The Spanish team players were pressed together in a huddle on the grass of the Berlin Olympic Stadium, seconds before the first match against Croatia began, with captains Morata and Rodri, and the one who harangued with enthusiasm was a debutant. Dani Carvajal was about to make his debut in a European Championship at the age of 32, two weeks after lifting his sixth Champions League title. A desperate collection of muscle injuries had deprived him of the 2016 and 2021 tournaments. But here he was finally, about to begin the route to a big trophy with Spain, something that has him excited as a rookie. What it is.
Carvajal tried an aperitif a year ago in Rotterdam, where he won the Nations. That night had a transformative effect on him, not just because of the title. Until then, he had been a starter in all the finals with Real Madrid, but for the clash at De Kuip Luis de la Fuente preferred Navas. When they returned to the locker room after the warm-up, he started with a short speech that moved the group: “It came out spontaneously,” he said in an interview in EL PAÍS. He told them that, that he had always been the starter on those nights, but that nothing happened, that everyone was going to be important. He touched his teammates, and it also changed him: “I think that talk brought me back to football a little,” he said. “Sport is capricious and it gave me the opportunity to take the decisive penalty, and I scored it.” Spain won the Nations against Croatia in the shootout with a Panenka-style shot. So there Carvajal was a year later, on the grass of the Olympic Stadium, haranguing again. From Croatia to Croatia.
“If he speaks it is because he is confident and because he feels comfortable,” says a source close to the footballer. “Otherwise, he doesn’t speak, and he’s also quite quiet in general. But there is a good group, with unity… and he has that experience, and he feels that they listen to him.”
Between that penalty and the 3-0 at the Olympic Stadium, his first goal with Spain, another transformation stands out: since then he has scored seven goals (six with Madrid and one with the national team), when in the rest of his career (11 seasons ) totaled only eight.
“It has a lot to do with experience. Before she was more of a crazy goat, up and down all the time. Now she has learned to dose herself, she knows when to go up, when to take the other team by surprise.” It also has to do with the eye of Carlo Ancelotti, who detected that he could take advantage of changing something that Carvajal had been doing for more than a decade: instead of waiting on the front line for free kicks and corners, the Italian sent him to the area . There he hit a header that gave them a draw in Seville and another that opened the scoring in the Champions League final at Wembley. At first, when he entered, he took his rival by surprise, who was not afraid of his 1.73. He is now so convinced that he continues to enter even if he does not surprise: thus he frees another, he says.
The team has followed that intuition, and shortly before half-time against Croatia he responded to a corner kick taken by Lamine Yamal. The first attempt did not reach the area, but on the second the Barcelona player left the ball floating and Carvajal scored. The youngest assistant in the history of the team in a European Championship and the oldest scorer: “I just had to push her,” he said. It wasn’t just that: he reached the ball after a rhythmic movement with the pass with the precision of a lifelong nine. “A killer, an absolute killer,” the defender joked after the game. “On set pieces you have to be ready, you have to have determination. “I am happy that they trust me with the set piece and that it is paying off.” Courtois remains amazed: “What a goalscorer,” he wrote on Saturday in X.
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