Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola admited last week that he is running out of superlatives to describe Lionel Messi, but Jeff Powell at the Mail has no such problem and is happy to pen a tribute to the diminutive Argentinian maestro, with this particular journalist happy to compare the current World Player of the Year to the great Diego Maradona.

"As Lionel Messi leaves defenders thrashing in his wake like steel hawsers suddenly severed from their moorings, one ghostly image comes back to haunt the minds of most English football lovers.

It is the memory of Diego Maradona scoring for Argentina against England in the quarter-finals of Mexico ’86. I am not invoking the Hand of God, which prompted such widespread rage, but the greatest goal in the annals of the World Cup.

That surging, weaving run from the halfway line spread-eagled England’s forces like so many whales stranded on a beach and ended with a low shot of such clinical
precision that it left Peter Shilton — the best goalkeeper in the world at the time — grasping at thin air.

Think what you will of Maradona, but it is his genius that will etch his permanent place in football history, not his madness. As the first British sports writer who saw Maradona play for Argentina — a few months after their 1978 World Cup triumph, when Maradonathey could hold back their prodigy no longer — I am consumed by deja vu.

Watching Messi is like being astonished by Maradona, almost beyond belief.
Maradona has hailed Messi as his successor to the individual throne of world football, a linear title which runs back through Johan Cruyff to Pele."

Elsewhere, Celtic are searching for a new manager after sacking Tony Mowbray following a dismal run of form that has seen them drop out of the title race with two months of the season remaining. Graham Spiers at the Times reckons Mowbray talked a good game but failed to make his team play one.

"The end was nigh for Tony Mowbray, and it finally came yesterday. The Celtic manager had suffered a wretched, quite abysmal season, by far his club’s worst in ten years, and a 4-0 defeat to St Mirren on Wednesday night proved the last straw.

Mowbray had accumulated enough bad experiences to invite his own sacking, and it was duly issued at 2.30pm by Peter Lawwell, the Celtic chief executive.

Mowbray and Celtic’s trouncing by St Mirren was one of those classic moments which football has a habit of throwing up, when a manager’s fate is cruelly defined. It happened to John Barnes at Celtic on February 8, 2000 when Celtic infamously lost 3-1 at home to Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and it is hard to avoid the similarities between that event and Mowbray’s humiliation the other night.

The defeat to St Mirren not only fatally injured Mowbray, it also exposed him for what he is: an imaginative but flawed football manager. Mowbray himself even condemned his own tactics in his post-match interview on Wednesday, pointing out that his team “finished the match with six strikers on the field, which left us pretty exposed”. He had also, he said, gone to St Mirren as usual “trying to be attack-minded”."