Current reign of La Roja a triumph for Spain in more ways than one

SOCCER ANGLES:A new book claims the national team's success has helped to foster a new Spanish identity, writes MICHAEL WALKER

SPAIN HELD its breath last night. Sixteen days before the reigning World Cup and European Championship holders were due to face Italy in Gdansk at Euro 2012, they were staging the Spanish Cup final. It was Barcelona versus Athletic Bilbao. As many as 13 players from those two sides could make it into Vicente Del Bosque’s final squad. That’s a lot of potential injuries.

Because of this, when Del Bosque announced his provisional squad last Tuesday, he omitted these Barca and Bilbao players. It was a precaution, as was leaving out Fernando Torres and Juan Mata until Chelsea’s Champions League final was over. The Chelsea pair have subsequently been added.

There was once a time when Spain would have been exasperated by this, when dynamic restlessness was, as cherished in the phrase La Furia, a symbol of Spanish energy.

But that was then, that was General Franco. Spain, certainly as a football nation, has since grown up. Now they are patient, the symbols are Del Bosque’s grandfatherly calm and Barcelona’s pass-and-wait. La Furia has given way to La Roja.

This, at least, is the theory put forward by Jimmy Burns in his new history of Spanish football, which is also called La Roja. In broad terms, Burns explores the idea that Spain has travelled from being a place of separate geographic identities and such cultural and regional disunity that there was a civil war 75 years ago, to a country of sporting harmony, where the national football team has created a new Spanish identity.

You can get shouted down for having such theories; Burns also knows things can change. One bad tournament and the unity forged by success in Europe and South Africa will be in jeopardy. Jose Mourinho, he hasn’t gone away, you know.

La Roja as a term, as a concept, was coined by Del Bosque’s predecessor, Luis Aragones, it is that recent. A basic translation of this is “The Reds”, as in the colour of Spain’s shirt. But that it can also mean simply “Red” gives it a political connotation in some eyes, such as those who grew up knowing Franco’s Spain.

So nothing is simple, colours matter. But colours can fade and agendas change. For now La Furia is dead and caution is not frowned upon.

Yet football is football – so even a character as famously rounded as Del Bosque will have watched last night’s game through his fingers.

He had already lost Carles Puyol to injury and this week David Villa confirmed he had not recovered fully from the tibia broken last December.

Like Del Bosque, neither of these individuals could be called insignificant. Villa is Spain’s record goalscorer. He has 51 goals in 82 appearances. He was top scorer at Euro 2008 and joint top scorer in the World Cup in South Africa. It can probably never be said that a Spanish striker has eclipsed Raul, but Villa has invaded the great Real Madrid man’s territory. That, as Burns explains, is no small deal.

The latter part of Burns’s book concerns the development of Spain, as a national team of underachievement, to one of achievement.

Puyol is as key to that as Villa. After the exuberant Barcelona captain had scored the only goal in the World Cup semi-final against Germany in Durban, Del Bosque told Burns it was another “turning point” in the evolution of this team – “I felt we had lost our fear”.

Given that Spain were already champions of Europe, fear was the last thing expected of them, but the country’s history of failure was decades long. The one of triumph isn’t.

It is easy to forget now that, aside from coming fourth in the 1950 World Cup, Spain had never reached the semi-final until that meeting with Germany two years ago.

Spain did win the 1964 European Championships – held at home – but failed to even qualify for the next three finals. In 1980 they at last made it back, only to finish bottom of their group. Four years later they made the final, but lost to France. It was an achievement of sorts.

Even as La Liga grew into the modern showpiece league we know today, as the Galactico era at Real was superseded by Barcelona’s tiki-taka movement, the national team still underwhelmed.

Spain required a play-off to reach Euro 2004; they required another to reach the World Cup in 2006.

Later that year they were beaten 3-2 by Northern Ireland in Belfast and 2-0 by Sweden in Stockholm.

Qualification for the Euro 2008 tournament they would eventually win looked much less than certain.

“I understand, the federation will question my position after this,” was how Aragones had reacted in Belfast. Some 18 months later, Spain were champions of Europe.

The Spanish federation kept faith in Aragones; he had lost his in Raul. Those are two big decisions. The scale of Raul’s career, personality and sheer presence meant that this was like dropping Roy Keane.

And initially it did not work, as the result in Sweden showed. Even a year later, Spain were not convincing. In September 2007 it took an 86th minute equaliser from Andres Iniesta to rescue a needed point against Iceland.

But Spain got over the line in their group and went on to win their first modern silverware.

That was June 2008, the same month Pep Guardiola took over the first team at Barcelona. As Burns writes of Euro 2008, “the answer lay partly in Aragones’ pragmatism and partly in the nature of the players themselves”.

In a sense, Burns argues, the football nature overcame Spanish nature. They were creating something new. Tellingly, the players of Barcelona and Real Madrid mixed agreeably on and off the pitch. They played with a certain Barca style and they gave Spain the “La Roja” that we know today.

But Burns accepts this can be fragile “until it is bedded into the culture”. Injuries to Puyol and Villa are unhelpful and if there is football angst amid the economic wreckage in Spain, it is that Barca and Real players’ good relations may have peaked. Barca’s new manager, Tito Vilanova, was poked in the eye – literally – by Mourinho earlier in the season.

But if fresh tension arises, there is always Del Bosque. A former Real player and one of their most successful managers, it would be easy to define Del Bosque narrowly as a Madrid man.

As Burns shows, however, Del Bosque’s father, a railway clerk, was a Republican in the civil war and was jailed by Franco’s regime. Del Bosque reveals the difficulties of even speaking about politics when he was growing up. He has also praised Guardiola publicly. Del Bosque is another symbol of the journey from La Furia to La Roja.

But as of last night, it was pure football rather than evolutionary theory. It has become immediate. Who does Burns think will line up at centre forward for Spain against Ireland now that Villa is injured?

“Bilbao’s Fernando Llorente, though if the Irish are thinking in those terms they’ll be in trouble. One of Spain’s strengths, as shown by someone like Andres Iniesta, is that they are flexible.”

Burns will discuss La Roja at Dublin’s Cervantes Institute on Monday evening from 6pm.

Check dublin.cervantes.esfor details.