With two clinical goals followed by one assist from the irresistible Messi, the Herons conjured up another Saturday night spectacle, this time a 4-1 victory at a packed Gillette Stadium, putting the luckless New England Revolution to the sword before a record crowd of 65,612 whose energy lent a rare vibe to the occasion.

A Tomás Chancalay stunner in the game’s first minute gave the last-place Revs a dream start. Yet it proved just a footnote as Messi’s involvement in all four of his side’s tallies pushed his 2024 league total to 16 goal contributions in his first seven matches, the most ever by an MLS player in their first seven games of a season.

As often as the term ‘unplayable’ gets bandied about in modern soccer, it would seem to apply to Messi at present.

“I thought in the first half, after the goal, we had them locked up pretty good, where they weren’t getting many chances, they weren’t finding a lot of time and space to operate. Then Messi did what he does, and he found a crack,” Revs head coach Caleb Porter said afterwards.

“I still thought at 1-1 we had a great chance in the game. We started the second half pretty well. We started keeping the ball and then he found another crack. Almost the exact same play, different side. First one was our left side, second was our right side in that seam in between our center back and our outside back,” Porter added. “They were able to find two goals when we felt pretty good about the defending, and that we were limiting their effectiveness, creating clear chances. But, you know, that’s Messi. He finds two goals out of nowhere and it exposes the detail in those moments from us.”

Ahead of the team news announcements, some were wondering whether Lionel Messi would be played from the start against New England Revolution. Gillette Stadium features an artificial turf surface, something that older players sometimes avoid due to the greater pressure it places on joints. 

Messi, however, seems unbothered by the prospect. In fact, he’s played on artificial surfaces before…

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MIAMI – Richard Hollis was holding two kitchen knives. He shouted his food was poisoned. Officer Jaime Pino stormed into an apartment, saw the 21-year-old man near his mother, Gamaly Argentina Hollis, and fired his stun gun and his firearm.

That’s how records describe the fatal police-involved shooting on June 15, 2022, at the Pepper Mill Apartments at Kendale Lakes, in western Miami-Dade County. But there is more to the story.

The shooting continues to haunt the grieving mother who had been accused of child abuse in 2017. Records show prosecutors have filed three new cases against her since the shooting.

Gamaly Hollis has a pending Sept. 20, 2022 case for three misdemeanor charges of stalking, resisting an officer without violence, and violation of an injunction. The Miami Herald reported on Friday night corrections released her on April 19 on a $1,000 bond after a year in jail — where the prosecutors want her back over her Facebook posts.

Attorney Natahly Soler, a Miami-Dade public defender who represents the grieving mother, told The Miami Herald she had a First Amendment right to her Facebook posts about the news that was public.

On Saturday, The Miami Herald published a police-cam video that is relevant to the pending case showing Gamaly Hollis confronting Pino: “You killed my son!”

Court records show prosecutors had filed a battery case against her son in 2019 and three cases in 2021. Two were for battery and one for resisting arrest. He suffered from a mental illness.

Court records also show that after the fatal police-involved shooting, the mother filed lawsuits against Miami-Dade County and The Department of Legal Affairs Bureau of Victim Compensation.