-of-the-match magic has on Sunday contributed to an Argentine victory over Australia.

The piece in Psychology Today, Raj Persaud's and Peter Bruggen's catchily-titled Cognitive Strategies of Elite Soccer Players and Athletes asks if something the authors call "time dilation" can explain the genius of soccer superstars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Here, for reasons of room and because Ronaldo is such a narcissistically obnoxious nob, we will ignore the toweringly tall Ronaldo and focus entirely on the elfin (1.69 m) Messi.

The Psychology Today authors bring together assorted studies.

They note: "A research paper entitled, Can Lionel Messi's Brain Slow Down Time Passing suggests that elite competitors become outstanding at anticipating their opponent's next move, before they, the opponents, make it.

"The authors argue that the key reason why the Argentinian soccer star [plays so well] is that he makes sure his adversaries don't have enough time. This is because, so the argument goes, in Messi's mind time [seems to] pass more slowly than it seems to in opponents' minds."

"These authors contend that if perceptual time for an elite athlete slows down this enables them to see more of what is happening on the field of play. Paradoxically, if their sensory systems work faster, then their more computations-per-second deliver a 'wider bandwidth' for grasping events on the pitch.

"The authors of a study entitled Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of Subjective Time Dilation show how for any set period of time, certain events can be experienced as longer than others.

"For example, they suggest you try this for yourself: Take a quick glance at the second hand of a clock or watch. Immediately, the tick will pause momentarily, and appear to be longer than the subsequent ticks. Yet, they all last exactly one second.

"But suppose for athletes like Lionel Messi on the field of play," the Psychology Today authors imagine, "they see the equivalent of the second hand as always running more slowly for them than it does for their opponents" thus giving them, the Messi-like sports gods, superior amounts of time in which to think and act?

"In a paper entitled The Discovery of Slowness: Time to Deconstruct Gretzky's and Messi's Predictive Brains," the Psychology Today authors trill on, "Messi's example it is suggested was preceded by the astounding case of ice-hockey star Wayne Gretzky."

Between 1979 and 1999 the Canadian ice hockey player broke numerous records. He was [like Messi] not a particularly impressive physical specimen but his predictive brain seemed to enable him to know what was going to happen next on the ice. He was famous for saying he considered ice hockey (for mortals the most ridiculously hectic sport there is) a rather slow game.

"Being able to predict what is going to occur is not just useful for elite athletes, it is of everyday significance in our daily lives as well," the Psychology Today authors plough on, broadening the inspirational Messi message to embrace us all.

"The authors of a study entitled, Why am I Always Late? Modelling the Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Anticipatory Timing Under Uncertainty [argue that] in life, you are not just spontaneously reacting to some event, but rather you are frequently engaging in anticipatory timing.

"In their experiment, subjects viewed the motion of a ball and then had to predict where it would be when it was occluded from view for a while. The authors found there was a link between people's ability to correctly anticipate the ball, and some other key aspects of their lives, linked to time judgments, including their tendency to be late."

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These ideas, especially the notion of the dilation of time, are stimulating in the extreme. And, although it has never previously occurred to me to compare myself to god-like Lionel Messi, I suddenly have tickets enough on myself to do it now.

I am the most punctual of men. I eat deadlines for breakfast. The sun in its risings and settings is a capricious, unreliable thing when compared with me. I am never, ever late for anything.

It is the essence of my almost superhuman punctuality that I am always anticipating the sorts of things that would make me late if I didn't anticipate them. So can it be that in this, in my own small everyday ways, with my own little suburban dilations of time (using my predictive brain) I am achieving a little of the same magic the worshipful Lionel demonstrates out there on football's Field of Dreams?