SEVILLA: ALL-ACTION OCAMPOSS HOLDS THE KEY FOR SPANIARDSS
NOT many players finish a game with ‘ scored one, saved one’ stats but when Sevilla winger Lucas Ocampos took the gloves in a game last month it was always a possibility.
Five matches from the end of the season Ocampos scored against Eibar to put his team 1-0 up. He finished the game in goal after Tomas Vaclik was carried off injured. In keeping with his all-action cult hero status at the club, he saved from Eibar’s final attack.
‘The goalkeeping coach told me to just stay between the posts,’ he said in an excitable post-match interview, still wearing the gloves. Asked how he kept out the injury-time shot delivered by the opposition keeper who had come forward for a corner, he said: ‘It came straight at me.’
Sevilla’s sporting director Monchi spotted the 26- year- old Argentine while he was working as Roma’s technical secretary in 2017. ‘I fell in love with him after watching him play on loan for Milan against Roma,’ he told Movistar TV. ‘Roma won but he was magnificent.’
Monchi never signed him for the Italians but when he came back for a second spell at Sevilla they needed an explosive, aggressive, goalscoring winger and so he paid £13.5million to Marseille and put Ocampos on a five-year contract with a £63m buy-out clause.
With 17 goals in his first season, there would be clubs willing to pay that now were it not for football’s post-pandemic financial meltdown.
At the age of 18, Ocampos was on a flight from Argentina to Europe. Barcelona and Manchester United had been monitoring him but it was Monaco who signed him.
At Sevilla the fans love the larger-than-life passion, the huge crucified Christ tattooed on his back, the wolf tattooed on his chest.
They also follow the social media activity of his wife, the Argentinian model Majo Barbeito. A barbecue, against La Liga’s lockdown rules and revealed in the obligatory social media pictures, has been forgiven.
Ocampos scored the winner against Wolves in the Europa League quarter-final, heading home in the 88th minute. Against Manchester United in the semi-final, he played with his right knee heavily strapped and went off kicking water bottles when he was substituted in the second half. But he is determined to start tonight.
‘When it gets to this stage of the competition, you play through the pain,’ he told sports paper Marca.
The only player who tops Ocampos for raw emotion is captain Jesus Navas, who crossed for Luuk de Jong to score the winner in that semi-final and was in tears at the end of the game. ‘He let it all out at the end,’ said Ocampos. ‘He is an institution at this club. There is no limit to what he will do on the pitch for this shirt.’
Navas was in the team when Sevilla won the first of their five UEFA Cups, beating Middlesbrough 4-0 in Eindhoven in 2006. Back then he was struggling with homesickness so severe that it almost scuppered his international career.
Today he has a World Cup with Spain and a Premier League title with Manchester City among his honours and, thanks to Pep Guardiola who encouraged him to play as a full back, he could lift the Europa trophy tonight alongside the irrepressible Ocampos.