Like the kid he is, Lamine Yamal just wanted to keep playing. This wasn’t Plaça Joan XXIII, wasn’t El Parque de Rocafonda either; it wasn’t the Mataró neighbourhood where it all began, but it might have been. I never thought: ‘Just blow the whistle’.
I was enjoying it.” No fear, just fun: 19 July, New Jersey and he knew: this 19-year-old who had happily been asleep on the bus to the biggest match of his life. And now he sits in a first-floor office in Las Rozas, surrounded by tactics boards and stats sheets. There’s a Spain keyring hanging from the door and a second star on his shirt.
In the corridor, crates loaded for London. Son of Mounir and Sheila, named after the family friends who helped them, “touched by God’s wand” in the words of the coach whose office is next door, there’s something about Lamine Yamal. He turned 17 the day before the final of Euro 2024, a schoolboy sitting exams, and 19 the day before the semi-final of the World Cup.
Asked what he wanted, he said a trip to New York, so there he was, about to be a champion again. The way Lamine Yamal tells it, Spain knew they were world champions before they had scored, in the moment Enzo Fernández was sent off. It was the third minute of second-half stoppage time, still 0-0, but now, he says: “We knew it was impossible they would score, and with the ball against 10, very difficult for us not to.” The surprise was that they hadn’t already, but on 106 minutes the ball came to his feet.
He had been thinking about this moment for some time. The battle with the one, two, three players facing you is “very psychological”, Lamine Yamal says. Robots can be almost perfect but a human will have something a robot doesn’t.
Football is mechanised but there are players like me, Pedri, many others, who have that special spark. There’s a typical Neymar move when he stops, fakes, goes the other way: I watched so many videos of him. I try to play with opponents, ensure they can’t mechanise me, don’t know where I’m going.” “I remember three plays in minutes 60, 70, 80 or thereabouts, when I took on the full-back.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
