“Coming to the national team has always been special,” Kanté said, calmly. “In a competition like the Euro you have to give your all and I hope to go as far as possible.”
Not even in the most banal moments does the shadow of fear disappear from the gaze of N’Golo Kanté. The atavistic fear of the child who learned to live without expectations is printed on his imperturbable face and in the petrified smile that many interpret as a sign of invincible good humor. He won a Premiership with Leicester – him and ten others. He won a Champions League with Chelsea. He won the World Cup. But his watchful eyes reflect neither disturbance nor vanity. This Friday he had just been awarded his second consecutive MVP: the first against Austria, this one against the Netherlands. The display he had made made him the best player in the Euro Cup being held in Germany, or almost, but the 33-year-old man who sat in the conference room at the Red Bull Arena in Leipzig had the same spirit as the determined youngster. to fight for his contract as if it were his life when in 2013 he did his first preseason with Caen, from the French Second Division, and he had breakfast every day at four in the morning, he did three sessions without missing a single one, and he did not try snack until ten at night in observance of Ramadan.
France drew 0-0 this Friday against the Netherlands. Qualification for the second round was practically assured and Didier Deschamps, the coach, responded tensely to each of the questions asked by the chorus of journalists who follow the most powerful team in Europe: Mbappé’s masks, Thuram’s viability, the lack of Griezmann’s success, the legislative elections next weekend, the effects of a possible triumph of the extreme right over a dressing room mostly made up of children of African immigrants… Deschamps’ face only lit up when someone, pious, He asked about Kanté. “N’Golo? “He still runs!” he said, pointing to the field. “And he doesn’t just run. Run good! He has a capacity that allows him to go forward and project himself in attack. This makes it easier for our cast of midfielders, currently made up of Tchouameni and Rabiot, to have variety and not always be predictable for our opponents. This has allowed us to create scoring chances and be solid at the back.”
France’s unbeaten goal bears its signature on a defensively tight team like no other. Two official matches since his last call-up, in June 2022, have been enough to dispel the doubts that weighed on the validity of Kanté, a player who has been a member of Al-Ittihad in the Saudi league for a year after becoming free at Chelsea. after two courses of knee injuries. The heat and ball touch graphs that indicate the midfielder’s activity in the Euro Cup, provided by Opta, reveal an exceptional phenomenon: there are points of contact with the ball everywhere, with a profusion of interventions, near the four corners, in both areas, in all lanes, no matter the hemisphere. Neither Bellingham, nor Kroos, nor Gündogan, nor Rodri, nor Pedri, reached those horizons.
The myth of Kanté’s two hearts, popularized by Ranieri, is reborn in the Euro Cup when no one expected it and evokes the words of Steve Walsh, the man who signed him for Leicester: “we play with three interiors in midfield, Drinkwater in the axis and Kanté to the right and to the left.” His statistics do not reveal a record in anything, but there are not enough fingers on one hand to find footballers who do so many things so well. For example, ten stolen balls, more than Rabiot and Tchouameni, France’s defensive midfielders. For example, five chances generated, the same as Nico Williams, two of them after driving, the same as Yamal.
Professionals often repeat that the ambivalent reality of football, on the border between sport and entertainment, produces two types of stars. There are journalists’ players, and there are players’ players. Veterans of France have no hesitation in pointing to Kanté as the apotheosis of the second variety. Marcus Thuram explained the perplexity that Kanté produces among the young people who did not know him: “When we started the rally I had the impression that there were three Kantes in Clairefontaine. I never saw anything like that. It is awful! We can’t play in training anymore. “When you have him on your team you know you have won.”
Superpowers
Humility, generosity, courage, and shyness mixed with superpowers—the intuition to know where to direct movement combined with peripheral vision, elasticity, and the power to turn, reverse, or propel yourself at full speed without interruption for 100 minutes are very rare qualities — make the small midfielder the true spiritual leader of Mbappé’s France.
Born in Paris, the son of a cleaner and a garbage collector who emigrated from Mali, he grew up with eight siblings in the suburb of Rueil-Malmaison before thinking that football could be his job. Today he is more than a hero of the Republic decorated by Emmanuel Macron. He is a footballer’s hero. An idol in his own dressing room, as he saw when the players paid him the penultimate tribute, after his debut with Austria. A video that went viral, recorded in the dressing room shows Kanté received with a standing ovation. “It’s crazy, it’s crazy, it’s something never seen before!” says Ibrahima Konaté. He is joined by Youssouf Fofana who tells him, ecstatic: “Listen to me well when I talk to you. I have seen it with my eyes. It’s not a legend! It’s crazy!”
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