Pablo Aimar commented the other day that football has lost its ability to incorporate unbalanced forwards (not to be confused with unbalanced ones, of which there are also those). Aimar reflected on the art of haggling. With contagious frankness – not feeling guilty is also part of our sentimental football education – he remembered the original names of dribbling and dribbling and noted the inexorable advance of the expression “one against one”. Lamine Yamal represents all these concepts. She is unbalanced. He is not unbalanced. He practices an evolved form of dribbling and, at the same time, embodies the inevitable consolidation of the already clichéd “one against one.” For culés with some experience, however, Yamal reactivates deep-rooted misgivings. He has happened too many times to ignore: we fall madly in love with an emerging player – Ansu and Gavi, to give recent examples – and the cruelty of the calendar and the demands of the competition injure them and condemn them to an uncertain future. Arguing about Yamal's precocity is also not new. It happened with Pelé, who also suffered an untimely injury that he happily overcame, and did not harm Messi's constant and exceptional progression.
The novelty is that, in the case of Yamal, his influence on the team's performance is not anecdotal but structural. Not only does he participate in the game with contributions of fleeting talent (orthodontic, we could call it based on the observation of Joanjo Pallàs) but, like Pau Cubarsí, he preserves the vulnerable stability of a team that, as seen on Friday, continues playing badly. A team that must also assimilate a context of identity transformation that is more traumatic than we can imagine. The anomaly of playing in Montjuïc, for example, caused that, with a goalless tie and an alarmingly unproductive game, part of the public decided to make the wave. Was it a parody? A display of self-referential humor similar to when the Camp Nou sang to José Mourinho “Go to the theater, Mourinho, go to the theater”? In practice, the wave coexisted with outbreaks of whistles and ambient coldness that perhaps try to prepare us for tomorrow.
What will happen tomorrow? Among the culés that I frequent, the hierarchy of emotions establishes a) a latent pessimism regarding the outcome of the tie, b) the fear that the match against Naples will become a repetition of that catastrophe invasive of Eintracht fans at the Camp Nou (based on the suspicion that in Barcelona there are more than 17,000 Neapolitans willing to demonstrate without wasting time making waves) and c) a minority who, like president Laporta and coach Xavi, appeal to optimism. Are there reasons to be optimistic? In the field of homeopathic relief, Yamal's one-on-one, which, according to one of the most unconditional culés I know, reminded him, when he went crazy with the goal against Mallorca, of a mix of Mbappé and (dramatic pause) Luis Figo .
