Pity the teams who keep being presented with games against Barcelona in this season’s Uefa Champions League. They try to set down a marker at the first attempt. They hold out. And then the tide eventually turns and, in the case of Benfica – eliminated at the last-16 phase of the competition – it becomes a deluge.
The Portuguese league leaders were 3-1 ahead after half-an-hour of Barca’s visit to Lisbon in January. They led 4-2 with 22 minutes left of what was the first of three Benfica-Barca clashes, this one in the league stage. The final score would be 5-4 to the visitors.
As it turned out, Benfica could feel they were spared over those 90-odd minutes. Over the next 180 in which the two teams shared a pitch, Barca scored four times. Benfica managed one goal in reply.
The X-factor now was that Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal had shifted into his upper gears. He scored a fabulous goal, having set up Raphinha’s opener in the second, home leg.
That night, nobody could mark Yamal. Benfica were often tasking three men to monitor him. On Wednesday, with Borussia Dortmund in Catalonia for the first leg of the contest for a place in the semi-finals, the vexing issue for visiting coach Niko Kovac is how many fit defenders he can muster to even make a plan for Yamal, still only 17.
As the Dortmund squad arrived in Barcelona, they were still reeling from the news centre-back Nico Schlotterbeck will not play again this season because of damage to his knee sustained in the weekend’s 4-1 win at Freiburg.
Of the other central defenders Filippo Mane is in recovery from muscle problems and Niklas Sule is doubtful. There are concerns, too, over Ramy Bensebaini, who withdrew from the Freiburg game with a sore hip.
It was to Bensebaini, the authoritative Algerian as comfortable at left-back as in the middle of a back three or four, that the principal duties of containing Yamal fell in November when the teams met on match day six of the league phase.
And until the 85th minute, the Barca prodigy had been adequately policed. A see-saw contest swung one way and the other, Dortmund twice coming back from behind before an error from Dortmund’s Pascal Gross allowed Yamal to pick out Ferran Torres for the last, late goal of a 3-2 away victory.
Bensebaini spoke for all his teammates when, on learning that the quarter-final would mean another 180 minutes with Lamine and company, he said: “To be honest we were hoping to avoid Barca.”
The Liga leaders are potent. They came into the last-eight stage as comfortably the highest scorers in the Champions League so far – this despite having played two fewer games than those clubs who were obliged to enter the play-off round – with Yamal further endorsing his growing reputation as a master of the knockout tie.
Only later this month will he mark the second anniversary of his senior debut as a professional, but his impact on elite football has been immense. At last summer’s European Championship, where he arrived as a 16-year-old, he put his stamp on Spain’s march to the title in every knockout round.
He set up the goals that gave Spain leads against Georgia and Germany and scored a glorious equaliser on the way to a 2-1 semi-final triumph over France. He also assisted the opening goal in the 2-1 win over England in the final.
He relived that special knack for his national team last month with Spain’s fifth goal in their thrilling aggregate 5-5 draw with the Netherlands in the quarter-finals of the Uefa Nations League.
Spain won that tie via an extended penalty shoot-out in which Yamal appeared briefly mortal, his spot-kick saved, before the shoot-out was sealed in Spain’s favour by his Barca teammate Pedri.
There’s more. Barca won the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia in January, Yamal on the scoresheet in both the semi-final against Athletic Bilbao and the final against Real Madrid.
Barca are in the Copa del Rey final thanks to a rollercoaster 5-4 aggregate beating of Atletico Madrid. Yamal contributed assists in both legs. In between, he was torturing Benfica to guide Barca into Wednesday’s showdown.
He’s lately been talking through this meteoric rise. In a new documentary for Catalan language TV3, Yamal spoke of his attachment to the working-class suburb, Rocafonda, a little north of Barcelona, where he grew up – and which he celebrates, after each goal, with a unique gesture, his fingers forming the numbers 3-0-4, the postcode of Rocafonda – and of his African heritage.
His grandmother and father moved from Larrache, Morocco, to Catalonia; his mother from Bata, Equatorial Guinea. He had the flags of both countries stitched in the boots he played in when he was beginning his senior career. That’s a resonant symbol, Yamal explains. “It’s part of my heritage, and you see my heritage in my personality and how I play on the field.” The Moroccan lineage, he says, expresses itself in “my sense of daring”.
That would be in his delight in the dribble, the fearless readiness to take on older, more worldly defenders. They might know to calculate Yamal will likely veer to his stronger left foot, but still he’ll back himself to command the duel, and eke out the space for the incisive pass or the curling shot.
As Pedri put it: “With Lamine, you know he’ll go past the first marker as if he wasn’t there. And then you know something’s going to happen. It's a feeling very like what we used to see in Lionel Messi. You just know that something very good for us is building up.”
The comparison with Messi is high praise indeed. But Yamal is hearing it at an age significantly younger than Messi was when he was making his prodigious first impact on his sport.
For those in his path, like an anxious Dortmund, the challenge is merely to apply a temporary brake on the rise of Yamal – and assign several men to the task.
