Farewell to a grand master as Iniesta quits
HIS FINAL act was symptomatic of his international career, a penalty swept emphatically home with his right foot. When it was done, Andres Iniesta walked back to the centre circle with the look of a man who knew all along that he would score. It was telling Iniesta took the first penalty in the shootout. Spain thought they didn’t need him for this game, so he was left on the bench at the start by coach Fernando Hierro. But when it came to it at the death — when men of substance and fibre were required — the 34-yearold was at the front of the queue. They did need him after all. But now Spain are gone and Iniesta has gone too. Retired from international football and on his way out of Barcelona, so if you want to watch one of the great minds of world football at work, you will have to buy a ticket to Japan. We will always remember him, though, and what he was once part of with Spain. Already the naysayers are sneering. Spain’s neat, intricate football has eventually tied only themselves in knots, they say. Tiki-taka is dead. But if there is some truth in that, then we should at least remember what it brought us. Spain were exceptional in winning the 2008 European Championship and equally effective in lifting the World Cup in South Africa two years later. Iniesta — along with his Barca compadre Xavi — was at the very heart of that and it was thrilling to watch. Here in the humidity of Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, we saw just how fine the line is when a team try to play this way. Hierro was parachuted in to the Spain job only days before this World Cup began, and he had no choice but to stay true to the creed. But from the moment Cristiano Ronaldo shocked Spain with that early penalty in Sochi more than two weeks ago, his team never looked comfortable. When football is played this way, it needs to be executed almost flawlessly in order to work. Here yesterday, the edges were too rough, the chains of communication too ragged. Spain never looked at ease and afterwards it was Hierro who took the bullets. Asked if he had ‘betrayed Spain’ by not selecting Iniesta, the coach said: ‘I left him out because i knew what this game required. ‘I am grateful to one of the greatest players of our history. ‘I thought at 70 minutes we would need something different. He was 10/10 when he came on.’ In Spain, the debate is about whether global football has caught up with a nation that has been seen as a pioneer for a decade. Hierro was not sure of the answer. ‘We used to play with a style nobody had done before,’ he said. ‘But now, it’s 2018 and many things have changed. ‘People are playing with a line of five defenders and I thought that had been forgotten. There are direct balls and lots of transition. ‘Things do change, but we have our identity and it’s recognisable. ‘With the players we have and the players coming through, we have our personality and that’s good.’ It shows what the game was like that Russian goalkeeper, Igor Akinfeev, was named as man of the match, while Spain’s goalkeeper, David de Gea, leaves the World Cup with his own questions to answer. The Manchester United keeper has made one save in the whole of this tournament and never looked confident of making a defining contribution in the shootout. De Gea will come again, of course, but Iniesta will not. Another genius has left the building.