It was an unexpected pass from Dani Carvajal, one of those one-touch passes that unhinges an entire team, an empire, which set up Lamine Yamal between two rivals, the first to be surprised by the full-back’s jolt. Bellingham was coming towards Carvajal and he received it with his back turned, close to the line, so he made a pass with his outside foot that didn’t go to where Yamal expected it, the wing, but to a much more playful place: the 8 lane and on his good leg, with an opponent automatically behind him and another in front of him trembling. By then Morata was running dragging his marker, passing the two like freight trains while Yamal saw them out of the corner of his eye and continued to drive. He already had a clear shot, but Dani Olmo was also coming like a bullet with an opponent tied to his ankles like the cans of the cars of the newlyweds. And in a tenth of a second, when the missile was expected, Lamine Yamal released the ball, which bounced past Olmo and the Englishman to find himself alone in the area.
What an impression a loose ball in the area makes, free, with no one twenty centimetres away and the goalkeeper out of reach. How short that moment lasts, the day before a Big Bang: everything you want in life for 90 minutes, right there in front of you to blow it up. That’s what Nico Williams did, bursting in like a wingless plane with its fuselage on the outside, at infernal speed. He didn’t even control it: he hit the ground with his left foot and put a hand grenade into the game. It was Spain’s first shot on goal in the final, right at the start of the second half, and the goal was followed by precious, beautiful, ineffective minutes: sparks that left England with no air in their lungs, and England made them pay dearly for it. The English team suffered, by the way: they stopped playing the best football of the Euros in the first half and began to bite bandages and stop bleeding until Cole Palmer tied the game in Spain’s face in their only clear chance of the second half.
Football is fun when it ends like this. That’s why Spanish football in international club and national team competitions is so fun: because it always ends like this. You get to a final and you win. The very low thresholds of football frustration of the younger generations can end up causing havoc in the future. Millions of kids are growing up believing that the semi-finals are the real final, and nothing can prove them wrong.
Spain and England were heading into extra time with the generation gap palpable: some were looking sideways to see if Tasotti or Al Ghandour would come on, others were asking for cold beer and betting on who would score the winning goal. The boys won. Oyarzabal scored in the last minute, having a terrible merit in the finish but even more so, if possible, in the melon that came to him on the rebound and tamed Cucurella with the first touch, who executed a tense, violent cross, to the place that only those with the most faith can reach: England did not have it and Oyarzabal did, with more legs. He left Pickford lying on the ground and made squares and windows explode in Spain, which played its first match in Berlin in the shadow of France, Germany and England, the three favourites of the tournament, and Luis de la Fuente’s team tore them apart, match by match, with an exquisite game executed by a beardless generation that does with its legs on the field what it does with its hands on the Play.
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