Lamine Yamal’s Wonder Goal Sends Spain Into Euro 2024 Final

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  • La Roja beat France 2-1 in semi-finals
Yarmal’s wonder goal

With Spain’s scintillating display at the ongoing Euro 2024 championship, football pundits are already upbeat that this may represent how new empires rise. Out of the ruins of the old, with fresh visions and fresh blood, a supremacy that creates its own logic as it goes, until it begins to feel inevitable.

Ranked among the pre-tournament favourites, Spain have taken the hardest possible road to Olympiastadion in Berlin on Sunday, conquering Italy, Croatia, hosts Germany and now France enroute to the Euro 2024 finals.

The Spaniards, by beating their French counterparts, Les Bleus, in Tuesday’s semi-final encounter, achieved their longest winning streak since 2010, a first final since 2012, and perhaps the strongest indication yet that this is a team worth remembering.

So, anointing them as worthy finalists is to decorate La Roja with crushingly faint praise. In a way, they have made this tournament, perhaps even saved it: shown that amid a fatberg of low blocks and tired, malfunctioning attacks it is possible for football to express as well as extinguish.

Their women are already World Champions and on Sunday the men have a chance to emulate their model; a little craft, a little graft and just a sprinkling of magic.

It was also the night that 16-year-old Lamine Yamal became the youngest goalscorer in the tournament’s history, a triumph not just for his own prodigious talent but for the system that produces and trusts him to thrash in a 25-yard thunderbolt.

Perhaps posterity will forget just how ominously France started the game, with an early goal. After Randal Kolo Muani opened scoring for France in the eighth minute, it was Yamal who brought matters even in the 21st minute with a masterpiece display of goal scoring.

Dani Olmo added the winner on 25 minutes and yet for all the early drama, this was a game that gripped right to its finish.

Ultimately, Didier Deschamps’s team were a flimsy disappointment, not just out-passed but out-thought, devoid of solutions and brutally taunted in the closing minutes, as the Spanish side kept the ball to a fiesta of olés.

But on the ledger of Tuesday night, and this tournament, France can have few complaints. The old empire is bloated and decadent and joyless. A new world is coming. – With The Guardian report 

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