MOST people with a vested interest in the state of the beautiful game of football must have breathed a collective sigh of relief last Sunday night as Spain beat England to win the Euro 2024 final in Berlin.
When Cole Palmer side footed the ball home in the 73rd minute to cancel out Nico Williams’s opener for Spain, so many were left with the unpalatable prospect of a team fluking their way to a major tournament win.
All those interminably long passages of meandering, rudderless, clueless football – against Serbia, Slovenia, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Holland and lastly Spain - would have been explained away as England being a team of “moments”.
The English media might have agreed to differ but it would have been no way to win Euro 2024.
There must have been so many rewrites among English football reporters in Berlin last Sunday night when Palmer equalised.
Gareth Southgate’s legacy swayed one way, then the other in those last 17 minutes.
But, when Marc Cucurella found Spanish substitute Mikel Oyarzabal with a wonderfully astute, undefendable low cross to score what turned out to the be an 84th minute winner, justice was well and truly served.
It was good for football that Spain won. They were the best team in Germany and after the 2018 World Cup finals – when the Spanish lost on penalties to host nation Russia – they had the foresight to ditch their tiki-taka style that had become a noose around their neck, inspired by Pep Guardiola’s great Barcelona team.
Tiki-taka had become self-defeating. At that time, Spain either had no proper wingers or didn’t believe in playing them.
So, they played in front of the opposition defence and made the pitch smaller.
Watching Spain go through the same passing moves over and over and over again for 120 minutes against the Russians was death by a thousand cuts.
It was possession for possession’s sake.
Spool forward six years and the Spanish were reborn. They returned to playing proper, authentic wide players; not the type that passes for wingers in the modern game who hate the thought of facing a full back one-on-one and instead recycle the ball back to their own full back. And on it goes.
Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal made Spain a joy to watch. Fabian Ruiz – the best player in the tournament – and Rodri were also huge assets in the middle of the field.
Williams and Yamal got chalk on their boots in every game and made the pitch bigger.
In an interview, England wide player Anthony Gordon made a very simple but profoundly important point during the Euros when he said that wingers shouldn’t always worry about losing the ball.
Spain were the bravest team at the Euros too. They trusted themselves in possession. They trusted their high press and trusted that teams would struggle to get out.
England were cowardly and conservative. They didn’t press. They parked the bus.
They didn’t trust themselves and clearly not the tactics employed by Gareth Southgate.
Instead, they fashioned a never-say-die identity through generally getting lucky – and nearly won the Euros in the same way Greece did in 2004.
They say history is written by the winners, and, by extension, winners set trends. You would like to think that some grassroots coaches out there have watched Spain’s bravery over the last four weeks and start to put their trust in old-fashioned wing play.
That the eight-year-old dribbler who might be a little bit greedy and aimless with his runs right now could flourish down the line rather than being viewed as a player that is destined to remain on the fringes of his team because he’s not big and strong like the others.
Currently that eight-year-old dribbler is - whisper it - a bit of a liability.
A lot of youth coaches can’t countenance liabilities – or luxury players, as they might call them, because the next game is a must-win. And the game after that is a must-win game too.
What happens is that, sub-consciously or otherwise, coaches start to de-invest in the technical aspects of players because in youth football athleticism and physicality usually, although not always, trump skill, cleverness and imagination.
The casual observer might imagine youth football to be a nice and easy introduction to football when it’s the exact opposite.
It’s Darwinian in many aspects. Grassroots football can have a seriously deformed look about it sometimes. For football associations, it’s desperately hard to regulate it as most of the coaching is voluntary and carried out by parents to a large degree.
You encounter some exceptional parent/coaches. I’ve met many of them.
And you encounter others who can’t see the big picture of individual development within a team environment.
On the sideline, it is difficult for a coach to pull back the lens and prioritise player development over results.
That is not to run a mile from a competitive environment, however, because most things in life our competitive – and there’s no better place to learn some life lessons than between the white lines.
So, when we watch these major tournaments and lament the lack of imagination and creativity, a lot of it can often be traced back to a player’s grassroots experiences – where the athletic kid got more game-time than the tricky dribbler.
The athletic kid thundered through the ranks while the tricky dribbler trundled on, feeling like a spare part, and eventually started to pass, pass, pass – and that wonderfully innate sense of skipping by an opponent on a sixpence was sacrificed, forever as it happens.
That dribbling talent has nothing to do with the coach. And sometimes that’s part of the problem, as a lot of youth coaches must own the copyright of everything that happens on the pitch. And all the reflected glory must be theirs.
But there are shafts of wonderful light too. Somebody believed in Yamine Lamal’s raw talent when he was a kid and nurtured him.
Somebody believed in a young Nico William and his directness and ability to be a game winner.
And there they were on a summer Sunday night in Berlin reminding us all of how beautiful the game can still be.
Champions of Europe.