Cape Verde are not the only ones to have kept Spain out at this World Cup. Turns out it was even harder to get past security on the gate of the team hotel in downtown Chattanooga. Two days after the 0-0 draw in their opener, Luis de la Fuente gave his players the day off, a chance to clear their heads and leave the disappointment behind. Lamine Yamal went to Nashville, Dani Olmo headed for Hamilton Place mall and Rodri strolled the Tennessee river with his partner. When Borja Iglesias got back before the 9pm curfew, they didn’t recognise him and wouldn’t let him in.
“It was funny,” Iglesias said, standing at the side of the pitch at Kennesaw State University 30 miles north-west of Atlanta on Saturday, moments before the selección’s final session in preparation for their second game. “It happens to me in Spain, so how could it not happen here? I didn’t have the accreditation with me so I have to wait for someone to come and get me. Lamine laughed at me: ‘I love it, they didn’t let you in.’ The good thing is I told a couple of them and they said it had happened to them before too.”
It can’t happen again. Up next for Spain are Saudi Arabia back in Atlanta on Sunday and this time they have to find a way through. “I’m not sure it’s fair to say that the forwards have to ‘improve’, but yes, we need goals,” Iglesias said. “We had various chances and didn’t score; other times you only get one chance and you do score. So, be calm. I have seen them train and there’s no problem. They will go in next time, for sure.”
And then things will be different. “If we had scored one, the game would have changed,” Martín Zubimendi said. Immediately after the game, De la Fuente had offered a simple analysis: when the ball doesn’t want to go in it doesn’t want to go in, he insisted. Spain had racked up 27 shots, after all. Ferran Torres had hit the bar and seen another clear opportunity saved. Vozinha, the 40-year-old goalkeeper who stopped that, saved six more and was named the man of the match. “There’s nothing to reproach the team for,” Rodri said. “We generated chances but couldn’t put it away; the good thing is they created almost nothing.”
Few others saw the good in the game, especially not from the outside. Cape Verde were supposed to be easy and with this format no one entertained the possibility of Spain being knocked out anyway, which may have been part of the problem. “Maybe the fact that it was the first game conditioned things,” De la Fuente conceded. The following day Mikel Merino had talked about a “mourning”; it was a metaphor, he insisted, but it had hurt. “The players are stung, and tomorrow will be different for sure,” said De la Fuente.
And yet, he said, there were “zero doubts”; Spain must “insist on the same idea”. Yet the conclusion that the only thing missing was a finish did not entirely convince. In the opening half an hour, Mikel Oyarzabal, the centre-forward, did not get a single touch. In that period, six players made more passes than Pedri, who is supposed to be the playmaker but who appeared too advanced, his energy expended chasing down defenders while the game was played behind him instead of in front of him. With Gavi and Torres on the wings, what width there was came from the full-backs.
Which leads to the other element which has occupied everyone – probably too much. The absence of Lamine Yamal until 71 minutes has eclipsed almost everything else in a national team developing a dependency that goes beyond the pitch. An 18-year-old is cast as Spain’s hope and salvation, almost as their everything. Unable to play since April with a hamstring injury, De la Fuente had said Lamine Yamal was in “perfect” condition before facing Cape Verde and that the way the game went would decide when he was put on but that claim was disproved by how long the coach waited and the conversations with the medical staff that preceded the winger’s introduction. Nico Williams, also returning from injury, got just nine minutes. “The freshness of Lamine and Nico is what it is,” De la Fuente said then.
“The good news is that Lamine is back,” he says now. The important questions are how many minutes Lamine Yamal can play against Saudi Arabia, and which minutes; De la Fuente seemed to imply that he would prefer the second 45, which is where games are won, to the first 45. But on the eve of the match the numbers he threw out were “55, 58, 63”.
“We would be in a better mood if we had won but today we have taken our run to 32 games unbeaten,” De la Fuente said then; six days on, the mood is better still, a sense if anything that the negative reaction to their opening game was a bit much, that the critics had got carried away, that it’s not so bad. And, importantly, that they would show those critics how wrong they were. There was that word: “stung”. De la Fuente said: “There’s no feeling of pressure, no sense of emergency. Sometimes the criticism motivates you and this is a generation of players that is very competitive. Players see [what’s said].”
He added: “There is a moment when it stops being about tactics. This team has heart and always responds.”
They are not going to let it divide them, certainly: this is a close group, they keep saying. On Saturday, Laporte was talking about playing Fortnite with the kids, who enjoy winding him up. And it is just one game, which they didn’t even lose. Uruguay’s draw that same night also meant that they don’t even have a deficit to make up.
“We were sad those first 24 hours but we have turned it around now,” Zubimendi said on Saturday. He also rejected suggestions that Spain’s circulation of the ball had been slow – “I’m surprised because if this midfield has a characteristic quality it’s not exactly that it slows the game down” – and defended Rodri from unexpected criticism, asking: “What am I even supposed to say to that?”
Zubimendi added: “It was not a brilliant game but nor was it really bad: there are things we can take from it. We have to come up with improvements, especially that fluidity, that freshness in the final third which I think is going to be the key. I don’t think it’s a physical problem, I think it’s more that touch of precision. The day after wasn’t easy but that shows we care, that we’re pissed off at not winning, and that we feel the need to win. Our confidence has not dropped; we have walked a long path together and we trust each other to turn this around.”
This time, they can’t let anyone stop them. “We were annoyed, which is the way it should be,” Laporte said. “But it’s also true that we are unbeaten in 32. We have the ambition and the confidence to look to the next game, think positively, and try to win, as we always to. To say: ‘We’re here.’”