When Lamine Yamal scores a goal, or lays one for his teammate, he gestures the number 304 with his fingers—three raised fingers on the left hand, the thumb and index finger curled into the sign of zero, and four digits, barring the thump, lifted skywards. The same number is stitched near the heel of his boot too. It is the postcode of Rocafonda, the immigrant-rich neighbourhood in Mataro, a town in the Maresmo coast of Catalonia, where he was raised in Spain. “The streets made my game, the streets define my game too,” Yamal once told GQ Magazine.
At the age of six, the son of immigrants from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea joined Barcelona’s La Masia Academy, where in a decade he finessed into one of the most talented youngsters in the world. The hallowed academy instilled him with all the ideals that Barcelona embodies—passing range, team over individual, positioning, off the ball energy—only that Yamal combined those with the virtues he imbibed from the streets, the flair and trickery, the cunning and stealth, the physical robustness that belies his reedy frame.
The end product is a footballer unlike any Spain has beheld in their history, a footballer breathing samba tunes rather than strumming tiki taka notes. The consequence is a brand of football, as unique as any Spain has embraced. The centre of the pitch retains the short-passing, slow build-up soul. They topped stats for possession (67.6 per cent), passing accuracy (90.8 per cent) and most passes completed per game (660) in Euro 2024 qualifying.
But there is a sudden shift of pace and play into the wings, where lurks Yamal, on the right, computing, imagining, processing a hundred different paths and possibilities. Wingplay has seldom been a precept of the Spanish game; in the peak tiki-taka era it was even considered heresy. But Yamal is too irresistible a talent that the manager has made him the heartbeat of the team, and emphasis on the wing-play was inevitable. To spread both flanks, Luis de la Fuente has installed another nimble-footed wingman on the left, Nico Williams. He is a winger in the traditional sense, a fine dribbler and with pace to burn. In a typical move, Spain overload the central areas to reclaim possession and sustain the press, before the ball is swiftly played wide to Yamal, or Willliams.
Here begins the magic of Yamal. A left-footer on the right wing (so was a little Argentine in a Barcelona shirt), he takes the ball on the outside of the left-boot, on the wrong side of most left-backs and left-sided midfielders. He can both cut inside, drift away, or embarrass the marker with a nutmeg. A lot of talented wingers could perform this, but few could keep the ball in a crowded maze of bodies, and fewer still could wriggle out of it. Sometimes with an audacious dribble, or with a croqueta, like Andres Iniesta. All with utmost composure and clarity. “His decision-making is almost always right. That is the hardest thing in football. He is intelligent and extraordinary,” Xavi, his manager in Barcelona, would say.
His passing repertoire is baffling for a teenager. He could chip, curl, roll, nutmeg, slide-rule, back-heel, or side-foot the ball to find the man he wants to find, even from narrow angles and nonexistent space. “When you learn to play on the street, in the end you have more resources, because it is more street football, without so many rules, and that generates more mischief in you compared to someone who has trained in a school,” he told GQ.
When a 17-year-old produces such outlandish talent, it’s inevitable that he is compared to the finest in the world. Hence, the burden of being likened to Messi. Right-footed; left-winger, La Masia product; like Messi short and asked to keep the goals, a horde of records already etched (youngest debutant and goalscorer for both Spain and Barcelona. Yamal himself has shyly deflected such hasty assumptions; Xavi feels it is premature, but those that have played against Messi and managed a team against Yamal vouch for their similar talents. “I remember seeing Messi when he was a juvenil, 21 years ago now, and you could see it immediately. He was like wheeee, a rat. And it looks like Lamine is a rat too,” said Javier Aguirre, manager of Mallorca.
His observation came soon after a sumptuous Messi-like strike of Yamal. He received a ball on the inside right channel just outside the box, from Robert Lewandowski. He veered further away with a string of dainty left-footed touches, seeing the crowded box and imposing defenders. Then, in a burst of wild energy, he took out a defender with a neat drag-back, drawing the eyes of the two others in the process before swerving into space towards his left and cushioning a sweet strike that nestled on the top-left corner of the goal. But Yamal admitted that he was not even in the vicinity of his idol. “Just to be in his shadows, I have to improve a lot,” he once admitted.
There are rough edges in his game that are waiting to be polished. Like in indecision in defensive situations, when he is confused to drop back into space or press the nearest guy. This vulnerability prompted Xavi to overload the right side. “But everyday he is making that one step to be the complete player he could,” De la Fuente would observe. “He can mark an era,” Xavi would say. He has already made his country change the way they have traditionally played. He could lead them to glory again. And remember the postcode: 304.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 14-06-2024 at 21:32 IST