Former Tottenham Hotspur defender, Toby Alderweireld has spoken about Lionel Messi in a recent podcast where he was invited to speak.

Here is full conversation from the podcast;

Who was the best player you ever played against?

“Messi. I’m usually read the play on the field and often I succeed. But Messi…ooh. One night at Wembley when we lost 4-2 against Barcelona (with Tottenham) he was unprecedented…really unprecedented.”

What makes him so special?

“You can’t get a grip on him. Everything he does, he does it just that little faster than you. He does this, then he does that, it goes so fast. I really had a feeling I couldn’t do anything against him.”

So what do you do during the game?

“Hoping time goes as fast as possible. (Laughs) We got back into the game which was positive and negative. We started attacking more but I had to face him even more one-on-one because there was more space.”

So what do you do with your back-line at that moment because you trained for this game and you knew what he’s going to do?

“That’s the thing, you don’t know what he’s going to do. That’s the special thing, you can’t train for that.

So what did you try to do during the game?

“You try to get in duels with him. He looks like a slender guy so you try to get physical. But he’s not slender at all, if you look at his thighs you think…wow.

He is so fast. The quality, the ball control, It’s not normal.”

Is he better than Ronaldo?

“Yeah, I played against Ronaldo many times. Of course his numbers don’t lie, but Messi was the best, because he is simply elusive. You can’t get hold of him.”