Let the Italians keep their conspiracies. I never believed Spain and Croatia would go into their Euro 2012 Group match having agreed to play for a draw. You would have to have turned Poland into Argentina run by a military junta and swapped Peru for Croatia to have made that one stick.
If Spain from the outset seemed to lack their usual sparkle, and fluffed too many passes it was partly their own fault for coming out and thinking not of themselves as champions but of Russia, a team that showed real promise in their opening game, but subsequently exited from the championship, showing their true mediocrity losing to a poor team.
By contrast Croatia was not a poor team. They came out and did exactly what they said they would do to frustrate and disarm the Spaniards, building up solid lines of defence, pressing, and taking their chances with an occasional counter-attack. They could have , at one point, been leading Spain, by two clear goals had it not been for the brilliance of Casillas, the only Spanish player, with the exception of Alba, to really give it his best, in response.
Credit nonetheless has to go to Vicente Del Bosque for bringing on Navas to replace a thwarted Torres so as to stretch the Croatan defence when it was already tiring and forcing a number of threatening corners, before scoring the winning goal. It was just as well the Spaniards kept celebrations to a minimum. The goal when it came in the final minutes involved probably the first piece of successful creative play by La Roja in the whole match: Cesc (another late substitute) exploiting a gap in the Croatian defence , passing to Iniesta who, after drawing out the goalkeeper, passed it to Navas for a final tap in, in a characteristically faultless interchange of passes.
The goal brought cathartic scenes among the Spanish fans who had looked increasingly tense and gloomy as the match proceeded,suspecting that just one Croatian goal would mean the end of the tournament for them just as surely as Don Quixote breaking his lance on a windmill.
When the fonal whistle went, Del Bosque looked like a man who had been made to suffer for 90 minutes, and his players, shattered. The BBC commentator at one point blamed the heat- an absurd suggestion given the high temperatures Del Bosque’s players are used to playing in back in their native Spain in spring, summer and early autumn. The players were I think as shocked as their manager was at how close they were to defeat, and all because they did not play as they know they can- so much better than tonight.
Nonetheless Del Bosque, who is a a wise and enduring man, will know how to turn this game to La Roja’s advantage, just as he did after morale hit a low point at the end of the the opening match against Switzerland in the 2010 World Cup. Del Bosque will let the players ask questions of themselves and trust them to put it right. The Spanish media will no doubt call for changes in the team. There were cries of ‘Lllorente, LLorente’, from the fans. I suspect Del Bosque will once again resist laying the blame on Torres, or any other individual player for that matter. It was a collective failure not to have won with more conviction. La Roja is collectively strong enough to bounce back.
