Vignettes of some sporting spectacles unfold in fairly interchangeable order. Spain’s 2-0 dismantling of France in the first semifinal of this expanded World Cup on Tuesday came like an elegant dissection of the abstract with an unflappable sincerity and indefatigable determination.Taken at face value, the challenge of facing France truly looked like a puzzle too imposing and dizzyingly abstract to solve for any team. They were the team to beat, an attacking juggernaut crushing one opponent after another with utter disdain. The stage was evidently set for Didier Deschamps and Kylian Mbappe’s Les Bleus to embrace immortality. Yet it ended up being just a possibility because Spain arrived and injected into such a very French idea of domination an irresistibly mighty contradiction with their own sense of La Furia.An uncharacteristically banal France met their match in an uncannily beautiful Spain. A France entered the examination hall with a class-topper’s swagger and suddenly looked in an incremental confusion. A Spain, perhaps a little detached from all this pre-match chaos, turned ecstatic with the joy of passing the test with seamless proficiency.The arc of flipping the narrative was evoked essentially through the pages of Johan Cruyff’s book so embedded in the psyche of Spanish football. It was a triumph sketched in triangles.Cruyff’s obsession with possession led him to develop a model based on triangles. Regardless of his position on the pitch, a player has to position himself to keep forming geometric shapes, thus enabling him to offer a teammate more than one passing option. “It isn’t the man on the ball who decides where the ball goes, but the players without the ball,” the Dutch legend — the focal point of Rinus Michels’ Total Football — once said.Cruyff ’s arrival in Catalonia first as player and then as coach of FC Barcelona sprinkled the stardust of this idea across Spanish football’s mind-space and went on to form his ‘dream-team’ project. It has since changed hands — from Pep Guardiola to Vicente del Bosque to Luis Enrique and now Luis de la Fuente. The triumph of geometry has since been the calling card in Spain. It has provoked debate, entertained and even annoyed its audience but never been abandoned. France, entering the contest as overwhelming favourites, might have played their worst game at the worst moment of this World Cup, but they couldn’t have faced Spain at their dazzling best at a more inappropriate time either. Mbappe and his entourage were out-thought and out-fought in every aspect of the game and there could be no real complaints for the 2018 World Cupwinning manager Deschamps.In the face of Spain’s passing masterclass with all those manifestations of Euclidean geometry, Mbappe remained stuck in a stagnant space throughout the match and, as if drawn towards a black hole, his ethereal speed got sucked into the surrounding nothingness.Everything appeared to be falling in place for Spain since Lamine Yamal earned a penalty after drawing a foul from the French full-back Lucas Digne and and Mikel Oyarzabal was perfect from the spot to become the third Spanish player to score five goals at a single World Cup, after David Villa (2010) and Emilio Butragueno (1986).It was, however, the second goal which stirred a life into the team’s tiki-taka theatre with all its magic and mystique. It was the result of a build-up starting with goalkeeper Unai Simon and culminating in Dani Olmo releasing Pedro Porro with a sumptuous pass and the French full-back controlling and finishing it with the confidence of a proper No. 9.Do Spain ever get bored of their own style?Of course, it has its shadowy depths and at times it feels like a burden in itself. Who could forget how the system dissolved into a stifling cul-de-sac during the 2018 World Cup that resulted in a shock Round of 16 elimination against Russia after and enjoying 74% of possession. The agony was repeated four years later as Spain lost to Morocco in another penalty shootout in the knockouts.Spain’s defeat to Morocco in Qatar led the federation to replace coach Luis Enrique with De la Fuente, then in charge of the under-21 time. Having spent years in the country’s youth system, De la Fuente has inherited that overwhelming identity of a team that is easiest to analyse but always hardest to defeat and infused it with the winner’s mentality.There are times when art doesn’t need to defeat anyone. This is when the game elevates itself and transcends the result.
