Spain’s collective trumps France’s individualism in startlingly one-sided World Cup semi-final | OneFootball

It would be simplistic to reduce Spain’s stunning World Cup semi-final win over France to merely a Collective beating Individuals.

But it wasn’t not that, either. Clearly, Spain have an abundance of world-class talent of their own to call upon. And there are several other iterations of France you’d think of before these lads when coming up with teams who were conspicuously less than the sum of their argumentative, falling-out, dissent-in-the-ranks parts.

While ‘this, in a way, is the real final’ talk is always a bit silly, it did nevertheless feel like if France were going to falter, this was where it would happen.

Against Argentina or England, the game is likely to become a shoot-out between each team’s superstars. And France would always be likely to win that. As we’ll no doubt see in what a lot of people apparently want you to call the ‘bronze final’ on Saturday night, when our suspicion is that Kylian Mbappe will stat-pad the sh*t out of it in the one World Cup fixture he still has to tick off his own personal list.

Spain are completely different. Spain are comfortably the closest thing the World Cup has to offer in style and approach to a top-level club side. There’s a cohesion and thoughtfulness to Spain that is an enormously impressive thing to put together in the short amount of time international squads spend in each other’s company.

The spirit and mentality and togetherness you genuinely get in international football is more ephemeral. It’s a feeling, a vibe. It’s very good to have it, and you won’t get far without it. But even the very best international teams just don’t have the familiarity and precision of elite club teams.

That’s not even a criticism. It’s pretty much impossible to have that, unless you draw an absurd number of your players from one club.

It’s huge testament to the Spain players themselves for how they’ve knitted it all together, and obviously the coaching of Luis de la Fuente.

This really was an astonishingly comfortable evening for Spain, whose superiority is barely reflected even in a 2-0 win. The standout players all over the pitch were in white and red tonight.

Few players have pocketed Mbappe as impressively as Pau Cubarsi, whose partnership with Aymeric Laporte in this at times seemingly impermeable Spain defence has been key. Both Spain’s starting full-backs – especially Marc Cucurella but especially Pedro Porro – were sensational.

Perhaps the decisive battle was fought, as it so often is, in midfield. But really it was barely fought at all. Rodri and Fabian Ruiz simply dominated the middle third of the pitch, running through and passing around France with indecent ease, offering us all a timely reminder that the team that wins the midfield battle wins most football matches unless you partake of a bit of self-sabotage by throwing a geriatric egomaniac up front for no real good reason.

It was nevertheless hard to tell how much of Spain’s dominance in that crucial area of the field was down to the undoubted excellence of their pair and how much down to France’s midfield being a pure disaster. Sure, one enabled and created the other to some extent, but there’s no doubt France offered a significant helping hand.

A half-fit Aurelien Tchouameni clearly needed replacing by half-time. Alas, that could not happen because alongside him the need was greater still. Adrien Rabiot was by this point a pure liability. Booked early and lucky on two further occasions to avoid a second yellow, Didier Deschamps had no choice but to hook him.

He simply couldn’t possibly come out for the second half, so Tchouameni had to struggle on. Manu Kone, unlucky not to start, stepped into the breach but could not alter what was by this point the game’s inexorable flow.

And to top it all off you had Lucas Digne having an absolute torrid. The Villa left-back was scared witless by Lamine Yamal, whose maddening insistence on being almost permanently offside against an opponent he could have beaten even giving away a five-yard headstart prevented an unpleasant evening for France becoming a humiliating one.

It was Digne who conceded the first-half penalty that set Spain on their way to victory, caught unawares by the speed with which Yamal closed down a loose ball as Digne looked to hook it clear.

It was crafty stuff  from Yamal who, as Gary Neville spotted on ITV, waited for Digne to have a scan around to see where he was before then charging in to surprise him like a child who has only partially understood the rules to What’s The Time, Mr Wolf?

Porro’s goal in the second half was the perfect way to settle the game and highlight the difference between the teams on the night. A slick, quick Spain team move left France players isolated, their defence fragmented as the Tottenham right-back burst through to clip the ball past Mike Maignan with a striker’s insouciance.

It has been quite the tournament so far for Tottenham full-backs. Porro also extends a proud record: 100 per cent of World Cup semi-final goals scored by Tottenham players have still been scored by right-backs. Djed Spence must start over Ezri Konsa tomorrow night, is what we’re saying here.

whoever emerges from the second semi-final will be a major underdog against a truly proper team, and not just because of the schedule. It’s a challenge England have faced and failed before, of course. The bad news is that it only seems to have got tougher over the last two years.