By his ridiculously high standards, Lionel Messi has had a disappointing 2020/21 campaign so far.

Heading into Barcelona’s clash with Athletic Bilbao on Wednesday night, the six-time Ballon d’Or winner had scored just 10 goals in 19 appearances in all competitions.

His Barca side were well off the pace in La Liga and speculation surrounding his future appeared to be impacted his and the team’s performance.

However, Wednesday may have been a turning point in the season.

Barca travelled to Bilbao and, despite going 1-0 down within three minutes, came away with a 3-2 victory. The win lifts them into third, five points behind Real Madrid in second and seven adrift of leaders Atletico Madrid - although Diego Simeone’s side do have two matches in hand.

But there were plenty of positives to take from the victory at Estadio San Mamés. None more so than the performance of Messi.

Messi scored twice and, generally, produced a world-class performance as he won the match almost single-handedly for his side.

This is the Messi we know and love.

If you weren’t fortunate enough to watch Messi in action last night, we have some good news for you.

That’s because someone has created individual highlights of his performance - and they’re quite brilliant.

Messi was back to his very best.

Enjoy:

After the match, new Bilbao boss Marcelinho admitted that he hoped Messi wouldn’t produce a world-class performance on his first match back as a manager. Unfortunately, he did.

"Before the game it crossed my mind that I wish Messi was not at his highest level on the day I had to go back to management,” the former Villarreal and Valencia manager said.

“But that's the way it was. In some situations we were able to do something else to avoid it, but he was the most successful player. determining factor of the match.”

Let’s hope this is the start of Messi’s campaign and we will be seeing these sort of performances every week until the end of the season.

Then, he had a pretty big decision to make regarding his future…