Fabregas started !
A big moment, when I saw that Fab4 was starting the final.
That Sunday night was our last night in Split and the kick-off was at 8.45 pm Croatian time, and we walked back to our hotel room after dinner and saw Michael Ballack in the tunnel with Jens Lehmann just behind him.
Fernando Torres and Cesc Fabregas, my favourite Premier League players, now had a chance to make history.
Fabregas is a tough pass-master, a king of the defence-splitting pass, mature beyond his years, able to make a difference every time he has come on as a sub
Cesc’s first start in Euro 2008 is Spain’s biggest game for 44 years.
Torres is dangerous as a lone wolf because he loves an early ball, times his runs, is a master of argy-bargy with centrebacks, improvising positions where the defender has to let him shoot or foul him. And the defenders don’t want to let him shoot because they know that Lehmann hasn’t played much for Arsenal this season and is no longer the great goalkeeper he was in 2006.
Spain have under-achieved so much that few gave them a prayer before their first game. Never has a nation with so many good players achieved so little in big tournaments.
But now they have two super-gladiators who have been toughened up by playing for Liverpool and Arsenal.
David Villa is injured and coach Luis Aragones has gone 4-5-1. I think that says to Fabregas : get forward as much as you like !
These two could be a bit like Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush.
We’ve watched both semis in the hotel. If Croatia has beaten Turkey in the quarter-final, when we were in London, we would have watched Croatia play Germany again in a bar in Split. We could have done that tonight but I wanted to see the detail of the game, wanted to be able to concentrate. I’m more interested in the detail than “atmosphere” and having a few laughs.
It’s soon clear that Spain have more ideas, more angles, more technique, and the pace of Torres scares the Germans, even from the halfway line. But that doesn’t mean Spain will inevitably win.
Ballack kicks Xavi on the heel, which signals how the battle is going, Torres sends a header bouncing against the base of the post, Fabregas hits a 20-yarder straight at Lehmann.
Then Torres powers beyond Lahm and clips his shot past the advancing Lehmann from 15 yards.
1-0 to Spain !
33 minutes.
What a player Fernando Torres is. What a killer.
1-0 to Spain, can the Germans react? Can they come back ?
Ballack and Senna go for a 50-50 and clash heads and Italian ref Roberto Rosetti soon sends Ballack off for further repairs as his stitched-up head is leaking too much blood.
Sergio Ramos makes a great recovery tackle to block a Bastian Schweinsteiger cross, then Ballack hacks Fabregas. The ref books Ballack, and he also books Casillas, who has come a long way out of his penalty area to complain. Spain launch a great five-man break that looks like being 2-0 but Iniesta fiddles around and can only win a corner off Mertesacker.
Second half starts, Ramos stands on Podolski’s foot deliberately, which should slow him down.
In 55, Xavi releases Torres in the channel but Lehmann reads it well and comes out and grabs the ball .
Kuranyi comes on for Germany and spends the next half hour kicking Spaniards.
When Xabi Alonso replaces Fabregas in 63, the Arsenal star is gutted. He walks off with shoulders slumped, as if he has been sent off.
In 78, Aragones takes off Torres and brings on Guiza of Mallorca. While Torres is like Ian Rush, Guiza is like John Aldridge, a prolific poacher who scored most of his goals from crosses, rather than through-passes.
Lehmann comes out of his penalty area and stops a ball with his wrist but makes it look accidental and somehow gets away with it. Sneaky !
And Spain win 1-0.
Before the final Fabregas has told his friend Torres, whom he calls Nando, that this will be his game.
So Spain win the best tournament we’ve seen for decades and Torres scores the winning goal.
Of the 16 teams, Greece, Poland, Switzerland and Austria are crap.The other 12 teams can all play and we’ve seen many surprises. I’ve had six bets and won one, and got my money back on one, but I’ve loved the football.
In the semis, Spain beat Russia 3-0 after Russia didn’t turn up.
So Spain beat Russia 4-1 in their first group game and 3-0 in the semi-final. Arshavin was suspended for their first two games, then took Holland apart, and then he had said he wanted to play for Barcelona, so when Russia played Spain he didn’t want the ball in the first half, so much so that in the second half they stopped passing to him. Ramos had brushed Arshavin off in the first minute with a great challenge and after that the Zenit star vanished.
In the other semi, Germany beat Turkey 3-2 in a rollercoaster game with a late Philipp Lahm goal.
And that Lahm goal was like no other goal I’ve ever seen. Because it was like a clip. As I was watching it live, it was like a clip. I had not seen the goal before but I knew what was going to happen- it looked like a clip, felt like a clip.
As I was watching that move in the 90th minute, with the score at 2-2, there was a slick exchange of passes and keeper Rustu gambled, went early to his left, and Lahm imperiously swept the ball into the other side of the goal for the winner, and I was sure I had seen it before, while being simultaneously aware that it had not happened yet, so I was seeing it for the first time. So that was very, very weird. If that ever happens again, I’ll go and see a doctor.
That was more extraordinary than losing the signal, even though I’ve never seen the picture fail in a semi-final before, let alone three times in one game
The third loss of picture came at 1-1 and when the live action was restored the score was 2-1……… Klose had headed in a cross as Rustu collided with his defender.
When the picture failed, I thought it was our TV or the hotel’s satellite dish, something local in Croatia. But we heard the next day that the game, in Basle, had been routed through Vienna before being beamed abroad, and a tremendous thunderstorm in Vienna had disrupted the feed.
In 2006, I wrote : Brazil need Fabregas & Torres. So do France, England, Germany
Maybe that piece was two years ahead of its time.