Watching Asensio"s development has returned a sense of joy to Real Madrid

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At some point during Real Madrid"s successful trip to Leganes on Wednesday, this scribe caught himself cursing Luka Modric. The Croatian had joined the team in the 85th minute. After just a couple of plays, he had the chance to find Marco Asensio on the left with some room to run, but decided against it and passed the ball to Danilo on his right.

The realisation that, after five and a half seasons, Modric had finally taken a passing decision I disagreed with was shocking, but it was explained by my own biased interest: I wanted Asensio to get the ball in every single play until the end of the match.

As a football fan, few things are as satisfying as a successful youngster making it big for your team"s senior side. Even though Asensio doesn"t quite fit that profile -- he was signed from Mallorca at age 18, so he"s hardly a Real Madrid product -- the fact that the club invested in a fresh talent, loaned him to Espanyol so that he could develop, and then brought him back to play with some of the best offensive players in the business feels good. It seems like that policy, also applied to Dani Carvajal and Casemiro, is working like a charm.

However, Asensio"s case is special. Rooting for his success has little to do with the club"s recruiting policy or its loan agreements, but with the sheer joy of playing and watching football. Asensio is not business, he"s fun.

Marco Asensio is emerging as one of Real Madrid"s brightest young talents this season.

In the past few decades, the sport has indeed become more professional, more tactical, better structured and, yes, a bit more predictable in the way games happen and even plays within a game unfold. Very few players have the gift of making the unexpected happen, and when one of those is a young prospect of your team, it feels like you have a treasure you"d rather not share with anyone.

Asensio"s talent and self-confidence allow him to generate advantageous situations when he"s obviously in numeric or physical inferiority -- or both! His accuracy, the speed at which he moves with the ball or makes decisions, his selflessness when he can find an open team mate, it"s just a gift to watch him play. And he still carries himself without the gravity of the professional, showing the fun of the kid that loves to play and for whom football hasn"t yet become a job.

His stats this season show that he"s one of those players who shine, rather than disappear, when surrounded by talent. With nine goals in 26 matches across all competitions, he"s already surpassed his scoring figures with Espanyol last season: four in 37 matches in which he played around 1,100 minutes more than in this term. With the competition he faces in Isco and James Rodriguez in the attacking midfielder position, or Lucas Vazquez and Gareth Bale as a winger, the fact that he"s putting up those numbers is more than remarkable.

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But restricting Asensio"s impact on this Real Madrid to a set of facts and figures would take us back to the conception of modern football as a numbers game, when the potential of the young leftie from Mallorca goes well beyond that. On the pitch, he takes some real madrid fans back to the times of yore when one would go to the Santiago Bernabeu every other week just to watch one single player grow and evolve. He reminds us of the coming of age of Raul Gonzalez and Emilio Butragueno, when you would see sparks of the players they would later become combined with a youthful, exuberant energy they would progressively lose as years went by.

Asensio"s performances have given many Real Madrid supporters reason to feel good about watching his team play in a way they hadn"t for a while, and that alone is already great news. But his ceiling is still unknown, and that is the most exciting aspect of the Asensio hype, even if it means having to curse Modric every once in a while.

Eduardo Alvarez covers Real Madrid and the Spanish national team for ESPN FC. Twitter: @alvarez.

Source: http://www.espnfc.com/club/real-madrid/86/blog/post/3097886/watching-asensio-development-has-returned-a-sense-of-joy-to-real-madrid