Álvaro Morata just knew. Before the draw was made, the Spain captain insists he was convinced the seleccion would get Italy. They always do and, although this is a special match for a striker whose wife Alice is Italian, who spent four years at Juventus across two spells and who may go back for a third, a game he says he can’t wait to play, it is also one that sadly his family will not attend and one that doesn’t always end well. This is his third European Championship, the competition in which only Michel Platini and Cristiano Ronaldo have scored more; until now, they have all been ended by the same team.
It’s personal, and it’s painful. In 2016, his friends Leonardo Bonucci, Andrea Barzagli and Giorgio Chiellini warned him to wear a helmet, then dumped Spain out in Paris. Five years later, he scored the opening goal in the semi-final at Wembley, but missed the seleccion’s last penalty. “And who knows what would have happened had we won that shootout,” he says.
Spain beat Italy in the semi-finals of the past two Nations Leagues, reacquainted with victory, but Wembley remains, something to drive them, a vendetta. It is, in his words, still “nailed” into them: a dagger in their side, yet to be pulled out.
Morata says they “have to treat this like a knockout”, but it is not. Eighth against ninth in the world rankings, it is the first round’s biggest game and will go a long way to defining the group of death, opening a path towards a final. And this match always matters, a meeting of history and symbolism. These countries have met 40 times; this will be the fifth European Championship in a row and the fourth encounter in three years.
At Euro 2012 they played each other twice, in the group and the final, which could yet happen here. That night in Kyiv, Spain won 4-0 to close the most successful cycle seen, a symmetry to it all; it had begun against Italy too, the shootout victory on their way to the title in 2008 a kind of exorcism, injustice avenged: 88 winless years were washed away, fatalism gone. It was only a quarter-final but Fernando Torres described it as the night they won their first trophy in 44 years. It would, he said, be “mythical for generations”. Few games capture the imagination quite like it, maybe not even the World Cup final.
Nothing, though, is for ever, not success and not even the narrative: 2008 came with a kind of moral quality, the image of the rivalry in Spain had been Luis Enrique’s bloodied face, victim of Mauro Tassotti’s elbow at USA 94. In their style, they claimed something purer, lasting; this was a rivalry built supposedly on contrasting identities, tika-taka vs catenaccio. There was a nice line from the Italy manager, Luciano Spalletti, this week about how if modernity means staying up to 4am playing on the console, it is not always a good thing – “we come here to win the Euros not Call of Duty”, he said – but generations change and old assumptions, cliches, are undone.
Well, mostly. “To get here, Spain had to be Spain, always with the same philosophy,” Spalletti said. “They have absolutely everything.”
Instead, there is a kind of convergence, these two more like each other than before. “What I most like about Italy is that they are similar to us; we’re looking in the mirror,” Luis de la Fuente said. Fabián Ruiz added: “Italy are the champions, they always compete well in tournaments. They’re aggressive, intense, tactical, and Spalletti has given that touch of quality, that desire to have the ball that maybe wasn’t always the case before.”
It’s not just Italy and Spain, it is everyone, and it was always overplayed, anyway. But perhaps here it is expressed more clearly than anywhere else, and if there is something upon which Spain, certainly, are insisting, it is that they have evolved. It is a line they have consciously pushed since De la Fuente took over from Luis Enrique after the Qatar World Cup, and it sometimes felt a little forced, but against Croatia it came into focus.
In Berlin, Spain “lost” the possession battle for the first time in 136 competitive games, the coach talking about versatility, knowing how to compete, defend and counter. The way Italy always would. “You have to start with the fact that Croatia want the ball too, but we interpreted very well what moment of the game we were in, how to find space and a free man,” the goalkeeper Unai Simón said. De la Fuente said: “You don’t need to have the ball so much if you’re a team like ours with speed,” as two young, exciting wingers, aged 21 and 16, provided a new twist. Simón said: “If they’re running into the area a lot, that frightens the opponents; it frightens them a lot.”
They do not shy from it. Morata said: “Times have changed; they’re uninhibited, they talk a lot, they joke a lot, you don’t have to tell them anything.” Just make the most of them. Lamine Yamal said: “Recently the national team is playing a bit more direct with me and Nico [Williams]. We go into space, we’re not have the ball so much. Having wingers like us helps the team to have space and be able to go long.”
Morata told Marca: “In the first quarter of an hour against Croatia it was the Spain we’d seen our whole lives, then we went direct, then we played again. For other teams we’re quite unpredictable. If I were our coach I would go to bed with my head about to explode because there are 26 players and they could all play. I imagine the Italy coach asking himself: how are this lot going to play against me? False 9? Wingers coming inside to combine? Wingers going beyond? We change our way of playing various times. We’re much stronger than at the last Euros. Sometimes hitting rock bottom does a lot for you.”
