Gary Lineker: ‘Lamine Yamal blows my mind. I’ve not seen anything like this’

The former striker on what he was doing at 16, his respect for Harry Kane and why England are a bit like Real Madrid

“I hadn’t reached puberty yet,” Gary Lineker says, cracking up. Then he stops and adds: “It’s true, I’m not lying. I used to hide in the showers”. Talk has turned, inevitably, to Lamine Yamal, the school kid who stands before England’s hopes of winning a first trophy since 1966, what their former captain calls his “lifetime’s ambition” as a player and broadcaster, and has everyone asking the same question: what were you doing at 16? “I had just joined Leicester City as an apprentice,” Lineker recalls. Which isn’t bad, and beats trying to blag your way into pubs with fake ID, but isn’t this.

Lineker has watched Euro 2024 from in front of the Brandenburg Gate and describes the tournament as one where “the fans were the highlight, showing human beings can get on even when they’re tribal”, as well as one that “started well” but got a “bit turgid” late in the group stages and was lit up by Spain, Germany, Austria and Turkey. “Teams playing brave, attacking football tended to be successful, which is encouraging,” Lineker says, but it has been a “cautious, mixed” Euros, during which he infamously described England v Denmark as “shit” – which is not, he stresses, the same as saying England are. Now, though, a competition with a “flawed” group format has “the dream final”.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/chBAtzH

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more