The joyful play of 16-year-old Lamine Yamal and 21-year-old Nico Williams has made Spain fall in love with the national team again at a time of deep political divisions
In 1912, Antonio Machado penned a short, untitled poem in which he warned Spanish infants coming into the world they were born into a dividedMachado’s Yeatsian cry prefigured the bloodshed unleashed in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and marked out a Spain of two faces: reactionary nationalists on the right, enthralled with the Catholic Church; and progressive, tolerant liberals on the left who were anticlerical. Spaniards have always followed priests with a candle or a club.
Spanish Football Federation president Pedro Rocha stands beside Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin during the Spain-Georgia match at Euro 2024. Photograph: Lars Baron/Getty Images Perhaps no one embodies conservative Spain more than Dani Carvajal. A take-no-prisoners full back, he plays a similar role in the Spain national team to Stuart Pearce in a bygone era for England. In 2004, as a 12-year-old, Carvajal accompanied the legendary Alfredo di Stéfano in laying the foundation stone at Real Madrid’s new training campus.
Carvajal was interviewed earlier in the tournament on Cadena Ser, a Spanish radio station, regarding Mbappé's comments about France’s drift to the far right. Carvajal wouldn’t be drawn, saying as a footballer he preferred staying on the margins, but conceded he wanted Spain to become “a safer country”.
Both youngsters play with smiles on their faces. On Monday morning, Spain’s sports newspapers pictured them on the cover pages dancing beside each other after Williams’s scintillating goal in Spain’s 4-1 victory over Georgia. Williams’s mother, pregnant at the time with her son, Iñaki, climbed the high, barbed-wire border fence to get into the Spanish enclave. A lawyer advised them to pretend they were from a war-torn country, such as Liberia, to secure political asylum. The ruse worked. They eventually got to northern Spain where Iñaki – who holds the record for the longest consecutive run of appearances in La Liga, stretching over seven years – was born. Eight years later came his brother Nico.
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