It’s an extraordinary thing to say about a five-time Ballon d’Or winner, but sometimes Lionel Messi looks like he doesn’t want the role of talisman for club and country.

It’s 9.32pm at the Vicente Calderon stadium. Deep into stoppage time, Barcelona are on the verge of being knocked out of the Champions League by Atletico Madrid for the second time in three years. But suddenly they get a free kick on the edge of the box.

Lionel Messi has the chance to send the game into extra time, where you would expect Barcelona to win. It’s the kind of moment any football legend would live for.

But it goes over the bar, and not agonisingly over the bar, over by some distance.

Now one bad free kick certainly isn’t enough to rip the entire career of the world’s only five-time Ballon d’Or winner to shreds, but it all seemed a bit reminiscent of Messi’s one-on-one with Manuel Neuer in the World Cup final.

There, he had the world in the palm of his hand. Greatness was certain, perhaps even the title of ‘greatest player ever’, in the mind of most football fans. But he didn’t read the script, he fired wide.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been nights where Messi has been simply unbelievable in crucial games. Last year’s 3-0 win over Bayern Munich and a 4-0 win over AC Milan to overturn a 2-0 first leg deficit, back in 2013, come to mind.

However, Messi seems almost unique among the greats of football today in that, when the world is against him, when his team will lose everything unless somebody can come up with a moment of magic, he doesn’t seem to want the responsibility.

He wears a frown that suggests he wants the ground to swallow him up rather than adopt the hero role the media have assigned to him. And most of all, he wants to believe that he is just one player of eleven and his contribution should be solely to support the other ten players in their attempts to win the game.

It’s a stark contrast to his great rival Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays every game as if it’s him, alone, against the opposition, and to hell with what the rest of his team think of that. If either Messi or Ronaldo could find the right balance between these two different approaches, maybe they would be the two greatest players of all time.

Case in point is the Copa America final last year, captaining Argentina against an inferior Chile team backed by a hostile Santiago crowd, Messi did nothing wrong. It was a good performance, a creative performance, an unselfish performance.

However, he seemed unable to summon that competitive beast inside him that says ‘this is MY moment’. He played as if he believed the likes of Gonzalo Higuain and Ezequiel Lavezzi were just as good as him, and all that was needed was to create chances for them in order to win the match.

Of course when you are playing with Neymar and Luis Suarez, that is normally enough. And Messi’s unselfishness in allowing a natural centre forward like Luis Suarez to rack up the goals was one of the main reasons Barcelona had been infallible for a year.

But last night was a different game. Atletico didn’t give Barcelona any space. Barca needed a hero, one moment of magic, and all Messi could do was sit deep, try to pull the strings and hope for the best.

This may all seem a bit of a harsh assessment, and many would point out that Luis Suarez and Neymar had no impact on the game either. But in the first leg, both players got involved and showed a different mentality to Messi, who didn’t produce the performance the world expected in either match.

Suarez struggled immensely against ten-man Atletico at the Nou Camp, but got in the right positions and managed to score twice – a job well done. While Neymar, throughout the second half of that first leg, was desperate to personally change the game and managed to hit the bar in the process.

As I said at the top of the article, two Champions League defeats in three years to Atletico Madrid can’t take away anything Messi has achieved at Barcelona, but there is a World Cup coming up in two years, which will probably be the Argentine’s last chance to win the competition. Messi is well capable of doing so, but he will need to adapt his approach and look inside himself to find that competitive streak.

Those fine margins are the difference between someone who can be called a great player and someone who can be called the greatest player.