Lunch is important to Spaniards, who like it late and like it long. At lunchtime last Wednesday, across the Iberian peninsula you’d have found many people more concerned about whether to choose the gazpacho or ham for their starter than finding a television showing Spain’s first match at the 2006 World Cup. Spaniards love their football, especially their clubs, but there’s a significant number of Catalans, Basques or Galicians who would prefer a good lunch than sit in thrall to a team bearing the flag of Spain. Besides the confusing aspect of nationalism, it’s a question of quality: Spain have a habit of starting World Cups a jangle of nerves and finishing them early.
Right up to last Wednesday lunchtime, there was also a practical difficulty in watching Spain in Spain. Confusion about how to access the new television channel that had secured the rights to show the World Cup to the Spanish people. A large portion of the population hadn’t got the technology to receive that channel.
All this, and a three o’clock kick-off. Lunchtime. The team’s coaching staff feared even the players might find this confusing. Top-flight Spanish club football is as nocturnal as a bushbaby. Matches kick off at five o’clock at the earliest and if you play for Real Madrid or Barcelona, you’re never back in the showers before 10pm. In Germany, Spain’s players had been adapting their body-clocks for several days. “It’s quite hard for some of us to sit down for a plate of pasta at 11 in the morning,” Luis Garcia, of Liverpool, explains. “I can say so from experience. You have to adapt your hours of eating, siesta and all that.”
In short, the lunch issue had been cooking up all the ingredients of another Spanish anti- climax at a major football event: indifference at home, and a gifted team who manage to look like blundering outsiders, like homesick caricatures for whom the idea of having to sit down to a meal not prepared by their mother or to mix with folk from outside the pueblo seem challenges too great to bear.
Spain’s puzzling inflexibility, their neurotic defeatism, has become an age-old mystery at World Cups. Spanish clubs featuring Spanish footballers travel brilliantly, reach the major European club finals more often than anybody else. Yet Team España travel dreadfully. They have never won a World Cup, and at the last two fell apart at the hands of Nigeria and South Korea.
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The nearer the frontier the more daunting it seems: at France 98, Spain went out in round one; at Portugal’s Euro 2004, they were back home after the group stage.
As a rule, Spanish players travel badly too. Historically, they only ever took their talents abroad reluctantly, aspiring to play for Real Madrid or Barcelona rather than, say, Juventus or Manchester United. When the transfer market opened up in the 1990s, some took a deep breath, tried and mostly failed. Clubs such as Milan, Lazio, Inter and Roma still regret the millions of Italian lire they spent importing good Spanish footballers such as Jose Mari, Gaizka Mendieta, Ivan Helguera and Francisco Farinos in the era when Italy had the best money to spend. Newcastle United directors may still be looking for Marcelinho.
Gradually, though, Spanish footballers have started to find a place abroad where they could settle and thrive. It is the Premiership and if Spain suddenly looked a more worldly team last week in Leipzig, it was, in part, down to its exported expertise.That was a point made after the 4-0 victory over Ukraine by Garcia.
Garcia, Xabi Alonso, Cesc Fabregas and Jose Antonio Reyes have been earning their living around three o’clock kick-offs and 11 o’clock lunches every weekend for the past two years. They are the players of Liverpool and Arsenal who, with Liverpool reserve goalkeeper Pepe Reina, are the members of the Spain squad based abroad. That makes them almost unique.
Spain’s World Cup squads in the past have been much more likely to include naturalised South Americans based in Spain — such as Marcos Senna, and Mariano Pernia of the 2002 team — than a group of expatriate Spaniards.
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It makes them more worldly. “It is unusual, and it’s important for us to have so many players working in the Premiership,” Garcia says. “It has helped us a lot in that our individual experiences can bring something different to our game in general.
“In England the type of football is different to how teams play in Spain. It gives us a range and a combination of styles.”
On the day, Liverpool edged Arsenal. Garcia and Alonso both started in Leipzig in an XI nobody watching Spain’s confusing set of warm-up matches would have predicted with confidence.
By the end of the game, three men in Spain shirts, including substitute Fabregas, were completing their competitive international debuts. But they knew what they were about.
Spain had opened the goal-scoring with a set piece, Alonso meeting Xavi’s corner. A direct free kick would put them 2-0 ahead by the 18th minute, and a penalty — benevolently awarded — gave the striker David Villa his second goal early in the second half.
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Spain, so anxious by reputation, were liberated. Suddenly Carles Puyol, a defender who tends to stray upfield only for corners, mistook himself for Ronaldinho, exchanged passes with Fabregas and set up the sharp Fernando Torres to finish with his favourite device, a volley. It was by far the most emphatic start to a senior tournament that modern Spain have achieved. Back home, folk began to get up from their tables. A legend had been created in its own lunchtime.
It had not only been a start out of kilter with Spain’s traditional curtain-raiser at World Cups — even when they begin well, they usually start fading before the end of 90 minutes – but it had been daring.
For that, plaudits to the head coach. Luis Aragones is an unusual man. He commands respect in Spanish football for his long years in the game and will always lose some for his coarseness.
Nobody needs reminding about a racist utterance he made some months ago in a notorious episode talking to Reyes about Thierry Henry.
Yet as a coach he is nobody’s patsy. He named Raul as his captain for this tournament and his instinct told him the fading Real Madrid player would not be as decisive as Villa, Torres or Garcia on the opening day. He assessed the evidence of myriad midfield combinations he has tried over the past month and neither experience or orthodoxy would sway him.
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He had even made a case for a midfield trio with no competitive international caps to their names comprising Fabregas, still a teenager; Andres Iniesta, outstanding in Barcelona’s European Cup campaign; and Senna, a Brazilian who only acquired his Spanish citizenship a few months ago.
He chose Senna, Alonso and Xavi. Purists then scoured the teamsheet for a midfield ball-winner. They found him, Albelda, on the bench. They saw the goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, wearing the captain’s armband and Spain worried.
It lasted barely 30 seconds as Aragones’s team immediately adopted Barcelona’s swagger and Milan’s shape and took control. “We were exceptional,” Garcia says. “We were so effective in the defence that their strikers barely had a chance to breathe and hardly created any danger for us.”
Were they among the favourites? “Apart from possibly Brazil, there aren’t too many players as technically good as Spain’s,” Fabregas says.
“Here, there will be teams who are physically stronger, but I think Spain has a good mix of technique and fight. Of course we have a chance.”