Soccer is such a strange, maddening sport. Fans, journalists, players, we all debate for hours about it, and yet nobody can truly predict what is going to happen — not consistently, anyway.
As in any sport, one comes for the winning, but it’s the uncertainty of the journey that makes one to stick around.
Spain’s women’s national team, engulfed by the alarm bells from the moment 15 players of the senior roster asked not to be called up citing health concerns, has shown how chaos can lead to unthinkable, surreal scenarios.
Enter Laia Codina, a promising 22-year old center back carefully nurtured by FC Barcelona and yet to make her senior debut with la Selección. Sharing a locker room at Barça with most of the players who disagreed with the methods used by Spain coach Jorge Vilda, Codina ended up joining Spain’s squad after another defender picked up an injury. Simply put, roughly 15 defenders were ahead of her in the depth chart if we take by heart Spain’s previous rosters.
After 39 minutes at El Sadar Stadium against the United States on Tuesday, Codina had not only made her international debut but scored to give Spain the lead.
“Not even in dreams could I have imagined this,” she said shortly after the final whistle, still standing on the pitch, looking dumbfounded. “I’m not really sure if we’re fully aware of what we just achieved, but we knew that tonight we could make history and we did it.”
Even acknowledging Spain was not facing the strongest possible U.S. side, the result in itself — a first ever win over the Americans — would always be taken as proof of the country’s recent developments in the women’s game. That the match was won by a bunch of players largely inexperienced on the international scene, and still lacking part of the chemistry between them, is something nobody in the country would have bet on.
The sad, unavoidable part of the story is that these players —even in the context of victory — were thrown into an unwieldy, lose-lose situation. Codina can tell. She couldn’t hide her happiness during the post-match interview, as this clearly was one of the first highlights of her nascent playing career. Still, that personal moment of joy was being met simultaneously with abuse on social media by a small but loud group of Barcelona fans who called her an esquirol, someone who had let her Barça teammates down by not joining their strike.
Speaking with a hint of cynicism, many believed the easiest way out of the mess Spain’s national team found itself in would be for the games against Sweden and the U.S. to go poorly. Maybe then Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish federation, might have taken the chance to make a u-turn and sack Vilda. Ironically, though, Vilda was all but saved by the fantastic level of the players he didn’t believe in, and by the recent interest of the public in women’s soccer.
Both in Córdoba and Pamplona, his name was received with a few seconds of whistles coming from the stands when the stadium speaker introduced him, but that was it. The symbolic protest stopped there, so a bit of context may help U.S. readers here: the conversation about the Sally Yates investigation, or the longstanding protests held by NWSL players during the past years, is alien to the average soccer fan in Spain. People may have heard about the U.S. senior players’ fight for equal pay, but extract the hardcore women’s soccer fans and the out-of-the-pitch debate amounts to almost zero.
A fan in Pamplona, Spain. (Ane Frosaker/SPP)In Córdoba, where going to a la Selección game is a rare opportunity, the Estadio Nuevo El Arcángel welcomed what surely must be one of the most family-friendly atmospheres it has ever had. It was all about young adults, teenagers, and parents with children who cashed on the opportunity of getting very cheap tickets to attend a match with the whole family. Spain played the No. 3-ranked Sweden, and the locals went to cheer their national team, its players — regardless of the names printed on the shirt — and to hopefully celebrate a couple of goals.
The tricky dynamics were confined to the pitch and the bench. And there, maybe Vilda finally started to realize what he had been hiding from himself: the depth of the pool of talent at his disposal, and even the possibilities in terms of alternative game plans out of his rigid notebook.
Against Sweden, the forced switch from the Barça-led core to the Real Madrid one meant the game tempo increased and attacks trended toward the flanks, with crosses and deep balls streaming naturally. The game also let players like Irene Guerrero or Athenea del Castillo, a fan favorite, take new responsibilities and grow in importance alongside it.
A few days later, the great matchup against Vlatko Andonovski’s United States was even more insightful, as Vilda binned his preferred 4-3-3 opting for a backline of five with wingbacks, where Athletic Club’s Oihane Hernández and Real’s Olga Carmona were excellent. Moreover, it was Vilda’s midfield choices what reminded how untenable and inconsistent some of his past decisions had been.
Maitane López, the slender Atlético de Madrid’s footballer, all but confirmed she should have been considered during the summer for the position of backup holding midfielder. Vilda’s insistence on flying to England with Patri Guijarro as the only pure player for the role turned fatal when Alexia’s injury displaced Guijarro from the No. 6 role.
Next to Maitane played Claudia Zornoza. Simply speaking, the Real Madrid player was one of the players of the past season in Spain. She’s at the top of her game, showed her versatility with las Blancas by switching roles all season long and — as U.S. midfielders learned on Tuesday — her ball movement and range of pass usually makes rival teams’ press futile. Neither Maitane nor Zornoza made even the original 28-player preliminary list from which Vilda picked his EURO 2022 squad.
And so, after 96 minutes at the beautiful El Sadar Stadium, with 2-0 in the scoreboard in favor of Spain, the referee’s final whistle was drowned by the cheer of (more irony incoming) a record attendance at a Spain women’s national team match. By the looks on their faces, the Spanish players clearly savored the victory.
“It feels like something bigger,” Esther González, captain for the night, said of the friendly. “It looked like we were under scrutiny, as if we were asked to prove ourselves. We worked together as a group. We want to keep on building this team and we want to dream big. Spain still has much to say.”
Spain had finally defeated the United States, the world’s top-ranked team, in addition to a draw five days earlier against the No. 3 Swedes, and yet the tune blasting from the stadium — a beloved, classic song everybody in the country knows simply because of repetition at different celebrations — sounded somewhat incomplete.
“What will it be? What’s the mystery? It may be my great night!”
On paper, it was. The 23 footballers present deserve full credit and people will remember their names, as coach Vilda asked for. But a question lingers: Will we ever get to experience the full, unimpeded potential of this generation of Spanish players? Only time will tell.
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