.jonawils spoke to Sadio Mané before the injury that ruled him out of the World Cup, and while Mané’s circumstances have changed, his importance to Senegal and Senegal’s importance to him have only been underscored. On Mané and 🇸🇳’s great sadness
It’s 20 minutes into Bayern Munich’s penultimate Bundesliga game before the World Cup break, a 6–1 win over Werder Bremen, and Sadio Mané goes down under a challenge. When he sits up, it’s clear something is wrong. His face is blank, but he must know what this may mean. He is forced off. There’s a hope it’s largely precautionary, but the news soon breaks: It’s an injury to his right knee, and his World Cup is in doubt.
A look back to last winter—and a look back to Mané’s origin story—provides all the evidence why. Mané spoke toshortly before he suffered his injury, and while events have changed things significantly, his thoughts and his words still offer insight into what football means for him—and what he means for Senegal.Sebastian Frej/Imago Images
“When Senegal played, you had at least 20 people together watching the game. We like this kind of thing, everybody watching the national team, shouting, arguing together. That is still going on now in the village. When I am playing and I see videos, they have the same thing now. They watch, even 50, 100 people together.”
“There were many examples in the village, many boys who loved football. They practiced almost all their lives but had no success. They stopped everything for football,” he says. “At the end of the day if you reach a certain age and have no success, you have no Plan B, so it’s difficult. My family said, ‘You can’t play football. What are you going to do? Go to school and be something else which is important for yourself.
“All the boys are a perfect age to have maturity, playing some of the best football of their lives,” he says.—Kalidou Koulibaly, Mendy, Gueye—it is Mané who was the star, he who must shoulder the bulk of the responsibility. “I started meditating four to five years ago. I had some conditioning person talking to me about it and I wasn’t interested, but then I was talking to someone, I don’t know who, and they said I should go to YouTube and check it out, and I decided to give it a try. At first my head was going,Mané had missed the vital penalty in a shootout in the Cup of Nations quarterfinal against Cameroon in 2017.
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