When Vinicius finished tormenting Bayern on Wednesday, celebrating with the microphone in the stands, attending to the media, and celebrating in the locker room, he picked up the phone and called a nearby restaurant and asked for a table for 30. He wanted to extend the joy with his people: family, friends and people on his team. It was almost midnight and he was ecstatic after the last comeback and the passage to the Champions League final. But there was still something left. When he arrived at the restaurant’s private room, where Nacho and Solari also dined at separate tables, he met one of the last people he was waiting for: no one had told him that his grandmother had gotten on a plane for the first time and had left. for the first time from Brazil to come see him at the Bernabéu.
The meeting was exciting. Vinicius feels a very special bond with his father’s mother. Until his adolescence he lived with the whole family in his house. favela Porto do Rosauna, one of the most dangerous in São Gonçalo, in Rio de Janeiro. And there she was, suddenly in Madrid, sitting next to her on one of the most special nights of her career. The footballer had just been chosen best player of the match, just like in the first leg, when he scored two goals in Munich.
Vinicius is very aware of those origins. After receiving the award, when he still did not know that shortly after he was going to meet again with the woman who connects him with that distant time, he mentioned it in an interview at the stadium: “I left São Gonçalo, a place in Brazil that is on the other side of the world. Normally people don’t leave there. I was able to go out, and I can be making a great story with this team, with my family nearby and with these fans that love me so much, and I do everything for them.”
At the Bernabéu he played a match of a very high level in which he was the main agitator: no one finished more than him (5), nor scored more crosses (6), nor escaped by dribbling more times (7). He entered Neuer’s area with the ball 12 times, more than the entire Bayern team in Lunin’s area, which he stepped on 14 times.
With only the final to go, Vinicius, who has missed a quarter of the games due to injury, is the top assist in this Champions League, with five assists on goal – UEFA counts as an assist the shot that missed Neuer and which Joselu converted into 1-1. He is also the fifth top scorer in the tournament, with five goals, only behind Mbappé, Kane, Griezmann and Haaland, all of whom have already been eliminated. He has had three consecutive seasons with at least ten contributions to goals (goals and assists), and in that time he is the one with the most contributions (33), ahead of Mbappé (28), Haaland (23) and Lewandowski (23).
Both in his circle and in some Real Madrid offices there is already talk that the next Ballon d’Or is a very certain possibility for the Brazilian, especially if he wins the 15th European Cup on June 1 against Borussia Dortmund in Wembley. They consider that his biggest rivals are Bellingham and Mbappé, although they believe that the Frenchman has lost his step with his poor performance in the qualifiers against Barcelona and Dortmund.
After the semi-final against the Germans, the sports newspaper L’Equipefrom the same company that publishes the magazine France Football, which awards the award, was especially harsh on the French star’s game: it gave him a 2 out of 10. “His last game with PSG in the Champions League was a nightmare. On the left wing, he was technically fragile for long stretches. Dominated by Hummels in one-on-one, he almost never surpassed his rival,” he wrote. “Very little for a Ballon d’Or candidate.”
However, sources close to the Brazilian believe that the boost that a victory in the Wembley final would give him, after the importance it has had in the development of the season, could lose strength due to the contrast between the Copa América, less considered , and the powerful weight of the Euro Cup, where England and France are two of the most serious candidates.
In any case, on Wednesday night Vinicius was still happy with the final he had just reached and without Benzema, so important in his evolution. And excited about his grandmother, from whom he did not leave until he left the restaurant with some friends, where part of the family extended the evening somewhat.
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