Cesc Fabregas
Winning this trophy can change your life
Isleep like a baby, I always have done since I was young. Just ask my mother. I can sleep for 12 hours before any big game, but there was one time I had trouble sleeping – after I had won the World Cup with Spain in 2010. For a footballer, it is the achievement of a lifetime and the pass I made for Andres Iniesta’s winning goal against Holland in the final remains the highlight of my career.
The advice we had on the 10-hour flight back from South Africa to Madrid was to try to get some sleep, because the party when we got home was going to be long and hard. But we had the World Cup trophy on the plane with us. How do you sleep?
Only Carles Puyol slept properly. He was in a really deep sleep after maybe just one or two hours on the plane. The whole squad took a picture of ourselves behind him because none of us could believe it.
We thought we knew what to expect when we landed in Madrid, because we had won the European Championship two years earlier and the reception had been crazy. It had taken us three hours on the open bus to get from the airport to the centre, where the big celebration was.
We did not think the party could get any bigger, but it was on another level for the World Cup. The same journey took us five hours and the bus felt like it was travelling at about one kilometre an hour because the streets were so full with millions of people. It was the best party ever.
When you win a big trophy with your country, everything changes, there are no colours, apart from the red of Spain. Madrid can be a difficult city for players from Barcelona to visit, but once you have won with Spain, it does not matter if you are from Barcelona, Madrid, Seville or Valencia. You are just Spanish and you are all together.
It can be quite overwhelming when you realise you helped to bring a whole country together and, remember, we did it over six years because we won three successive tournaments.
Of course, you do not appreciate it properly at the time because you are too busy celebrating and then working for the next one. It is later, when you are a bit older, that you realise how big the achievement was and what it meant to the country.
You hear the stories of how people from every corner of Spain travelled for hours and paid so much money to come and support you, either at the games or to come and celebrate when you returned, and you know how important it was.
Even when I visit Madrid now I get a good welcome and people want to talk about two things – my penalty against Italy in the Euros and the pass I made for Iniesta in the World Cup final.
There is a photograph in my house of me celebrating winning the Euros and I have a picture that a friend kindly painted of me lifting the World Cup. I put it on Instagram recently and it is very special to me.
I actually believe it was destiny that I was to make the pass for the winning goal. I had a chance to score myself about five minutes earlier when Iniesta passed to me but, even from a young age, my special quality has been to make goals. I think it was meant to be that I passed for Iniesta to score and I am still very proud that I made a big impact. Somebody will make a similar impact tomorrow in the final between France and Croatia, but I have an admission to make. Even though I have watched nearly every game of the whole tournament, I do not think I will watch the final.
Since I lifted the World Cup – which is heavier than you might imagine – with Spain, I do not like to watch any other team lift it. I would have made an exception if England had got to the final because this is my second country, and I know how exciting it would have been for many of my friends. For the semi-final, I went to a friend’s house where people were wearing England shirts and everybody was in a really good mood. Even after Croatia won, nobody was pointing fingers or blaming people, everybody was just supporting Gareth Southgate and the players, and I think that was good.
But, usually, I do not watch the final if Spain are not playing. It is a bit like a superstition, I suppose. What is for sure is that it is likely to be the biggest game any of the Croatia or France players will be involved in because you have this chance once, maybe twice if you are really lucky, in a lifetime.