Spanish riches fail to yield golden goal

From Spain, all the old worries; from Italy, all the old strengths.

Spain had 60 per cent of the ball, yet struggled to turn it into chances; Italy stayed deep, looked to strike on the break and were persistently dangerous. Vicente del Bosque played the more progressive tactics, but this was a tactical victory for the Italy coach Cesare Prandelli.

Against England in November, Spain had played David Silva as a false nine, with David Villa to the left and Andres Iniesta to the right. That night, they struggled to break down a resolute England playing the familiar two banks of four and the general theory was that, at national level, it doesn’t pay to overcomplicate things: systems that can work at club level when the players can work on them in training are not for the international game.

Russia used something approaching a false nine in their 4-1 victory over the Czech Republic on Friday, Aleksandr Kerzhakov dropping off the front line of three to create space for Andrei Arshavin and Alan Dzagoev to cut in from the flanks. But Spain went far further. At Wembley, they at least had Villa, a bona fide forward, cutting in from the left; here the front three was made up entirely of midfielders: Iniesta to the left, Cesc Fabregas as the false nine and David Silva on the right – all three players who have spent the bulk of this season playing as orthodox midfielders.

This was approaching the 4-6-0 envisaged by the Brazilian coach Carlos Alberto Parreira when, at a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, he said he saw the 4-6-0 as the future of the game: a back four with six highly technical, almost interchangeable midfielders in front of them, able to keep possession and interchange at speed, creating a swirl that attacked from unexpected almost undefendable positions. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as radical as 4-6-0 but it was certainly 4-3-3-0 rather than simple 4-3-3.

Italy hadn’t won since November, losing three successive friendlies without scoring a goal, something that prompted them to go for a back three. The system has become increasing popular in Serie A over the past season as a way of creating attacking width without sacrificing bodies in the middle, with 17 of the 20 top-flight sides using it at some stage, but it had never been used in any of Cesare Prandelli’s previous 26 games in charge of Italy.

Deploying it in the opening game of a major championship was either bold or a sign of desperation, particularly given it involved Daniele De Rossi as the libero. He has played — occasionally — as a defender for Roma this season, but never in a back three. His inexperience in the position showed in the final minutes after Fernando Torres had come on as the Chelsea striker created three chances against him, but fortunately for Italy, Torres’s finishing was — yet again — awry.

One of the reasons the back three had declined in popularity across Europe was the increasing prevalence of lone-striker systems. A back three traditionally was set up with a spare man and two markers to pick up the strikers in a dual-striker system. Against just one opponent, there is a spare man and a redundant man, whose presence means an absence elsewhere in the team.

The modern back three has two incarnations: among those sides that don’t care about possession, and those that insist on dominating it.

The latter is the Marcelo Bielsa-style, almost taunting the opposition by saying a team doesn’t care if it is overmanned at the back because it believes it will control the ball to the extent it doesn’t matter.

It was the former, though, that Italy played, which says that two spare men is actually a good thing because it offers an extra body to pick up runners. Given Spain’s strikerlessness, in fact, Italy effectively had three spare men.

With Andrea Pirlo sitting deep as a regista and Claudio Marchisio and Thiago Motta snapping and snarling either side of him, Spain were often reduced to passing the ball around neatly in front of the Italian rearguard, often breaking through the midfield only to find another line of blue shirts there to thwart them. There was a lack of pace and zip: like Barcelona against Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final, runners were never bursting through the lines: there was a lack of what Bielsa terms vertical penetration.

At the same time, Spain had a problem in the Italian wing-backs, Christian Maggio and Emanuele Giaccherini, effectively had a clear run if they wanted to break forward; the very issue Italian football has turned to the back three to avoid. Who was supposed to close down the wing backs? With a narrowish front six it should logically have been the full-backs, but if they did push forward, it left Sergio Ramos and Gerard Pique two-on-two against Antonio Cassano and Mario Balotelli.

In the end, it took a moment of individual brilliance from Pirlo to break the deadlock, his run and through-ball laying in the subtitle Antonio Di Natale to score. Within three minutes, though, Spain had levelled, Fabregas at last moving onto a pass — from Silva — at pace and thus achieving the penetration they’d been lacking. Italy, though, can be highly satisfied with the point, while Spain must decide whether to persevere with the adventurousness of strikerlessness or to return to orthodox and play a centre-forward from the start.

Subs for Spain: Navas for Silva 65, Torres for Fabregas 74.

Subs for Italy: Di Natale for Balotelli 56, Giovinco for Cassano 65, Nocerino for Motta 89.