Serge Gnabry, the long trip of the bullet that knocked down the Tottenham

[Inkriql]

Serge Gnarby is a mole of just 1.75 tall. Its superb head framed in jaws and zygomatic of unusual volume is the most visible part of a body made for speed. Until the age of 11 he hesitated between dedicating himself to athletics or football. He was inclined to enroll in the quarry of Stuttgart. It did not take long to shine. He scored 30 goals for the German Under-16 team when he caught the attention of Arsène Wenger. He signed it for Arsenal for about 150,000 euros. The following year he debuted in the Champions League with the first team. It was in October 2012. He was just 17 years old and his career announced something important and early. Destiny, however, would reserve a wide detour.

It was, circular paradox, in London, in the new White Hart Lane field, before Tottenham, where he triumphed on a great stage. It was last Tuesday. It was in his 12th Champions match. He wore Bayern's shirt and at 24 he had never scored in the top European competition. He opened his account without subtleties. He dispatched the current runner-up of the one-run tournament: four goals made the way 2-7. It seemed unstoppable. It seemed out of nowhere. He had been fighting for seven years to be there.

"I waited a long time to make my first goal in the Champions League," he said, in the hallways of the stadium. “I would not have dreamed that I would score four. It's just great. "

Injured for many months in his third season at Arsenal, in 2015 he was ceded to West Brom. He lost the position in favor of Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain before being transferred to Werder Bremen for five million euros. He was then signed by Bayern for eight and transferred to Hoffenheim in 2017 to re-fish him the following summer. When he returned to London this week he loaded it with dynamite.

Demarking from left to right behind Aurier's back, accelerating before the exit of Alderweireld with a demarrage that nobody managed to interrupt, defining quickly with the right or with the left, always anticipating the reaction of the goalkeeper, adjusting the shot next to the sticks , his four lashes were unstoppable. Lloris stretched her arms in vain. Everything was so sudden and unusual that Gnarby left the court and confessed that he did not remember how he had put the room, how exhausted he was. Now his name appears in the rarest statistics: he adds one more goal in the new Tottenham stadium than Harry Kane himself. The captain of the London club and scorer of the English team has barely made three since the inauguration of the new venue, in March: one to Aston Villa, one to Southampton, and another penalty, to Bayern.

Only 14 players have scored four goals (or more) in a European Cup match in the Champions format. The intimidating list: Van Basten (Milan) to Göteborg; Simone Inzaghi (Lazio) to Marseille; Prso (Monaco) to Depor; Van Nistelrooy (United) to Prague Sparta; Shevchenko (Milan) to Fenerbahce; Messi (Barça) to Arsenal and Bayer; Gomis (Lyon) to Dinamo Zagreb; Mario Gómez (Bayern) to Basel; Lewandowski (Dortmund) to Madrid; Ibrahimovic (PSG) to Anderlecht; Luiz Adriano (Shaktar) to Bate Borisov; and Cristiano (Madrid) to Malmo.

Son of an Ivorian father and German mother, Gnarby is a regular head of the national team that Joachim Löw tries to rebuild after the 2018 World Cup disaster. Sometimes as a far left, the position he occupies in Bayern, sometimes as a false center forward, takes a couple of seasons standing out for their mobility and tremendous power. Pending the grandiose relay of the world champion generation in 2014, the newspaper Die Zeit baptized him with a messianic label: Der Hoffnungsträger. The hope. The scouts who studied him from clubs of the Premier and LaLiga highlighted his technical quality as well as his difficulties in reading the games. They accuse him of a habitual defect in the ends of breaks and tears: he does not interpret the times of the play with sufficient lucidity.

He did not need to interpret pauses and accelerations against Tottenham. After a discreet hour, he simply put the fifth gear. The match was alive until he killed him.

"Certainly," said Niko Kovac, the Bayern coach, after attending poker, "this was his best night."