The Guardian - Left-footed signing from Sevilla loves dribbling at opponents and has shown he can deal with physicality and adversity
The way the story is told at Sevilla, the first time Bryan Gil turned up at the club’s training ground, one November evening when he was 11, they put him up against the biggest, strongest, hardest kid they could find. That would show how good he really was. Tall and blond, they called the kid The Russian, after Dolph Lundgren’s character in Rocky IV. His name actually was Iván too, and although he was Leiva not Drago, from Málaga rather than Siberia, he was an intimidating figure. Bryan took him apart.
Sevilla’s academy director, Pablo Blanco, recalls the story, returning later with a team picture, the two boys by then on the same side. There’s something in the legend: The Russian is twice the size of the rest. “He wasn’t the fastest or the most agile,” Blanco admits. But then Bryan, a skinny kid a year below the others did this to everyone and still does. “He came with something wild, untamed about him,” says Agustín López Páez, the youth coordinator, “and we never wanted to take that from him.” Continue reading...