‘A total killer’: How Dani Carvajal found an unexpected scoring touch

Dani Carvajal celebrates with Lamine Yamal after scoring Spain’s third goal against Croatia. Photograph: Petr Josek/AP

There is a photograph everywhere today, splashed across the front pages of Spain’s sports papers which tells a story, a little piece of history made. Appearing in the picture is a Spanish footballer celebrating the third goal in Berlin as the selección defeats Croatia 3-0, announcing their candidacy for the title and the arrival of a new generation on the day he makes his first appearance at the European Championship.

There is also some kid called Lamine Yamal.

Aged 16 years and 338 days, the schoolboy from Barcelona became the youngest footballer to play a European Championship match but his is not the only moment from Saturday afternoon. There is also Álvaro Morata and Fabián Ruiz, Unai Simón and Rodri, the coach Luis de la Fuente. And then there’s the player in the photo with him, hugging him hard. Dani Carvajal plays on the other side of the country’s great footballing divide and is twice Lamine Yamal’s age; he has also just become the oldest Spanish international to score at the European Championship.

At 32 years, 156 days, it seems bizarre that the third against Croatia, sliding in like a striker to volley in Lamine Yamal’s gorgeous delivery, should be Carvajal’s first as an international. It is after all a decade since he made his debut for Spain. Odder still is that, forget the goal, Saturday was his first game at the European Championship. But when he says that he has told the young players, including the winger who is 16 years his junior, to seize this opportunity because however good you are you never know if the chance will come, he knows. He has lived it.

Carvajal, who has won as many European championships as anyone ever at club level, lifting that trophy a record six times, had never even played a European Championship game for his country. Forced to miss Euro 2016 and Euro 2020 through injury, now he has – and he marked the occasion with a goal. “A total killer,” he called himself afterwards, laughing as he left the stadium. Not that it was so unusual, not any more: a fortnight before, at the end of his last competitive match, he was wearing an even bigger smile as he departed Wembley. He scored that night too, for Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League.

In two weeks, Carvajal has scored more than in any of the previous 10 seasons. This season he has scored as many goals as he had in the last ten seasons put together. 1, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 … and 7. Oh, and it all started with another one that didn’t count statistically but meant everything. Less than a year ago now, against the same opponents, Spain defeated Croatia 5-4 on penalties to win the Nations League, their first trophy in eleven years.

That night in June 2023 Carvajal didn’t start, but he was the man talking in the huddle pre-game; he was also he later admitted, close to tears. It was the first time he had been left out of a final line up when available – De la Fuente had chosen Jesús Navas to start at right back – but he told his teammates that this was their moment. And, he later reflected, “destiny wanted it to be me who took the last penalty”. Having come on as a sub, he took Spain to the trophy – by dinking in a Panenka.

And so an extraordinary year started, one in which the injuries that had previously forced him to walk out of two European Cup finals in tears, missing two European Championship tournaments as a consequence, had been left behind. And all because of the broccoli, or so the story goes: “My new diet is strange and very strict,” Carvajal said this week, “but there are other factors: rest, psychology, even being a father … I have been liberated from football not being such an obsession.” An extraordinary year which closed with him carrying the European Cup through the city flanked by his father, a police officer named Mariano one year off retirement who had requested the opportunity to accompany Madrid as part of the cavalry on a white horse.

Only it hasn’t closed, not just yet. With the full-back insisting that he is consciously trying to bring some of that Real Madrid indestructibility to the national team, there is something else to do, an opportunity to make up a little lost time, alongside a whole new generation. A debut goal marked his determination to do so. “I can’t ask for more,” Carvajal said on Saturday, before doing exactly that. “We want to go a long way.”