It is clear that Spain-France ¼ final caused a great interest at European Championship. This match was interesting for Georgian fans too. These two teams are opponents of Georgian national team in the qualifying round of World Championship 2014. Perhaps, Temur Ketsbaia attentively watched this match held on “Donbass Arena”.
The Spanish team has played one style for many years and played it yesterday too. Vicente del Bosque successfully continues work of Luis Aragones and the Spanish team is through semifinal of European Championship twice in a row.
Controlling the ball, pressing on opponent’s half, moving while two halves, assists behind rival’s defenders, playing with one touch, non-ordinal decisions – the Spanish team achieves success at the expense of it. Sometimes it feels like the Spanish team has more players than the opponent. Each Spanish player has several variants of continuing attack. Del Bosque has so many high class players that the Spanish coach makes experiments. This time, he played without one obvious forward and put Cesc Fabregas (midfielder) in offence. The team proved once again that all of them can play in offence and defense. The team won by double of Xabi Alonso.
By the way, Alonso held the 100th match in the national team. He was named as the best player of the match and legendary Croatian forward Davor Suker gave him the prize. According to the Croatian, Alonso played well, scored two goals and deserved the prize. The football player stated: “I am very happy to hold the 100th match and score 2 goals. We played well. We are balanced team. Our strategy is to control the ball and move a lot. I cannot say why France chose defensive tactic. The first goal changed everything. We will hold a difficult match against Portugal”.
Alonso was asked if he had scored goal with head before. The Spanish answered: “You can find out this information on “Wikipedia”.
Of course, Vicente del Bosque was satisfied with playing of his team. It is the first European Championship in his coaching career and his team is through ½ final.
“We wanted to win and achieved our goal. We can control the ball and score goals. We put Silva and Fabregas in offence but Alonso proved that the whole team can attack. Alonso and Busquets are good players. They can play in defense and score goals too. Alonso is one of our leading players but I do not want to distinguish only one player because the whole team played well. It was a difficult match and we did not gain victory easily. There are not easy matches at European Championship. We will play against France in the qualifying round of World Championship” – stated the Spanish coach.
Del Bosque was asked about playing tactic of Laurent Blanc. The Spanish answered:
“I do not want to talk about the head coach of the French team. Alonso scored the first goal after the assist of Jordi Alba. Overall, we played better than France”.
Journalists were interested if the Spanish team would return to Poland and prepare for the match against Portugal or if they would stay in Donetsk where they will hold ½ final match on June 27. According to the coach, the team will leave for Poland.
The French team could not play well against Spain. Ribery, Benzema and Nasri could not play well. It was surprising that Nasri was not in lineup but neither he, Menez and Giroud could strengthen offensive line of the French team.
After the match Laurent Blanc mentioned that the whole team was disappointed because of not going through ½ final:
“We are all disappointed. It was difficult to stop Alba and Iniesta. We wanted to end up the first half 0:0 but we could not do it. We knew that the left wing would play well. We wanted our left wing to play well too because Ribery acted. If not many technical mistakes, we could have caused troubles for the rival. We could not save the match after losing 0:1. It would have been better if the second half started with 0:0 or 1:1. The Spanish team controlled the match and it was difficult to do anything when the score became 0:2. The team did everything for victory but we had a few chance of scoring goal. We will analyze everything for future”.
Blanc was asked which team he considered as a favorite of the championship. He answered:
“Spain and Germany are favorites. Spain can control the ball but Germany is a strong team too”.
“Donbass Arena” was not fully crowded at the match. There were 47000 fans when the stadium can contain 57000 fans. By the way, several hours before the start of the match, people sold tickets.
As for the fans, there were not many Spanish fans. But they were majority in comparison with French ones. Though, ‘Ukraine, Ukraine” was often heard at the stadium.
Lasha Tabagari, special correspondent of worldsport.ge from Donetsk
Photos by author
