LOS ANGELES. Defend with ball, attack with Lamine.
Right now, Spain is the best in the world at one, but can get even more out of the other.
This time the European champions have gone across the sea to stay.
Finally, they can party like it’s 2010 again. After three fiascos and sixteen years of woes, Spain have won a World Cup play-off match again.
One of the most absurd realities of national team football has been the fact that none of the world champions of the last 20 years have managed to win a single playoff match since they lifted the lid.
Not Italy since 2006. Not Germany since 2014.
And most inexplicably of all, neither did Spain, despite continuing to run European football and racking up continental titles during this period.
No comprehensive explanation has been found, no relevant analysis has been found. Just one of them things, a historical quirk that needed to end.
And today there was never the slightest doubt.
It took about half an hour before the Spaniards started to find passes to third players rather than always choosing the shortest option, and more than that was not really required to tear open big holes in a morning’s cowardly opposition team.
When Austria are not themselves, they are not much at all.
Already when Christoph Baumgartner broke down before the tournament, they lost their individual sharpest attacking weapon, and even worse is that World Cup soccer’s own climate change has made them lose much of the collective power that their entire period of success was based on.
Ralf Rangnick’s energy drink soccer is at its best on a rainy autumn evening in the Tyrol, works quite poorly in a stuffy Californian greenhouse at 12 o’clock in the day.
Before they even went here, they accepted a change in their basic game – resigned to the fact that the climate would make it impossible for them to run and press as furiously – and it caused the very essence of the team to be diluted quite significantly.
Austria is a team that will detonate, break and force its way through the opposition defense. Left to their own devices, they are simply not enough.
When Saša Kalajdžić headed in that stoppage-time goal against Algeria, they finally got a World Cup moment that could rival Hans Krankl’s winning goal against West Germany in Córdoba 48 years ago in emotional terms, but not much else came of this tournament.
Here but certainly not anymore.
Spain could have continued to play all the way through the American Independence Day celebration without letting up. To score on them is borderline hopeless, to finish at all extremely difficult.
In old Guardiolan spirit, the team is extremely well organized with the ball – making themselves somewhat invulnerable to their own turnovers – and that is always how the really effective type of defensive play begins.
When Luis de la Fuente rants about the world’s top six midfielders all playing for Spain, he’s not leaning solely on passing ability, but almost as much on these guys’ ability to close the pitch for opponents.
Unai Simón has kept a clean sheet for 520 WC minutes in a row now. It’s not because he made a lot of phantom saves, but because his teammates made sure they weren’t needed.
And forward…?
Up front, most understandably revolves around an 18-year-old from Mataró. Lamine Yamal may not be quite Ballon d’Or ready yet, but he is undoubtedly the best dribbler in the world.
So it was a show. Normally, Konrad Laimer is the most reliable player in this whole Austrian team – great one-on-one defensively – but now he was out of luck if he didn’t get support.
It was a show from Lamine Yamal, but not so crazy much for the final product today.
A finish in the middle of the goalkeeper, a ball that was stopped on the goal line, a passing game that both mixed and gave.
At times, you can detect an impatience in both his body language and his decision-making, and to some extent I think it depends on how well everyone Lamine Yamal is measuring himself against in history’s most star-studded world championship so far.
Why doesn’t he also have six WC goals, like the other bulls?
The biggest part of the explanation is due to the fact that he entered the tournament injured, and that he still hasn’t reached much more than 75-80 percent of his physical maximum level.
How fast can it go? How high can he reach?
After all, these are the questions that will give the final word on the entire Spanish world champion candidacy, even if the sixteenth part did not require the very sharpest version of Lamine Yamal.
Goal machine Mikel Oyarzabal built on his sensational streak as he dribbled and angled, little Pedro Porro demonstrated how his forwardness and courage make him a disproportionately good main player.
3-0 to the Reds, time to party like it’s 2010.
That was when Spain was on top of the world. That’s when they conceded zero goals in the entire playoffs.
