If Mikel Merino is sleeping, please don\u2019t wake him. If the last week has been a dream, he\u2019d just as soon keep dreaming.<\/p>\n
Because on Friday, for the second time in five days, Merino came off the bench for the final five minutes of a World Cup<\/a> knockout game and scored the winning goal, the latest lifting Spain to a 2-1 victory<\/a> over Belgium and into next week\u2019s semifinal against France in Arlington, Texas.<\/p>\n \u201cNot even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what\u2019s happening right now, right?\u201d Merino said in Spanish. \u201cHonestly, it\u2019s crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n How crazy? Merino has played less than 10 minutes in the past two games and has two goals. He\u2019s taken four shots in the World Cup and put two of them in the back of the net, the first in stoppage time to beat Portugal in the round of 16 and in the 88th minute Friday to beat Belgium in a quarterfinal and extend Spain\u2019s unbeaten to streak to 36 games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Mikel Merino is sleeping, please don\u2019t wake him. If the last week has been a dream, he\u2019d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[61169,149118,2424,3900,48,52,51,3556,47,50,49,63,24644,100,24026,157979,13824,7785,5712,35345,5393],"class_list":["post-394221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-belgium","tag-daily-recap","tag-friday","tag-inglewood","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-live-update","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-memorable-moment","tag-news","tag-plenty","tag-quarterfinal-match","tag-result","tag-schedule","tag-sofi-stadium","tag-spain","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}