Up close, there are hints of Gianluigi Buffon about Yassine “Bono” Bounou. The Morocco goalkeeper, who needs just one more of his already legendary performances in Qatar to propel the Atlas Lions into the World Cup final, isn’t quite Buffon’s twin, but they could easily be brothers. The mop of dark hair, the chiselled profile, the facial skin tone, identical height and their big, rangy frames evoke outdoorsmen who could, back in the day, have built a cabin, fenced a ranch and wrangled horses or run logs down river in midwinter.
They are hardy men.
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It’s also true that the last team to reach a World Cup semifinal having conceded just once in five tournament matches — Bono and Morocco’s current record — had Buffon in goal, in 2006, as Italy (2-0, 1-1, 2-0, 1-0, 3-0 against Ghana, United States, Czech Republic, Australia and Ukraine) eventually won the tournament that year.
Somewhat spooky is the fact that Italy met Zinedine Zidane’s France in Berlin, 16 years ago, having conceded only an own goal on their way to the final (Cristian Zaccardo against the US). Meanwhile, Morocco, already the first Arabic and first African nation to compete in a World Cup semifinal, have also seen Bono beaten by only an own goal, when he was beaten by teammate Nayef Aguerd against Canada.
You can choose which of the quirky story elements make a surprise World Cup semifinalist more interesting: the fact that his surname isn’t Bono, but Bounou, or that he speaks English with an Arabic accent, but Spanish with a very distinct Argentine accent; the fact that the football club he’s most passionate about is Buenos Aires giants River Plate; the fact that prior to this competition, his greatest fame concerning penalties was shouting the made-up word “Kiricocho!” at Erling Haaland to try to deter the Norwegian star from scoring; the fact that this Moroccan man was actually born not only in a different country, but continent (Montreal, Canada); or that his dog sounds as if he’s named after a Disney mermaid but actually isn’t.
However, if there’s a defining characteristic about this 31-year-old, who learned to play football on the uphill slope of a Casablanca supermarket parking lot where he and his pals pulled huge garbage containers together to make goalposts, it would be his intense humility. So down-to-earth and ordinary is he that despite already being a Europa League winner by then, when Youssef En-Nesyri — whose towering leap and headed goal put Morocco into Wednesday’s semifinal against France — joined Sevilla, Bono actually worried that the newly arrived striker wouldn’t be his friend.
“Youssef is like my younger brother,” Bono once told me. “Whatever bothers him bothers me, and likewise with whatever makes him happy, too. I look on it as a great honour to be playing alongside such a wonderful footballer, for club and country, but the day he arrived, I was nervous. I didn’t know whether we would get along or indeed whether he would get on with the rest of the squad knowing that he has ‘quite a personality.'”
