Watching the parabola drawn by Lamine Yamal’s shot against France made me want to study mathematics again. Or philosophy, because there must be some theoretical problem involved in facing one of the most experienced defences in Europe, tackling the moral problem of respecting your elders, imagining a satisfactory outcome for a significant part of humanity and throwing a cucumber into the crossbar which is nothing other than, you understand, the exercise of reason in all its forms. What a pity I didn’t take better advantage of my parents’ efforts to give me an academic preparation that they could not even dream of. And how pertinent it is to remember what each of us was doing at the age when Lamine Yamal planted his first great pike on the international scene.
I think it was Michi Panero who coined the apt saying that “in life you can be anything but a bore”. And let the bore be said in all the metaphorical sense of the expression and being faithful to the poet’s words: let no one understand, or want to understand, this as a sexist uproar, or contempt for more than half the population. The Spain of Lamine Yamal, Nico Williams, Rodri Hernández and Carvajal, among others, is the most entertaining and transcendent team of this Eurocup, which is no small thing to say after having attended a tournament in which the great teams of the continent seem not to know what to do with their national reserves of talent, while some others, like in the case of France, do not so much not know as not want to: how sad to be or feel French and present themselves to the world as a prawn in a trench coat covered in mayonnaise.
Spain, this Spain led by a coach who is suspicious from the start (without any great merits to gain the position and ethically burdened by those applauses for Luis Rubiales’ wild speech at the RFEF headquarters), is a team that competes at the highest level while taking care to give back to the spectator a part of what they gave, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about money, enthusiasm or time. That fan, often despised by those who understand that football is only about winning and that any path is honest. That fan bled by clubs, federations, television operators or clothing brands, has found in this Spain a group willing to show that suffering is only a different form of beauty when talent can flow in time and form towards the opposing goal. What have we done wrong for so long for coaches like Deschamps, as the closest example, to insist on trying to show that the straightest path to victory is not to try?
There is something in the parable of Lamine Yamal (in the parable traced by his shot, and there will be time for biblical parallels when he comes of age) that brings us back to the path of reason and knowledge. There is something in that smile and that walk that reminds us of football’s capacity to brighten our lives and fill us with reasons in pursuit of beauty. Or in pursuit of the great life, as the kids from Alcalá Norton sing. There is something in this Spain of a thousand colours and a thousand flags that reminds us of the essential difference between imagining a goal that goes into the corner or going through life without reading Panero. What a life lesson these kids are giving us, I would say without wanting to give them anything.
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