Pablo Aimar commented the other day that football has lost the ability to incorporate unbalanced strikers (don’t confuse it with unbalanced ones, which also exist). Aimar reflected on the art of haggling. With an infectious frankness – not feeling guilty is also part of our sentimental football education – he recalled the primitive denominations of dribbling and dribbling and noted the inexorable progress of the expression “one against one”. Lamine Yamal represents all these concepts. It’s unbalancing. It is not unbalanced. He practices an evolved form of gambeteo and, at the same time, embodies the inevitable consolidation of the “one against one” cliché. For the culer fan with some experience, however, Yamal reactivates deep-rooted emotional misgivings. It’s happened too often to ignore: we fall madly in love with an up-and-coming player – Ansu, Gavi, to name recent examples – and the cruelty of the schedule and the demands of the top competition injures them and dooms them to an uncertain future . Arguing about Yamal’s precocity is also nothing new. It happened with Pelé, who also suffered an untimely injury that, thankfully, he overcame, and which did not interfere with Messi’s steady and exceptional progression.
The novelty is that, in the case of Yamal, his influence on the performance of the team is not anecdotal, but structural. He not only participates in the game with contributions of fleeting talent (orthodontic, we could say from Joanjo Pallàs’ observation), but, like Pau Cubarsí, preserves the vulnerable stability of a team that, as saw friday, continues to play poorly. A team that, in addition, has to assimilate a context of identity transformation that is more traumatic than we can imagine. The anomaly of playing in Montjuïc, for example, caused that, with a scoreless draw and an alarmingly unproductive game, part of the public decided to make the wave. Was it a parody? A display of self-referential humor similar to when the Camp Nou sang to José Mourinho “go to the theater, Mourinho, go to the theater”? In practice, the wave coexisted with outbreaks of whistles and periods of environmental coldness that may be trying to prepare us for what may happen tomorrow.
What will happen tomorrow? Among the clubs I frequent, the hierarchy of emotions is established: a) a latent pessimism about the outcome of the tie; b) the fear that the match against Naples will turn into a repeat of that invasive catastrophe of Eintracht fans at the Camp Nou (based on the suspicion that in Barcelona there are more than 17,000 Neapolitans willing to demonstrate without wasting time making waves), and c) a minority, who, like president Laporta and coach Xavi, appeal to optimism. Are there reasons to be optimistic? In the field of homeopathic relief, the one on one of Yamal, who, according to one of the most stalwart culers I know, reminded him, when he went crazy with the goal against Mallorca, a mixture of Mbappé and (pause dramatic) by Luís Figo.
