Spain 1-0 Argentina: My thoughts

The photograph that set the whole thing up

Before the game there was a lot of talk about Messi and Lamine Yamal and the picture they took together. Years ago, Yamal’s parents won a lottery to do a shoot with Messi bathing their baby as part of a UNICEF campaign. And incredibly, that kid turned out to be Lamine Yamal, who ended up not just being a Spanish player at this World Cup but basically the star of the team. He hasn’t played as well as the other stars of the tournament, but he’s 19, so he’s been good enough anyway.

The fact that they then played each other in a World Cup final is a massive coincidence. Yamal, this really young guy who’s meant to be a generational superstar, against Leo Messi, who everyone thought was gone before this tournament and who ended up being one of the best players at it, if not the best, carrying his team to another final four years after winning it. Big talking point before kickoff.

Two teams who’d had completely opposite World Cups

The setup was great, because these two arrived from totally different places.

Spain looked like they outplayed everyone they played, apart from Cape Verde in the first game, which is quite funny at this point. And they did it in a very tactical way. They were composed. They didn’t show incredible expansive football, they just controlled the pitch. They focused far more on not conceding than on scoring. They defended by having possession and control of the game, and they just seemed to be better than everyone.

Argentina had that combative football everyone knows about, really aggressive, with love and passion built into it. The theme they got going was the comeback. They came back in every game. They had loads of really interesting finales. They looked like they could come back against anyone.

So the big question of the final was simple: is Argentina good enough to come back against Spain too, and is Spain good enough to be the team that doesn’t die?

A boring final I had to find the beauty in

The whole game was pretty boring, to be fair. But it was interesting to watch from a tactical point of view, because the questions were live the entire time. When or if can Argentina play and have any chances? How well can Spain control this? And we’d seen in the previous few games that Argentina do eventually play. Even when they’re having a day off, they show up in the end. So the question wasn’t if, it was when.

Spain were making half chances, not really big ones. Argentina were having nothing at all. Messi was absent. He didn’t touch the ball much, he was dropping deep trying to get it, and his game was a bit like his first half against England. He couldn’t create anything, he couldn’t dribble past anyone.

And Spain looked like they do in any other game. They were a lot more concerned than usual, and I think that’s fair. There’s a balance. You can’t go into a World Cup final saying we’re going to control this and score five, we’re going to throw everything at the attack. They’ve not done against weaker oppositions in lower stake matches, they were not going to do it now.

When they played less competitive teams, their approach was: make sure we don’t concede, bring the ball high enough that every once in a while we get a chance, and hope we score from one. Spain aren’t the team that suffocates opponents offensively. They conserve their energy through the whole game. They don’t have spikes. They just start, and play, and play, and play, constantly, annoyingly well. You won’t see them do a really intense 10-minute go-for-it spell. They do enough. If they did more they’d probably score more, but they’d probably concede more as well. They conceded just one goal in the entire World Cup.

It’s easy to say after the game, but I think that really played into their hands against Argentina, because Argentina need poking. As I said about England, you have to poke them enough to get a reaction. It took Egypt scoring two good goals for them to put a foot on the pedal and score three in about 15 minutes. It took Cape Verde giving them a proper game. It took Switzerland coming back into it, and a really stupid red card. It took England scoring, and honestly it almost felt like England had it before that goal went in. Argentina basically had to concede first in order to play.

Where I have to give Spain more credit than I did at first is the passing. I said they just keep constant pressure and never go full throttle, and that’s true, but they also produced these really nice sequences of play. Every time there was enough space for a few good passes in a row, they’d string them together, very fluid, and create a chance out of it. Very similar to the moves they scored from against France. You watch Spain and you think, they do this every day. You’d see Cucurella coming inside to make space, you’d see the runs, and it all felt properly rehearsed, properly studied. Very academic, if you ask me. It was nice. It was boring and nice to watch at the same time.

The obvious turning point

In most games there’s a moment where you think, that’s when it switched, and nobody can actually know. In the England game, in almost every game, these are just opinions.

This one was obvious. You didn’t have to look between the lines. It changed when Enzo Fernández got the red card.

Up to that point Spain were fine, comfortable, in control, and Argentina were defending okay. It felt like they could have seen the game out.

That red card was just massive brain fog. I can’t think of a nice enough word for it, so I’ll say it: it was a genuinely idiotic tackle. You’re in a World Cup final, you’re on a yellow card, you’re a central midfielder, it’s your job is to be smart about the tackles you go into. You’ve got an insane amount of experience. You’ve had one of the best World Cups in your team. You’re probably one of the leaders in that dressing room. And you go into that on the halfway line.

What was he thinking? If you get that ball you’re not going to score from it. You’re going to gain, what, a bit of passion out of the tackle? And the fact that Cubarsí flipped after he was caught tells you everything. You cannot pretend he didn’t mean it or that it wasn’t a foul. Whatever you do to a player to flip him like that, that’s the kind of one that gets looked at by VAR for a straight red anyway. He knew he was on a yellow as well.

Maybe there’s a bit on Scaloni for not sensing he was really off and taking him out. But I feel like it’s inexcusable. I know it’s very Argentinian, the way it happened, jumping into a really high-risk tackle for no reason. It was definitely the stakes. It’s almost like he thought this is the end of the game, it’s going to be a draw and that’s it. He lost Argentina the World Cup, because they were doing pretty much fine defending the 0-0 and Spain wasn’t suffocating them in a manner to make everyone expect they could score any minute.

Did Spain score too late?

After the red card, Argentina set up in a little block and did really well in it. Spain had a couple more chances, but nothing massive. Watching it, with ten men, Argentina were a lot less likely to get to penalties, but you could still see it happening. It wasn’t like Spain were due to score every minute, although Emi Martínez was making save after save, a record number for a World Cup final. I thought Argentina could have seen it out.

And this is the thing I keep thinking. I wish Spain had scored earlier, because then we’d have seen Argentina have the chance to show us what they’re made of, the way they did in every other game. It’s impossible to say what would have happened, though. Would Spain scoring early have been too early? They scored early against France, and France have an insane amount of quality and couldn’t give them a game. But France are a different animal to Argentina.

Would Argentina have started playing a game like the England one? Would they have taken control of it, got all over it, created chances? Would Spain have profited from that, kept their heads, allowed Argentina to come at them for a while, then found a load of space and scored more? I guess we’ll never know. But it’s the way it happened. Argentina didn’t create a single shot in the whole 90 minutes, which is crazy, and which also matches the pattern exactly. They weren’t poked enough.

Spain’s bench, and a goal that could only have been theirs

We all knew what the Spain first eleven would be. Oyarzabal up top, Yamal on the right, Dani Olmo in the middle, Rodri running the game, Pedro Porro and Cucurella running the wings and varying their actions to create space. These were the key players all tournament, they’d had really good games, and they played really well.

So I was surprised they subbed so early. I was amazed they could afford to take Dani Olmo off, because I thought he’d been immense at this World Cup and he had an okay game here. But I guess that’s the advantage of a really good squad. They have a lot of quality on the bench too.

And that’s the thing with Spain. Olmo has been very good here, but he hasn’t had a big season by any means. He’s no Messi. He’s no Mbappé. He’s no Harry Kane or Bellingham. He isn’t the kind of player you can’t take off. And Spain haven’t got one. Maybe Yamal, but by his own standards he’s had a pretty mediocre World Cup. He’s played all right, and you keep coming back to the same point. They’re such a unit that they all play well together. So you take Oyarzabal off and bring on Ferran Torres, who I don’t think had as good a World Cup as Oyarzabal did but who is a very similar quality of player, and he’s the one who scores the goal. Obviously a good sub. Spain just changed the team one by one and kept exactly the same quality on the pitch.

Rodri, though. He ran that game. He was in the driving seat of the whole football match. He was the one taking the ball from defence to attack, connecting the team, breaking up the play when he needed to. He was great to watch.

And the goal was proper Spain. Such a good ball, such a good flick back, a header assist set up for Ferran Torres. Such a nice goal. I feel like I’ve seen that goal a lot of times. Very well-worked sequence of play, incredibly smart for the assist, and a good finish as well. They deserved it. It was a perfect way for them to score, everything about it was so Spanish. You watch it and think, yeah, fair enough. What did I expect, really?

And then the beast woke up anyway

Here’s the part that genuinely surprised me. Argentina fought for it.

They’d taken Álvarez off. Messi was up there by himself. No way they’re creating a chance, and no way Spain are letting them. And then that beast woke up again. They created a couple.

One was when Messi crossed from inside the box on the right, where he loved to play all tournament, and it got flicked. It could have been an own goal, and it looked really, really close. And then the chance Simeone got just after that, in a similar sort of position to where Ferran Torres scored from, maybe a bit further back. He really could have scored.

Argentina, in a few minutes, with ten men, after another 120 minutes. The only games they didn’t take to 120 in the knockouts were Egypt and England, and those were the ones where they came back from behind in the second half. The fact that they woke up again and nearly did it, that was insane.

A team that hadn’t had a single shot until then. Red card. Defended all right, but no attacking at all. Messi showing nothing. No shots, no sequences of passes, no threat whatsoever. And they created two chances. That’s the Argentina we saw against Egypt and against England. They almost did it again.

If Argentina had scored and that had gone to penalties, that would have been crazy, and it would have really made me say Spain scored too late, and that if they’d scored earlier Argentina would have done this earlier. And that’s with ten men and a defensive setup where they’d used all their substitutions to load the bus and park it. Obviously if you’re Spain, fair enough, you’re not going to risk anything when leading in a World Cup final extra time. But they gave away two big ones.

The ugly stuff, and why I’m glad they lost

I love Messi and I think he’s been playing incredibly at this World Cup, so I don’t want to be on board with most of the criticism Argentina got. But I do agree with a lot of it.

One moment worth talking about is when Cucurella scratched his face, or said something to him, in an obviously non-controversial way, and Messi called the referee over and asked for a red card. I thought it was a bit desperate. But look at that Argentina team. Messi is the maybe the nicest of the bunch, and if he’d gone off, that’s it. Everyone’s coming down on him a bit too hard for that. Would I have done it? Probably. If that was the World Cup final for my country and it worked, I’d have been a hero. Nobody cares about anything else. You’ve got to try whatever you can.

Overall, they played some really ugly football at times. They were not likeable, for sure. Maybe they were if you’re a massive Messi fan, or for the comebacks. But the strategy, the ugly football, the ugly tackles, the cheeky breaking up of play. If you played a five-a-side against them you’d come off hating them. They brought a toxic energy to the pitch. The nicest football team won, and the better football won as well. I’ll give Spain that, and it comes from someone who doesn’t agree with all the stick Argentina got.

And I have to mention the scenes after the game, even though I’d like to ignore them as much as I can. Punching people after you’ve lost. It was just disrespectful to the sport. It wasn’t nice, and from that perspective I’m happy Argentina lost. You want the nice guys to win.

The counterweight is that as neutrals we want to find a nicer team to support and criticise a team that isn’t playing nice football and is being a bit of a prick. But they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. They’re heroes for their country. They came to win the World Cup. I don’t think anyone in Argentina cares at all, and they just want their team to win. If I’m a level-headed Argentinian I probably also think the way they approach these situations isn’t nice, and I also want them to come back with the trophy.

The halftime show, Trump, and how American this final was

Got to talk about the halftime show. I didn’t mind it as a show. I’m not writing this to give my opinions on songs and people, but I thought Justin Bieber’s song was a bit off topic, and Shakira’s was good. Which ones were good and which weren’t doesn’t really matter though.

If you talk about the implications, it was definitely Americanised. They deliberately tried to create controversy and put their identity on the game. That’s American identity, this is American sport, and the World Cup is in America. So I understand it. It feels like we all want a glimpse of someone else’s culture right up until we don’t like it.

My opinion is that in football we always do this before the game, as a ceremony. If that had been before kickoff, nobody would have mentioned it. It’s a capitalised, get-attention thing, that’s what they live off, so I’m not surprised they did it.

The other one was Trump giving them the trophy, with Rodri sort of waiting for him to go away, and Infantino shooing him off, and the Spanish players not being able to lift it until he’d finally left. He hung around and then went. So intrusive, such main character syndrome. But he knew exactly what he was doing. It’s just his personality at this point, and I don’t want to feed more into it.

The awards

Rodri got player of the tournament, which I can sort of see the reason for. They probably wanted to give it to a player from the winning team, and if you’re giving it to any Spanish player it’s probably him, maybe Dani Olmo. But Olmo didn’t have a good final. If he had, maybe he gets it. I understand it from that viewpoint.

I don’t think he deserved it, though. With the amount of superstars we had at this World Cup, and the tournaments Messi and Mbappé had, it’s a bit unfair not to give it to one of them. Messi was there. He played the final. He carried his country to it. He scored so many goals. He was their engine, and when he wasn’t scoring he was passing. Both him and Mbappe deserved it more in my books.

There’s one reason I think they didn’t give it to Messi. It was quite awkward when they gave it to him at the 2014 World Cup after he lost to Germany. I don’t think he should have got it then, and it sort of backfired. But I don’t think anyone would have minded this time. He really deserved it this time.

Best keeper went to Unai Simón. Emi Martínez didn’t deserve it across the tournament. He conceded way too many goals. He was fine, but not that good, and I reckon there were a lot better keepers at this World Cup. Unai Simón’s impact for Spain was massive, though not purely as a shot stopper. It was more about distribution, and being part of that Spain squad for a long time, and the chemistry they’ve got. But giving it to the winning country’s keeper who’s on the pitch is fair enough. If the Argentina keeper had been better during the tournament they’d probably have given it to him. I don’t care about these awards that much.