Spain, ten years of loneliness

Date:

After the golden age, La Roja wandered lost in two World Cups and one Euro Cup since 2012 until it started to forge its new persona

The debacle at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, in which they failed to even get past the group stage, confirmed that Spain had entered a new era and faced a future full of uncertainties. The transition from the golden years had been traumatic due to the enormous wear and tear of the main stars due to the impossibility of seeking replacement warranties for them.

Their brilliance had been so dazzling they had become irreplaceable, closing the way for rising hopefuls to break open the door. Vicente del Bosque tried to find the perfect mix of seniority and youth, experience and self-confidence, but since the Kiev final, when the decline began, he has never found it.

The successive successes in the 2008 Euro Cups – with Luis Aragonés on the bench – and in 2012 and in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, already with Del Bosque, had raised to the altar an unrepeatable generation of footballers who formed the perfect formula talent and physique. La Roja became the mirror in which the other teams looked at themselves, and also the majority of the clubs, an ideal game based on possession with an offensive verticality.

Pirlo, a legend from Italy, crushed by Spain at the Olympics in the Ukrainian capital with perfect football, summed up the general feeling of what was suffered when he faced those vintage players: “I had never suffered so much in a match .” He hadn’t stopped chasing shadows. Players and fans got used to happy endings and no one seemed to notice that the cycle change was near, that one day the story would end and another would have to begin.

And it ended suddenly, with a nightmarish prologue in Brazil, a frustrating I want and I can’t at the continental event in France in 2016 and a grotesque story in Russia two years later, when Julen Lopetegui was shocked to find a secret agreement with him. revealed. Real Madrid in a sultry image.

That made the national team very sporting and was an institutional blow to a federation that has always been plagued by controversy. Fernando Hierro took the reins of a team that didn’t look too bad, but performed well below its capabilities. Result: elimination in the round of 16 in the penalty shootout against the host.

different schedules

Living from the past was no longer an option and the present urgently needed renewal to build the foundations of the future. The catharsis had to be collective, from the profiles of the internationals to those of the coach. Bet to manage La Roja was Luis Enrique, a coach who had achieved a historic sextet on the Barcelona bench and was met with suspicion in the capital’s Madrid-friendly media. The Asturian was clear from the first moment that the regeneration of the dressing room had to be comprehensive. Or almost. Because the coach turned a survivor of the glory days into the pivot on which his entire project had to revolve: Sergio Busquets.

The team has spent the last four years forging its new persona. It has been difficult, and a lot, because it is not the same to establish the seal in a club, in which the relationship is daily and almost always with the same footballers, than to do it in a national team, in which the relationship with the players is sporadic. Players who, in addition, in some cases have to adapt to a schedule that is very different from the one they learned in their respective teams.

It gave the impression that Luis Enrique’s Spain was moving forward in fits and starts, without a set pattern and with calls with a point of eccentricity that always brought surprises. It was a trial and error full of unknowns until the Eurocup of the pandemic, Luis Enrique’s team’s first major test. He passed it with flying colors. They reached the semifinals where they lost to Italy in a penalty shootout.

Now comes the World Cup in Qatar, the test that will measure how far the reconstruction has come. It has been ten years without titles after reigning on the planet. A decade in solitude, waiting for a new turn in history.

Source: La Verdad

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Share post:

Subscribe

Popular

More like this
Related

Side effects of vaccinations – The Italian government introduces Corona committee

The Italian government wants to set up a committee...

The pressure is on – How retailers can compete with online giants

Where can I get the product of my choice...

On the A10 – More than 10 kilometers of traffic jam on Good Friday

Easter tourist traffic on the Tauernautobahn (A10) in Salzburg...