A truck full of clay went into the making of the cast of the gigantic Lionel Messi statue installed on VIP Road for the football legend to unveil during his Calcutta visit on Saturday. Twenty tonnes of iron rod went into the legs to stabilise the 70ft fibreglass structure.

But beyond the enormity of scale was the magnitude of the logistical challenge that the team faced to simply carry the pieces of the prefabricated statue to the chosen spot near the clock tower.

For perspective, just the World Cup replica that the statue holds aloft is 8ft, taller than real-life Messi himself.

It took the whole of December 5 night to transport the statue from a makeshift garage space in Sreebhumi that minister Sujit Bose had earmarked for the making of the statue. “We needed a crane as well as a trolley truck to haul it along the narrow alley,” recalled Monti Paul, the sculptor who had also created a 12ft Diego Maradona statue installed nearby. But first the overhead cables in the alley had to be snapped for the crane to pass.

When Metro made its way to Paul’s workshed on December 4, an intense street-side discussion was underway among South Dum Dum Municipality officials and Paul to decide the route with the least overhead obstacles.

Inside the shed, the finishing touches were being given to Messi’s face that topped the 21ft torso.

The 14ft arm holding the Cup was kept at a side. And at the foot of the 19ft segment from the waist downward sat a man welding the joints at the base, so dwarfed that his head hardly reached the top of the level of Messi’s socks. It was to be installed on a concrete pedestal.

“The face alone took me 15 days to get,” said Paul, recalling his initial trials in clay at his Kumartuli studio, where Metro had first chanced upon the cast being readied on Diwali-eve.

“Sujitda had planned the statue before Durga Puja and had asked me to create a miniature figure. Once he approved it, I got going in earnest from November 6,” said Paul, who, ironically, is a Brazil supporter. “I grew up watching Zico play,” he shrugged.

On Thursday afternoon, the cover was removed from the statue’s face temporarily and replaced with an easily removable cover. Bose, the state’s fire and emergency services minister and president of Sreebhumi Sporting Club, is supposed to introduce the statue to the public on Friday, ahead of Messi’s visit.