On A Spectacular Night, Lamine Yamal Shone Brightest

As if in response to my minor complaint about the cagey first leg of the Arsenal vs. Paris Saint-Germain Champions League semifinal, the other semifinal, between Barcelona and Internazionale, served as a stark counterpart. A wide-open 3-3 thriller, up there with the best first-leg knockout matches of the tournament's last decade, had almost too much action to recap. The goals came hard and fast, and with almost otherworldly quality, from both sides, and Inter especially weathered a furious storm to pick its spots and send the tie back to Italy for the second leg all knotted up.

That's not to say, though, that all the goals, or even all the performances, were created equal. If ever a six-goal masterpiece could be distilled down to the exploits of one player, it was Wednesday's match. That player was, as it already has been in big-ticket showdowns and as it looks like it might be for years to come, Lamine Yamal, Barcelona's 17-year-old (17!) winger who isn't just the best prospect in the world by a mile; he might already be the best player on the planet, a whirlwind of technical prowess and creativity that European soccer hasn't seen since, well, another teenager suited up in the same club's colors.

Lamine obviously has a long, long way to go before he can enter the GOAT conversation, it's striking that his only true peers for being this good this young are Pelé and Diego Maradona. Likewise, while Lionel Messi's similarly staggering eruption happened when he was a couple years older than Lamine, it's hard to ignore the commonalities when confronted with another Blaugrana-clad dribble-obsessed left-footed right winger upon whose feet the ball seems to dance. Lamine is his own player, though, and the comparisons to the club's eternal talisman do a disservice to the wonder that this literal child can produce.

His goal on Wednesday was as important as it was miraculous. Lamine received the ball with his back to goal, jostling with the much larger Marcus Thuram, scorer of an incredible backheel 30 seconds into the match. The teen was able to out-muscle the Inter striker long enough to get space to turn back towards the goal, still some 40 yards away and with at least four Inter players between him and the promised land. No matter, though. Lamine feigned a move to his left to throw off Henrikh Mkhitaryan, then burst into the space behind him and into the box. The Inter defense collapsed on Lamine, its main strategy throughout the game, and yet, surrounded by five white shirts, this dynamite-in-human-form found just enough space to whip a side-footed curler past everyone, including goalie Yann Sommer, rooted to his spot. The ball kissed the far post and bounced in.

For almost every player on the planet, a goal of that nature, with his club shockingly down 2-0 at home already, would be the highlight of their season, but Lamine Yamal has already proven, in his short time as a Barcelona player, that he can always one-up himself. It might be a hard sell to say that his next shot attempt, which didn't end in a goal, was better than an already stunning strike, but I'm going to argue for it anyway.

Just a couple of minutes later, Lamine received a pass outside the right corner of the box, with Federico Dimarco in prime position to shield him towards the touchline and away from a dangerous position. Poor Dimarco had his hands full on Wednesday, and came off mostly for the worse against Lamine, never more so than on this play. Lamine slowed the ball down to let runners come into the box, before deciding to do it himself, taking the ball to that same touchline Dimarco was conceding, stopping on a dime, forcing the Italian to slide out of bounds, then taking a touch to his left and shooting from an impossible angle. Impossible is nothing for Yamal, though, as this shot was bang-on the money, and it took a rather incredible reflex save from Sommer (without the Swiss keeper, Inter might have lost this game by two or three goals) to merely push the ball onto the crossbar, an explosion abated by fingertips.

Though Lamine would not score again, his work rate and flair on the right side constantly pushed Inter back, which was good for Barcelona, as the Italian side was hitting deadly counter-attacks, particularly in the second half, against the home side's maniacal and sometimes suicidal high line. (Mkhitaryan actually scored off one of those, but was found to be offside by a toe length. Make no mistake: Inter was deserving of this draw, and maybe even of more.) Lamine's ability to relieve pressure and constantly press forward, hitting his trademark trivela outside-the-boot crosses into the box to force Inter to defend for its life. Those trivelas didn't come to glory, Barcelona's size disadvantage most on display on these crosses, but Lamine was the engine that drove this Barcelona side's unrelenting search for equalizers.

Even when he didn't touch the ball, he made the right move, the right call in the heat of the moment. For Barcelona's third goal, Dani Olmo hit a low and hard corner to the edge of the box, a set piece from the training ground that only works because of the threat of Lamine Yamal. As the ball screamed towards his dangerous feet, and an Inter defender immediately went to close the space, Lamine instead let it slide through his legs to a waiting Raphinha, who had enough space to uncork a screamer that hit off the crossbar and into the back of Sommer for a cruel own goal.

Despite the dizzying amount of action on both ends of the pitch on Wednesday, it's hard to look at the game and see anything but Lamine. Inter's Denzel Dumfries was named the Man of the Match, and on any other day, against any other opponent, this would have made sense; the Dutch wingback set up Thuram's opener, and scored twice from corners, the other arena where Inter's physical superiority most showed itself. And yet, I wager that when anyone looks back on this match, good though it was for almost the entirety of the 90 minutes, it won't be Dumfries skying over Barcelona defenders that comes to mind first. Nor will it be Raphinha's rocket, or even his perfectly weighted headed assist for Ferran Torres's equalizer at 2-2.

No, the game will be seen as another early chapter in what promises to be a lengthy chronicle of Lamine's genius. With the repeated caveat that he is not even old enough to legally drink in Spain, what Lamine has often exhibited and definitively proved on his 100th appearance for Barcelona as a senior player—"senior" feels like a misnomer, given his age; let's go with "first-team" instead—is that he is the center of the club's ambitions, and that he should be the center of the soccer world's attention. If the semifinal of last summer's Euros was his arrival on the world stage, then Wednesday's match was the confirmation of his stardom. Messi may be gone, and Lamine is not quite a like-for-like replacement, but the quality he oozes, and the fear that he evokes in opponents, even those with effective gameplans to swamp him every time he touches the ball, are up there with the best of the best. If there's one thing that Wednesday's individual masterclass showed, it's that Lamine Yamal might make this type of brilliance commonplace.