So much for England’s future. Welcome to another all-too familiar glimpse of the recent past. The José Rico Pérez Stadium is a lovely, dinky little coastal concrete bowl. It looks like a miniature version of the Vicente Calderón, its steep concrete sides open to the sea breezes, floodlights drawn from the huge terrifying disposable Bic razor school of 1970s stadium design. Before kick-off it was awash with pinkish English flesh, an Alicante-centred horde of basking, bellicose Englishmen fanned out across one end. Deafening heavy metal music blared out over the PA. Bats swirled around the eaves. Spain kicked off, kept the ball for two minutes, and from the start the sense of another daunting, bruising contest with familiarly agonising opponents was already palpable.
It would of course be wrong to overreact to England being rather lovingly strangled into submission by the one team in world football equipped to throttle the life out of pretty much anyone who shares a square of grass with them. Spain even managed to dominate possession against Holland en route to that 5-1 defeat in Salvador last year. They were excellent here, building up the tempo and trajectory of their passing game from a cautious, body-punching start, before striking the kind of blows in the second half that often, out of context, look like moments of slack defending, soft-touch goals. But which are a part of the wider piece, reward for the grinding down and wearing thin, earned by a thousand 10-yard shuttle runs that were the bedrock of this ultimately straightforward 2-0 victory.
It is no secret England came here more in hope than expectation against a team that kicked off with four players who also started June’s Champions League final. They were always likely to spend large swathes of this game shuffling sideways, closing gaps, performing like tackle bags in a rugby training drill.
And yet, so vast were the differences between the passing, movement and basic technical skills on the ball of these two teams it feels, still, like a deeper, systemic issue that is no nearer to being bridged. England came here with counterattack as part of the game plan. In the event it was all Spain left them as they shut the game down almost completely apart from a brief period before half-time when England’s youthful attack (this was an extremely young team) was able to exert some pressure.
Even by Spanish standards, this was a notably Spain-like performance. Sergio Busquets was magnificently reassuring, a shambling, spindly, oddly assertive figure, often sprinting not towards the ball or the player but some pocket of space two moves down the line. He completed 100% of his 54 passes here. Alongside him in the starting XI, Thiago Alcântara, as gracefully bird-like as Busquets, resembles a pile of sticks twined together and shot through with a lightning bolt of life, and was a delight to watch, whirling and turning in one movement, funding the ball with balletic, 360-degree grace. Thiago made 32 passes in his 26 minutes on the pitch. Michael Carrick, who played for 90 minutes, racked up 35. Passing and possession stats often tell you little, or only so much. Here the sheer comfort of Spain’s players on the ball felt like an annihilating ace.
Carrick knows how to pass and keep the ball, but he had another of the kind of games he tends to have against Spanish opposition where his best qualities, those that stand out in England, are neutralised by the fact these are also the best qualities of the best midfielders in the world, among whom he looks, on evenings like this, like a Roman siege tower being winched hopefully into place against the invading Martian tripods.
It would be wrong to say England will take nothing from this match. There were still some scattered sparks of something interesting in between the domination by Spain’s Velcro-toed midfield gnomes. Roy Hodgson’s decision to start this match with Ross Barkley just behind Harry Kane was a hugely commendable one just for the sense of chucking out the chintz, the basic intrigue of seeing the England attack carried by a pair of mobile, coltish, 20-somethings.
As ever the problems were further back, based above all in England’s inability to play the ball out calmly, or to keep it with any purpose in midfield. If a youthful attack was the right move, the absence of John Stones, England’s best ball-playing defender, was a tactical mistake. Here, more than anywhere, England needed to cosset the ball, to keep it lovingly, to carry it upfield rather than playing safe or hitting flustered passes into the channels.
There is nothing to be done immediately about any of this. England are a better team then they were allowed to appear here, even if at times in the first half it looked as though the referee was skilfully switching balls every time possession changed hands, with England getting the really light one that bounces oddly and needs to be disposed of as quickly as possible.
The lessons are clear enough though. England will never play like Spain but a touch of that craft is needed, not to mention the patience and game awareness that will only come from the deeper, systemic change English football is still waiting to make.
