Barcelona striker, Lionel Messi believes he can put his fitness woes of 2013 behind him to have a phenomenal year with club and country.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old has scored four goals in his opening four games of 2014 having returned from a spell out on the sidelines, though lost his Ballon d’Or crown to Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo.<\/p>\n
Despite losing the tag of best player on the planet, the Barca attacker believes he can bounce back with top performances in 2013-14 and, in the summer, at the World Cup with Argentina.<\/p>\n
“I’m very happy,\u00a0I have plenty of desire to come back and play football after such a long time out. I’m lucky because step by step I’m starting to feel better, with a lot of vision to have a great year – not just with Barcelona but also with Argentina.<\/p>\n
Messi could return to action on Wednesday when Barca travels to Levante for the first leg of their Copa del Rey quarterfinal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barcelona striker, Lionel Messi believes he can put his fitness woes of 2013 behind him to have a phenomenal year with club and country. The 26-year-old has scored four goals in his opening four games of 2014 having returned from a spell out on the sidelines, though lost his Ballon d’Or crown to Real Madrid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[85,60,81],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}