LAS VEGAS — Shortly after moving up in weight and eking out a win in the closest fight of his career, Terence Crawford — then on the cusp of his 37th birthday — was insisting on jumping another two divisions to fight the undisputed 168-pound champion, Canelo Alvarez. This was 13 months ago. Crawford was addressing an audience of one: his patron, the Saudi Arabian boxing financier, Turki Alalshikh.

Even by boxing standards — I use the term advisedly, as boxing has only few and dubious standards — it seemed a semi-preposterous idea. Alalshikh shot him a look. “But the weight?” he said.

Actually, it was more than just the weight. Both history and common sense favor not merely the naturally bigger man, but the younger one, and the so-called “A side.” Paired with Canelo — boxing’s leading man, who had already generated almost half a billion dollars in purses — Crawford was none of those things. What’s more, he would do it without insisting on any of the usual contractual niceties designed to even the odds: no catchweight, no rehydration clause.

Alalshikh proposed a couple of very lucrative, if more sensible, alternatives: Vergil Ortiz Jr. or Jaron “Boots” Ennis, each of them undefeated young stars with great ambition at 154 pounds. Crawford refused to entertain either option. “Boots is not a megafight,” he said. “Vergil Ortiz is not a megafight. This is the tail end of my career. They’re going to say, ‘You were supposed to win.’ I want Canelo Alvarez.”

He wanted the fight he wasn’t supposed to win.

“OK,” said Alalshikh, relenting. “I’m going to try to get that fight for you.”

“That’s the only fight I want,” said Crawford.

Thirteen months hence, Canelo and Crawford will fight Saturday at Allegiant Stadium. Canelo agreed to the fight in return for a purse believed to be in excess of $100 million (“More than that,” Alalshikh proclaimed at Thursday’s news conference) — an offer that even the sport’s leading man couldn’t refuse. But it all began with Crawford. “That’s how we got here,” he says.

A generation of fighters has come to look upon Canelo less as a rival than as a score, a jackpot, a career payday. Their victories, it seems, were signing the contracts, not fighting the fights. But Crawford looks to Canelo as his white whale, something he was stalking long before that meeting with Alalshikh: an existential corrective for everything he believes has afflicted his career, an answer for every slight going back to the amateurs, from fighters who wouldn’t fight him to promoters who failed to promote him, a source of eternal respect and stature. But only if he wins.

In fact, Crawford has been studying Canelo since at least 2015, when he showed up at Mandalay Bay to watch Alvarez beat a future Hall of Famer, Miguel Cotto, for his first middleweight title. Crawford, by comparison, then held the WBO junior welterweight title. “I didn’t think fighting Canelo would be a thing,” he says. “We were too far apart in weight classes.”

Gradually, though, it would become a thing. In 2021, Crawford — by then a welterweight champion, though desperately lacking for worthy opponents — attended Alvarez’s stay-busy fight against somebody named Avni Yildirim in Miami. Canelo, now the WBC’s 168-pound champion, knocked out Yildirim in the third round. But even as he did, the seed had been planted. Crawford wouldn’t mention it in public, but it was in the back of his mind.

By 2023, though, he had begun his behind-the-scenes campaign to land a Canelo fight. Late that year, he met with then-WBO president Francisco “Paco” Valcarcel in Puerto Rico and broached the idea.

“I was shocked,” recalls Valcarcel. While Crawford had now beaten Errol Spence Jr. to become undisputed at 147 pounds, Canelo — who had already won a world title by knockout at 175 — was undisputed at 168. “Why don’t you wait a couple years?” Valcarcel advised gently.

“I can’t wait,” Crawford shot back, citing his age. “I can beat him.”

By now, Crawford was a regular at Canelo’s biannual fights, and still fresh in his mind was Canelo’s victory over Jermell Charlo. Charlo, coming up from 154 pounds, was dropped in Round 7. After that, though, it was all paint-by-numbers. “He didn’t fight to win,” Crawford says of Charlo. “He just fought to survive.”

In many respects, Canelo-Charlo has become an all-too-familiar template in the arc of Alvarez’s career: a single knockdown that lumbers on predictably to a unanimous decision. Such was the case in Canelo’s wins over the likes of John Ryder, Jaime Munguia and Edgar Berlanga.

“They wanted the payday,” Crawford tells me. “They didn’t want to win the fight. Going the 12 rounds was a victory to them.”

If Canelo’s most recent victory — for which Crawford traveled all the way to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — lacked even the pro forma knockdown, his opponent, William Scull, was intent on nothing so much as survival. Crawford, meanwhile, fights only to destroy.

That said, if it’s fair to judge Canelo based on past performances, what of Crawford’s? His last fight, moving up to 154 and winning a close if unanimous decision over the estimable Israil Madrimov, fell far short of making a case for Canelo.

“Madrimov taught me patience,” says Crawford. “He was so herky-jerky and so explosive — bouncing back and forth, all those crazy antics. But Canelo doesn’t have any of that in his arsenal. I don’t have to worry about any of that with him.”

What about the age, though? Alvarez is 35. Crawford is two weeks from his 38th birthday, old by the standards of any division in any era, and certainly not an optimal time to jump up multiple divisions. Then again, Alvarez has fought at least 520 rounds (maybe more, as there are believed to be several early fights of his that never made it into the records) as a pro. He has had two competitive fights with the hard-hitting Gennadiy Golovkin, and losses to Floyd Mayweather and, more recently, Dmitry Bivol. Crawford, for his part, has never been beaten, or beaten down, in 245 pro rounds. Who’s older in boxing years? I wonder.

“He is for sure,” says Crawford. “He started fighting professional at 15.”

Still, Alvarez remains not merely the “A side,” but an economy unto himself. Considering the fight is on Mexican Independence Day weekend, it will certainly be a pro-Canelo crowd, but more than that, Canelo will be the presumptive beneficiary of any doubt on the judges’ scorecards. Crawford doesn’t disagree. He knows he can’t fight his typical fight, which involves a relatively slow start as he downloads his opponent’s tendencies. He needs to start fast.

“Of course, of course,” he says. “I got to set the tone. You have to set the tone with Canelo — to let the judges know you’re putting rounds in the bank. That’s how I look at it: one round at a time. Don’t go in and try to get a knockout in the first round. Just put rounds in the bank. And make sure you’re winning those rounds decisively.”

The way Crawford explains it — the way he has been explaining it to himself for years now — makes his existential errand sound, well, perfectly reasonable. Maybe that’s how you hunt white whales, even those with red hair, when the only thing you want is what you’re not supposed to have.

Barcelona head coach Hansi Flick accused Spain of “not taking care” of Lamine Yamal during the international break after the forward was ruled out of Sunday’s LaLiga match against Valencia.

Yamal, 18, featured in Spain’s World Cup qualifying wins against Bulgaria and Turkey last week despite managing pain in the groin area.

As a result, he will miss this weekend’s visit from Valencia and is also a doubt for Thursday’s opening game in the Champions League away at Premier League side Newcastle United.

“Lamine goes to the national team with pain, didn’t train, had painkillers to play, they were three goals ahead in every match, and he played 79 and 73 minutes,” Flick said in a news conference Saturday.

“Between the matches he didn’t train. This is not taking care of players. Spain have the best team in the world, in every position they are unbelievably good. I am really sad about this [situation].”

Yamal had started the season in fine form, scoring two goals and registering two assists for Barça in their opening three LaLiga games. He then contributed three more assists in his two Spain appearances.

Flick, who previously coached the Germany national team, said the communication with Spain boss Luis de la Fuente could be better.

“I never really spoke with [De la Fuente],” he added. “Maybe my Spanish is not good, his English is not good, so this is a problem.

“Normally, the communication, because we have more players there than just Lamine, could be better. I was also on this side as a national team coach, so I know how hard this job sometimes is, but the communication with the clubs was always good.”

Barça will also be without Frenkie de Jong against Valencia after the midfielder picked up an injury while with the Netherlands.

Gavi and Alejandro Balde are also still missing, but Barça have been boosted by the return of youngster Marc Bernal, who will be on the bench after over a year on the sidelines with an ACL injury.

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The match will be played at the 6,000 capacity Estadi Johan Cruyff next to Barça’s training ground as uncertainty continues to shroud when the team will be able to return to Spotify Camp Nou, which is currently being refurbished.

“I spoke with the players, the captains, and they say it will not affect us,” Flick said of having to play the game in a much smaller stadium.

“This is not an excuse. Also Valencia have to play in this stadium. We showed against Como [in preseason] we can win in this stadium and this is what I want to see on Sunday.

“We know the situation. The president [Joan Laporta] explained the whole situation to me. I have confidence in this [returning to Camp Nou]. These things don’t affect my team.”

It will also be the first fixture with Thiago Alcantara back on the sideline after the former Barça, Bayern Munich and Liverpool midfielder rejoined Flick’s coaching staff this week.

“I am really happy he’s back,” Flick said. “He has a lot of experience and he can pass it on to the players. I can see how the young players listen to him. It could be a really good piece of the puzzle for our success.”