On the afternoon before the first leg of the the most extraordinary Champions League semi-final anyone could remember, Lamine Yamal said he had left fear behind in the park in Mataró years ago. Everything else he left behind at Montjuïc and San Siro, a statement stronger than any he had delivered in the press room. If that line was a promise, a demonstration of personality, it was kept, but Barcelona couldn’t reach their first final in a decade so he made another. “We won’t stop until this club is where it deserves to be: at the summit,” he wrote in the dark moments after defeat.
Here Barcelona had been stopped within touching distance. Lamine Yamal departed the pitch in silence holding Marcus Thuram’s shirt, Inter’s players coming to embrace this boy they had survived, a child born every 50 years in the words of their manager, Simone Inzaghi. There has been something revelatory about the 17-year-old’s performance over two astonishing nights and at the end of it all there was almost a kind of reverence, a respect towards him. Inter had reached the final again and will talk of this for ever, their everything; one day, they knew, he may be part of the epic stories they tell.
The big night, the pressure, had not beaten him, but Inter had, the weight released, the place rightly going wild. Before the second leg, Dani Olmo claimed that Barcelona’s younger players treated being in the semi-final like a party, as if unaware of the transcendence of it all, treating it as if it didn’t matter. “The older players are here to tell them,” he said. The result, the hurt, would have showed them. Perhaps a result such as this will introduce fear and maybe there are even moments when that’s not a bad thing: Carlo Ancelotti talks about the value of having pessimistic defenders, prepared not for the best but the worst.
Lamine Yamal had played without fear, as he promised, although now there was a lost look. Gerard Martín embraced him, sobbing. It is not just about him, although he expressed it so well; there’s a broader context, an identity. Barcelona held their nerve and held their line, even if inside somewhere a part of them might have been desperate not to. Life has been good lived on the edge, and it is worth adding that their approach is the product of analysis too, not some wild act of irresponsibility. Here, though, they were defeated.
They had gone a goal down inside 30 seconds and two down within 20 minutes of the first leg, and played. They went 3-2 down, and they played. They went two down in the second leg, and they played. And how they had played. Lamine Yamal embodied that attitude. He scored that goal, hit the woodwork twice in the first leg. At the end of that match he was annoyed that they had not won, barely smiling when handed a shirt to commemorate his 100th game for the club, but he had a chance to do it again, so he did.
San Siro. So? Two down again. And? He was not alone, make no mistake: Pedri and Frenkie de Jong especially stood out, the former described by Toni Kroos this week as the best in the world. For a while, the two full-backs, neither of whom was supposed to be a starter, were unstoppable. But they looked to Lamine Yamal, everyone did. Inter’s supporters whistled him, and he didn’t care. They double-teamed him, triple-teamed him, pushed and kicked, and he kept going at them. Yann Sommer made two extraordinary saves from him.
The fear was still back in Mataró. When he got the ball on the edge of the area with Barcelona leading as the third minute of stoppage time began after the regulation 90, he didn’t head to the corner, didn’t run down the clock, didn’t wonder what could go wrong; didn’t draw the foul, draw the sting, those last few seconds between them and the final. Instead, he fired off a shot. Again, it hit the post. You know what comes next. Forty-two seconds later, Inter scored. Maybe it is the enthusiasm, the unconsciousness of youth, of talent. Maybe there is a lesson there.
But what if it’s the wrong one? What if it is not a lesson to learn? What if what you “fix” is worth less than what you lose in doing so? Michael Robinson used to say that if you stop the tape on any goal, go back far enough, you will always find a mistake, something that seemed to change everything; something that diminishes the achievement, that serves to find someone to blame, to decontextualise. Over these two legs there were errors from Barcelona, plenty of them. There were mistakes, bad ones. But an analysis, an identification of errors, need not be a reproach, at least not of an entire identity.
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There is also a 7-6, for goodness sake, a tie that was this close. Results condition everything, change every analysis, but can turn on a moment, and Lamine Yamal even had another chance on 95:45. Every detail is magnified, including the refereeing ones about which Barcelona complained. Pedri said Uefa should look at Szymon Marciniak. Ronald Araújo insisted there was a foul on Martín on the equaliser. Eric García said: “For A or for B, something always happens here.” Hansi Flick claimed every 50-50 had gone Inter’s way. And yet at the end of his press conference he stopped himself and said he didn’t like to talk so much about the official and wanted to look elsewhere. Thing is, it hurt. “I am disappointed,” he said, “but not with my players.”
“Football has been cruel to us,” García said. They have been good to football. “We go with our heads held high,” Martínez said. “My father would have been proud,” Jordi Cruyff said. That word pride kept coming up post-game. Which it would of course and there is an element of self-protection in that, some consolation sought when there is none, but that is not all. Barcelona had reached a semi-final for the first time in six years. They have won the Copa del Rey. They are top of the league. They have scored more than 160 goals. This is a young team, a transitional season, they said. There wasn’t much hope of the winning anything, let alone like this. And in the 93rd minute of the semi-final, a treble was still there, still in their hands.
Perhaps it still should be, regrets to face, but few truly expected them to get here at all, let alone have so much fun doing so. And plenty now expect them to be back. “I will fulfil my promise and bring the Champions League to Barcelona,” Lamine Yamal vowed, and if the last week has shown anything, and it has shown everything, it’s that he’s as good as his word.
Source: theguardian.com
