“Now the good bit starts,” said Sergio Ramos as he anticipated the business phase of the World Cup. “Any mistake and you’re out.”
The trouble is that Spain have made so many mistakes. They have stumbled and slid their way to first place in their group while seemingly on the edge of implosion. Their stand-in manager, Fernando Hierro, was asked whether his side were carrying ‘the luck of champions’. Hierro has been around too long to give hostages to fortune. All he would say is that conceding five goals in three games “was not the way forward”.
Most of his players did not know how close Iran, 1,200 miles away in Saransk, had come in the other game in Group B. Iago Aspas said he only knew Iran had drawn 1-1 with Portugal as they walked off the pitch. Andres Iniesta had told him. Somehow, they had topped the group and they would avoid Uruguay – three wins, no goals conceded – in the knockout phase.
On the long flight back from the Baltic to their base at Krasnodar, deep in the Russian south, Hierro, Ramos and the rest of their players might have thought of it another way. Had VAR had not overturned Aspas’s disallowed stoppage-time goal and if Noureddine Amrabat’s shot had struck the back of David De Gea’s net rather than crashing against the crossbar, Morocco would have won 3-1 and it would have been enough to send Spain home on goal difference. It had been a tightrope walk.
“There are loads of things to improve; it wasn’t a good game at all,” said Ramos. “It is very hard to face a team like Morocco, who have nothing to play for and go in for every ball and play right to the limit. It was the chance of a lifetime for them because they knew everyone was watching.
“But we have to correct things. Those mistakes you can allow in the group stage but now any detail can see you knocked out. We have to be very careful with all that.”
That Spain should have failed defensively would be hard to believe for anyone who saw them qualify for the World Cup while conceding only three goals. For the 3-0 win over Italy in Madrid that virtually guaranteed their passage to Russia, the defence was exactly the same as the one that looked so brittle as soon as the tournament began – De Gea, Carvajal, Pique, Ramos, Alba. Or put another way, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Barcelona.
“We have to make this the turning point,” said Ramos. “When you have a defence that’s solid, that transmits a sense of security and decisiveness, it becomes much more complicated for the other team to play against us. We have to get back to that routine of letting in very few goals so the players further up the pitch are not so concerned and can do their jobs.”
For Ramos to be asked whether a side whose record consists of a frantic 3-3 draw with Portugal, a fortuitous 1-0 win over Iran courtesy of a deflected goal from Diego Costa and another lucky point against Morocco can win the World Cup was not a fatuous question.
Throughout the season just passed, Ramos led a Real Madrid side that was told it had been hopelessly eclipsed by Barcelona in La Liga and yet, for a third successive year, he held aloft the European Cup. Like nicotine in a 40-a-day smoker, the will to win runs through the blood of so many in this team.
Ramos pointed out some comparisons with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where they had lost their opening game to Switzerland and won their final group game, narrowly, 2-1 to Chile. “We suffered terribly,” he recalled. A couple of weeks later, they were world champions.
De Gea might be the exception to this inner self-confidence. He came to Russia with the reputation of being the best goalkeeper in the world but he plays for a Manchester United side that no longer competes for the great trophies of the game.
Perhaps he was more unsettled than most by the sacking of Julen Lopetegui just before Spain’s opening game in Sochi, where his error presented Cristiano Ronaldo with the second goal of his hat-trick. However, De Gea has cut a strangely indecisive figure and now there are reports that Athletic Bilbao’s Kepa Arrizabalaga will replace him when they take on Russia in Moscow, which does not sound quite the walkover it is being painted as.
“Remember that there are teams that aren’t going through at the top of their group as they were supposed to,” said Ramos, referring to Germany, another squad that has a built-in will to win. “They are every bit as much favourites as we are.
“It is not easy, nobody gives you anything and things don’t always go the way you want. Despite training well, working well, preparing well, a lot of small details can decide a game. Hopefully, we can leave this group stage behind and impose the kind of football everyone knows is ours and expects of us.
“We are a team that can aspire to win the World Cup but to do that we have to focus, commit fewer mistakes and play the way we can.”
