Culture
Perfection, by Lamine Yamal
Follow live coverage of England vs Netherlands in the Euro 2024 semi-final today
A tear in the universe opened up at the Allianz Arena.
A space that wasn’t apparent to the other 21 players on the pitch, notably France goalkeeper Mike Maignan, or the 75,000 fans in the stands, suddenly appeared. When it did, Pedri, on the Spanish bench, brought his clasped hands from his neck to his face. He looked frightened by what he had just witnessed. Frightened by the portal to a new dimension his team-mate Lamine Yamal cut into with his left foot. The portal to a Euros final. The portal through which Yamal’s immense potential could be glimpsed.
Pedri watches Yamal’s goal in disbelief (BBC)
Time travelled with the ball as it went from out to inside the far post. Yamal was 13 when the last Euros took place three years ago. He watched Spain go out in the semi-finals to Italy at a shopping centre with his friends. Dani Olmo, the man of the match in that game, missed a penalty in the shootout. But in Munich, Yamal showed an alternative reality was possible.
Olmo scored the winner against France. His goal was exquisite in its own right for its dexterity, its elusiveness, its affirmation of Spanish technical supremacy. Olmo was playing with the confidence of someone who has scored in three games in a row. But France were also in a state of sheer disbelief and disorientation.
Four minutes earlier, Yamal had cancelled out France’s opener. Up until then, it had looked like this might be Kylian Mbappe’s night. Mbappe had discarded his mask in the way a gladiator might throw one onto the bloodied sand of the Colosseum floor. A statement of intent. His vision was no longer impaired by the “horrible” accessory he’d been forced to wear to protect a broken and bruised nose. Inside 10 minutes, Mbappe even made Randal Kolo Muani, a player who famously missed a one-on-one in the 2022 World Cup final, not to mention another against Portugal four days ago, finally score.
We’ve grown accustomed at this tournament to no one coming back against France. They’re not supposed to, anyway. The only goal Maignan had conceded so far was a penalty from Yamal’s Barcelona team-mate, Robert Lewandowski, in the 1-1 draw with Poland. Maignan had saved Lewandowski’s first effort only for the referee to order it to be retaken for encroachment. Beating him would take something truly special. Something out of this world. “We were in a difficult moment,” Yamal acknowledged. “Nobody expected to concede a goal so early.”
When a Fabian Ruiz roulette ended in a tangle 30 yards from goal, Yamal collected the loose ball and moved to puncture the enthusiasm behind the French goal. “I picked up the ball and I did not think about it, I tried to put it where it went, and I’m just very happy.”
Standing up to him was France’s giraffe-like midfielder Adrien Rabiot. Clearly, Yamal thought he needed to wind his neck in. On the eve of the game, Rabiot had said: “We’ve seen he is a player who can deal with stress very well, he has lots of qualities of playing for his club and in a major tournament. We know what he is made of. He keeps a cool head, but it can be difficult to deal with a semi-final in a big tournament. It will be up to us to put pressure on him, but we want him to come out of his comfort zone. If you want to play at a Euro final, you need to do more than he has done up until now.”
Yamal responded on Instagram with a post of a hand moving a pawn on a chessboard. “Move in silence” read the caption. “Only speak when it’s time to say ‘checkmate’.” Yamal let his left foot do the talking. His move came in the 21st minute. Yamal hid the ball, at first, by wrapping his left foot around it to go outside Rabiot only to reveal it again by nudging it inside with the outside of the same boot.
Rabiot shifted from side to side like an Arctic crab. He threw out a claw as Yamal set to shoot, but Rabiot caught none of the ball. Neither did Maignan. He covered his goal as well as he could. The AC Milan goalkeeper’s gloved hand eclipsed the top corner, but it couldn’t shut out the sun, the light of Yamal’s talent. “Habla! Habla!” Yamal shouted at Rabiot. “Talk! Talk!” All the Frenchman’s talk had been cheap. Yamal’s strike, on the other hand, was priceless. “We saw a touch of genius,” Spain coach Luis de la Fuente said.
It’s commonplace to hear people say perfection doesn’t exist. That it’s unattainable. But Yamal’s shot challenged that notion. “His shot was magnifique,” Didier Deschamps praised. It made Yamal, at 16 years and 362 days, the youngest goalscorer in Euros history. He will turn 17 on the eve of the final. The only gift Yamal wanted, he said, was “just to win, win, win. My objective was to be able to celebrate my birthday here in Germany. And I am very happy to celebrate it here with the team”. He then added: “I told my mum she does not need to buy me any present if we manage to win the final.”
As Yamal turned and dashed towards the enraptured Spanish bench, sliding on his knees in a state of euphoria, memories of a very similar goal the Barcelona winger scored against Mallorca flashed before the eyes of the Catalan journalists in the press box. But this was better. For the occasion. For the way it made Mbappe puff his cheeks in a look of awe and helplessness. “I don’t know if it’s the best goal of the tournament,” Yamal said. “But it’s the most special for me.”
Maignan is powerless to stop Yamal (Javier Soriano/AFP via Getty Images)
Yamal’s display will be condensed to the analysis of a moment. Rodri, however, expanded on it. “I personally went over to Lamine and congratulated him for his performance,” he said. “People will remember the game for his goal and what he did is something only a few chosen ones can do. But I personally thanked him for his defensive commitment. The recoveries, the tracking back, how he helped out the full-back. It’s been outstanding for a guy his age. I personally really rate this.”
At the end of the game, the Spanish players huddled together and jumped up and down in celebration at reaching the final. Yamal, initially, stood apart from them, nearer the halfway line like a star from a galaxy far, far away.
(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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