TRUE RELIGION: The Keita Kid

I was watching a game in Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium last Sunday when I received a message on my mobile phone from a friend in Lagos. "Who's the Keita kid?" The message read. I didn't have time to answer the question at that very moment. Nor, for that matter, the interest. If I had looked down at my phone, I'd have risked missing yet another Barcelona goal in what ended up being a tennis set victory, 6-1, over an otherwise perfectly respectable Spanish team called Zaragoza.

So allow me to answer my friend now. Seydou Keita is a Barcelona player born in Bamako, Mali, who is in the process of contributing mightily to the ever more impressive legend of African football. There was a time (and, yes, I know, I am showing my age here) when African football players were admired more for their athleticism and raw talent than for their drive or tactical sophistication. Then Patrick Vieira came along and that perception changed forever.

Brain over brawn

As captain of Arsenal, the Senegalese-born mid fielder became the legendary London team's heart and brain, as well as its chief purveyor of muscle. Then the likes of Claude Makelele and Michael Essien (to choose among many) came along and the idea became consolidated that if what you were looking for was all-terrain midfield talent, Africa was your first continent of choice.

Seydou Keita looks poised to take the concept of total footballer to a new level. Barcelona is the team that plays the best football in the world now.

They played their best football of the season in that 6-1 victory last Sunday - and the best player on the pitch was Keita. Which is saying quite a lot when among his team mates you've got world class talent in the shape of Leo Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández.

Keita is, on paper, a defensive mid fielder. Yet he scored a hat-trick on Sunday and, with an exquisitely weighted cross, laid on another goal, on a plate, for the giant centre forward. Ibrahimovic, who in turn returned the favour for Keita's second.

Goal getter

Let me describe this goal and you will get a sense of what I mean when I say that the man from Mali is a truly total footballer. He rubbed the ball on the edge of the Barcelona penalty area. then he ran with it towards the half way line, passed it inside to Xavi, who slid it down the left channel to Ibrahimovic. Only one Barça player kept pace with him, down the middle: Keita. He outpaced three Zaragoza defenders, and when the cross came in from the big Swede, he was there to smack it into the back of the net with his left foot.

He showed it all: tenacity in defence, vision, pace, power and the intelligence to see that if the centre forward was wide on the left someone should fill the slot in the middle of the attack, and that someone should be him.

For Ibrahimovic's second goal, Keita saw this time that there was an empty space on the left wing, and he filled it, duly received the pass from Iniesta, then glid ed the ball across into his team-mate's path.

As for Keita's two other goals, both were with his head. One a dive, powering in through a thicket of defenders; the other magnificently steered into the bottom corner from the penalty spot. And the guy's got a hell of a shot on him too.

It's a pleasure

To cap it all, he is strong-willed. Signed from Sevilla in the summer of 2008, he had a good but not a great first season with Barcelona. He was an important element in the team's terrific treble of Spanish League, Spanish Cup and Champions League, but he was not a cert in the starting eleven. This season, he has been the team's indispensable man, which is all the more remarkable given that he is a devout Muslim who has been observing in recent weeks what in lesser mortals might have been the debilitating fast of Ramadan.

Oh yes, and he is a great team man too. He voluntarily turned down the chance to play in last May's Champions League final against Manchester United, judging that the position in which the coach, Pep Guardiola, wished to play him - left back - was not one in which he would be able to contribute usefully to the cause. You also see his generosity each time his team scores a goal. No one runs to congratulate the scorer, or the maker of the decisive pass, with a bigger smile. Beloved of the great Guardiola, he must be an enormous pleasure to play with.