It wasn’t the first time that necessity proved the mother of invention, and it won’t be the last that what was meant to be a stopgap turned into more than a stroke of luck – and, in a not so distant future, may even be seen as a stroke of genius.
Had Lucas Hernandez not been injured in France’s first game at the 2022 World Cup, Eduardo Camavinga would not have played at left-back for Les Bleus against Tunisia and Argentina later in the tournament.
Similarly, had Ferland Mendy and David Alaba not been unavailable for a Real Madrid La Liga fixture against Real Sociedad in late January of this year, it is unlikely Carlo Ancelotti would have imitated Didier Deschamps and deployed his 20-year-old midfielder in a position Camavinga knew very little about until six months ago – a position in which he gave such a brilliant display in the first leg of Real’s semi-final against Manchester City that a madridista paper gave him 10 out of 10 in its ratings, regardless of the misdirected pass which led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equaliser.
No one would have predicted this back in November. Deschamps’s decision had taken everybody by surprise at home. He had tested his young player at left-back in a warm-up friendly against the Qatari side Al-Gharafa and been pleased enough to field him there again when France, already qualified for the last 16, met Tunisia in their final group game. It was not a resounding success. Tunisia won 1-0 and Deschamps was fiercely criticised for his choice. The former Marseille coach Rolland Courbis thundered on national radio: “Camavinga left-back? Why not the physio?” It was one thing to deploy Antoine Griezmann as a deep-lying regista, quite another to ask a youngster with four caps, all as a central midfielder, to try a new role in the biggest of all tournaments. Yet it is on the left of defence that Camavinga played, and very well, the last 49 minutes of an epic final.
One of the most striking features of Camavinga’s reinvention is that the two managers who engineered it are not thinkers in the Pep Guardiola mould. Both learned and perfected their trade in Serie A, a league which, during their time there, in the era of Arrigo Sacchi, could be associated with tactical refinement and a quasi-scientific approach but not with experimentation for the sake of it. Both are pragmatists, superb readers of the flow of a game, exceptional leaders of men. They have knowhow, experience and principles, but neither could be considered “system coaches” by any stretch of the imagination.
Camavinga’s transformation was not informed by an urge to try the untried, but by the gradual realisation that this young footballer possessed qualities which could blossom into something very special if put to good use in a different context. Counterintuitive as the process may have seemed from the outside, it was no less organic for that. The square peg was not forced in the round hole; it now feels like a natural fit, an “invention” in the original sense, that is: a find.
Wednesday’s game will be only the 20th in which Camavinga operates from the left of defence, yet what we’ve seen of him there suggests that he may – just may – set a template for a new understanding of what this role could be.
We’ve had plenty of marauding full-backs who could turn into auxiliary wingers, from Giacinto Fachetti to Manuel Amoros to Cafu in the past to Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold today. Thanks, in particular, to Guardiola and his former assistant Mikel Arteta, we also have had a number of full-backs who can “tuck in” and bring numerical superiority in midfield, such as Philipp Lahm, David Alaba, João Cancelo, John Stones and Oleksandr Zinchenko. What we have not had until now – until Camavinga – is a full-back who could combine both these dimensions in a single, thrilling package, one whose influence could, just as much as Vinícius Júnior’s or De Bruyne’s brilliance, determine the fate of this semi-final.
There is always the temptation, when speaking of so young a footballer, to rein in expectations for fear of succumbing to hyperbole and harming the development of a prodigious talent. It should be resisted. Camavinga has the athleticism and stamina required of the most physically demanding role in modern football. He has the touch, raw pace and dribbling ability of a winger. Most importantly, he has the intelligence, passing range and vision which astonished onlookers when, aged 16, he masterminded a shock 2-1 win for Rennes over Paris Saint-Germain in 2019.
Players blessed with such a profusion of gifts are not usually found at left-back. But then, Eduardo Camavinga isn’t your usual kind of left-back.
