Spain press and progress after Calafiori calamity

Luis de la Fuente had described Spain v Italy as a clásico, a game that could easily be a final; watching this, he might have been half right.

- Sid Lowe

The team he coaches beat Italy by an own goal, scored by Riccardo Calafiori, to win the Group of Death with a match to spare but that doesn't tell the story, nor begin to express the way they took Italy apart. The surprise was not that Luciano Spalletti's side had lost here but that they did so narrowly, somehow alive to the last.

Spain are in the next round; if they continue to play like this, they will surely go further too. Reaching the final, on this evidence, is no fantasy. The concern may be that a destruction so complete did not deliver a more comfortable victory, but what a performance this was, 20 shots fired off, 50 attacks launched, and illustrious opponents taken to pieces from the first minute to the last, when Ayoze Pérez came on and twice almost made it two. One would have to do, somehow.

In the buildup to this match Lamine Yamal had talked about the value of taking on the full-back, going one on one from the very start and refusing to let up; football, he said, is a "psychological game". If you beat him the first time, you can feel the fear, see it in his eyes. And if you don't, well, then you go back and do it again until you do. That was the theory, the idea the Spain coach drove into his two wingers; here it was in practice.