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Arsenal’s Hector Bellerin Storms into Spain’s Euro 2016 Squad with Typical Speed
- Updated: May 31, 2016
Hector Bellerin is fast. At everything.
Along a right flank on football pitches across England, there is nobody faster. Over 40 metres, he holds the record sprint time at Arsenal and is thought to be quicker over that distance than Usain Bolt. In the Premier League, he’s gone from second-stringer to member of the Professional Footballers’ Association Team of the Year in 18 months.
And now with Spain, well, it’s the same story.
On Tuesday, Bellerin was included in Vicente del Bosque’s 23-man squad for this summer’s Euro 2016 tournament. On its own it’s a magnificent achievement, but consider this: It was only on Sunday that Bellerin made his international debut against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and at the time he wasn’t even in Del Bosque’s provisional 25-man squad and was simply covering for absent stars.
From outside the provisional squad to inside the final squad in two days: That’s how fast Bellerin is.
For the Arsenal right-back, the wait between his first cap and his second won’t be a long one, either.
On Wednesday, Spain take on South Korea in Salzburg, Austria, in the second of their three warm-up matches ahead of the UEFA European Championship, and for the 21-year-old, it will be another chance to impress a manager he hadn’t even thought he’d playing for.
“I had planned a holiday with my family,” Bellerin said after Spain’s 3-1 victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina. “But I’m happy to cancel it for the call of the national team.”
Suddenly, he’ll need to find those receipts, because that call has now arrived thanks to a combination of excellence and little luck—a theme of Bellerin’s rapid rise.
Indeed, if there’s a feeling of symmetry between the full-back’s ascension into the Spain national team and his emergence at Arsenal, it’s because that symmetry exists.
This opportunity has been awarded to Bellerin because of the injury suffered by Real Madrid’s Dani Carvajal, who limped off the San Siro pitch in tears during Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final. Right then, he knew.
“I feel a lot of contained rage,” Carvajal told Cadena Cope this week (h/t Reuters). “I fought for two years to try to make the group and I am disappointed with myself for the bad luck I’ve had. I’ve worked so hard to be in the preliminary squad and now look what has happened.”
For Carvajal, it’s a crushing blow; for Bellerin, it’s a case of right place, right time—just as it was at Arsenal.
In the summer of 2014, the Catalan returned to the Emirates Stadium following a loan spell at Watford, and in front of …
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