To mark today’s draw for next summer’s World Cup, let me offer you a bit of interesting history, and some preliminary thoughts on who might win. As I relate in my latest book ‘La Roja’ (now published in English (UK & US editions), Spanish – ‘De Rio Tinto a La Roja’, and German)
https://www.jimmy-burns.com/books/
the world of football was in a different place back in 1950 when Brazil hosted her last football World Cup. It was the first such tournament to be staged anywhere in the world since 1938 because of the political divisions and economic hardships provoked by the Second World War and its aftermath.
Spain, was still evolving as a football nation and ruled by General Franco. She had never won a major championship. She was not among the favourites either on or off the pitch. England , who had introduced football to Spain and Latin America less than a century earlier, and counted legends of the likes Wright and Ramsay, Finney and Mortensen, Mannion and Matthews in their squad,was.
Previously in this tournament, Spain and England had won their opening games, against the United States and Chile respectively. But then Spain beat Chile, and England lost to the US. The Spaniards thus faced the English with an unbeaten record in the competition so far and needing only a draw to enter the final stages.
The Spaniards were up for a fight, with the team counting on some impressive club players –Basora and Cesar (FC Barcelona), Luis Molowny (Real Madrid) and Telmo Zarra, the leader scorer of the Spanish League and widely admired bastion of Athletic de Bilbao. It was Zarra that scored the one and only goal of the game, in an action for ever immortalised by the ecstatic live commentary of Spanish national radio’s Matias Prats.
As things turned out, Spain’s involvement in the 1950 tournament ended in failure, eliminated from the final stages, after being swamped by Brazil 1-6 and beaten by Sweden 1-3. Uruguay won the tournament, much to Brazil’s chagrin. After that, Spain failed to qualify in four of the next six World Cups, and performed badly in the two that it did contest. Spain had to wait another sixty years before winning the tournament in South Africa in 2010.
Spain, or La Roja as it is now popularly known, qualified for this summer having gone through the group stages undefeated, scoring 14 goals and conceding just three times. But it is facing a major challenge to retain its reputation as the best national squad in the world. As it prepares to defend its title, the Spanish squad cannot rest on its laurels.
Over at FC Barcelona, the club that provided both the creative style and most of the players behind the success of La Roja in 2010 and its follow up European Championship win in 2012, the sense of unassailable supremacy has been lost, with the once iconic mid-field duo of Iniesta (goal scorer of the winning championship goal in 2010) and Xavi less than impressive so far this season. Moreover Spain faces tough competition from national teams that have hugely improved their performance since the last World Cup, like Argentina, Germany, and Brazil, the host nation. (England remain a rank outsider having failed to impress with any quality over the last year. )
However Spain’s coach Vicente Del Bosque has a proven track record of forging teams that not only play, on a good day, beautiful football, but can also pull back from disaster and win and he has an extraordinary pool of talent to pick from. There are his in-form other tried and tested squad players like Busquets, Xabi Alonso , Ramos, Navas, Cazorla, Javi Martinez, and Silva; stars who have particularly brilliant seasons in foreign lands like LLorente(Juventus), and Negredo(Man City); super young bloods of Spain’s hugely successful under-21 team such as Isco, Koke, and Batra, and last but no means least the Brazilian born but nationalised Spaniard Diego Costa . No other national team has such a galaxy.
