The time begins to weigh at this point. Spain have been in New Zealand for a month, braving near-zero temperatures, the strong winds that numb the fingers and carry perfectly adequate long passes out of play, the ennui so acute the whole squad and their families decided to move from their sleepy Palmerston North training base to the centre of Wellington in the middle of the tournament.
The Netherlands, for their part, have been constantly on the move from their Tauranga base in the north of the country: south to Wellington and Dunedin, west to Sydney for their last-16 game, and back again. “So many airports,” their coach, Andries Jonker, said on Thursday. “So many hotels. So many pitches. So many flights. We are the world champions of flying.”
New Zealand is a place that makes you feel its remoteness: not just in the lush rolling landscapes that seem to go on for ever, but in the dislocation of time zones and distance, the unfamiliar weather, the messages back home you know will go unread for another eight hours. And this ride is rewarding and memorable too. But when you have been riding it long enough, it needs to be the right kind of rewards and the right sort of memories.
And so to a quarter-final between two European giants scheduled for the dead of the European night: 3am in Madrid and Amsterdam. It’s not just the players putting in a shift here. Jonker recommended setting an early alarm. Spain’s coach, Jorge Vilda, reckons it’ll probably be easier to just stay up late. That’s northern and southern Europe for you in a nutshell. For all the familiarities between these two coaches and their sides, there are also dividing lines that promise to generate one of the tournament’s most fascinating encounters.
Vilda, like many former Barcelona products, comes from the Johan Cruyff school. His father, Ángel, worked as a fitness coach for the Barcelona team that won the European Cup and transformed European football in the 1990s. Almost inevitably those ideas began to filter down when Jorge embarked on his coaching career, infusing Spain’s female youth sides with Cruyff’s fluid passing philosophy before doing similar work with the senior squad. “We can start off talking about anything,” Ángel once said, “but we always end up talking about tactics.”
Jonker, for his part, yoked his career to a different Dutch genius. He was an assistant to Louis van Gaal at Barcelona and Bayern Munich before striking out on his own. You can see the Van Gaal influence in the way the Netherlands have played: the carefully structured 3-5-2 with the flank players hugging the touchline, two mobile forwards capable of peeling wide, a defence balanced between passing nous and aerial ability.
They are unafraid of going long or sitting back and playing on the counter. While it is spectacular when it works, they are also prone to long periods of claggy holding-pattern football.
Friday’s game should follow a similar pattern. Spain, the team with the most passes, the most shots and three biggest chance creators in Teresa Abelleira, Aitana Bonmatí and Jenni Hermoso, will almost certainly dominate possession and territory. The Netherlands, by contrast, will look to hit them with the quick switch of play from the centre-half Sherida Spitse, the pace of Lieke Martens and Lineth Beerensteyn running at an occasionally brittle defence, taking their template from the Japan side who beat Spain 4-0 with 22% of the ball.
None of this is very revelatory, which in a way is the point. There is a strong cultural familiarity between these sides, from the time spent by Martens and Stefanie van der Gragt at Barcelona to the midfielder Damaris Egurrola, who switched her allegiance from Spain to the Netherlands last year as a result of her treatment by Vilda. “We know everything about them,” Jonker said. “My file on Spain is very big. I don’t think they will surprise us.”
But this particular Spanish inquisition does not count surprise as one of its primary weapons. They wear you down and stress you out, they make you chase, they rain in shots and low crosses.
Hermoso looks likely to start in midfield again, a move that seems to have got the best out of the wonderful Bonmatí. Vilda claims he has “23 Ballon d’Ors” and “23 leaders” in his squad and, for all the turbulence of the past couple of years, as they have progressed through the tournament there is a growing sense of momentum and cohesion, players finally buying into a collective. “The soul of this team is growing,” Vilda said on Thursday. “At the end of the last training there was a special energy.”
Can Spain harness this energy all the way to the final? There is history to be made, a first major semi-final in 26 years, the chance to crown a generation of players reckoned to be greatest in the country’s history. This was Cruyff’s great skill, over and above anything he ever did on a tactics board: the ability to infuse players with a simple joy for the game, love of the ball, the thrill of competition.
As we reach the sharp end of this epic and gruelling voyage, it is a quality Spain will need more than ever before.
