Wolves From World tothe Cup!
Lopetegui chose Spain over Molineux. Was he right? Well, the man who got the Wolves job has already been fired!
WOLVES or the World Cup? It’s not a common dilemma among coaches but Julen Lopetegui had one foot in the door at Molineux this summer, but now finds himself leading Spain’s Russia 2018 campaign and taking the team into a friendly at Wembley on Tuesday.
‘I was very close to Wolves. They were very nice to me and really interested, but things happened the way they happened,’ he says, sat in Vicente del Bosque’s old office at the national team’s headquarters just outside of Madrid.
It may be cruel to call it ‘Del Bosque’s old office’ but it feels that way. It is largely unchanged since the most successful coach in Spain’s history took his coat off the peg and closed the door for the last time on an era that produced a World Cup and a European Championship. Wolves would not have been easy, but then neither is following that.
‘The generation that has just passed is without doubt the most brilliant not just in the history of Spanish football but one of the best in the history of football anywhere,’ Lopetegui says emphatically.
On the close call with Wolves, who have already sacked Walter Zenga — they appointed him instead — the 50-year-old Basque says: ‘We were working very closely together and we had been doing so for some time when the call from Spain came.
‘In the end, it wasn’t to be but I have a nice memory of the short time I was working with them because I could feel what they were trying to build. It’s a great club.’
He says he spurned interest from several Premier League clubs because he felt Wolves — about to receive huge investment — was the option with a better future. Chinese conglomerate Fosun International eventually bought the club.
Super-agent Jorge Mendes was involved in the takeover — sure to open a few doors in the transfer market — and you can tell the former Porto coach really fancied following the Spanish diaspora to England. Now he has to follow them for different reasons — almost a third of his squad are playing in the Premier League.
He dismisses the idea he could pick an all-English-based XI so let’s help him along a bit by starting from the back with David de Gea, Nacho Monreal and Cesar Azpilicueta.
Lopetegui knows what’s coming. Centre-backs? He nods knowingly. There aren’t any, not playing in England anyway. And Spain’s firstchoice pairing of Sergio Ramos and Gerard Pique are both out so it will be a makeshift back four, or even a three, against England.
Another problem is replacing Diego Costa up front. One of Lopetegui’s successes after his first four games has been making the Costa experiment work. Ahead of last night’s home game with Macedonia, Spain had beaten Belgium 2-0, Liechtenstein 8-0, drawn in Italy and beaten Albania away, all with Costa finally looking the part.
‘He has a very special way of living football and he has a character that we don’t want to change. That’s part of him,’ says Lopetegui of a player whose darker side has sometimes raised Spanish eyebrows.
‘I prefer to talk about the good things. He’s conscious of what he represents and what he can give us in footballing terms.’
In the draw with Italy last month there was a moment when Costa kicked the ball away while already on a yellow and got a rollicking from senior team-mate Pepe Reina.
‘It’s the image of the long-jumper that just brings his foot back a bit from the board so as not to touch it,’ says Lopetegui, assured of Costa’s ability to always pull back from the brink. ‘He’s a good kid,’ he says.
Lopetegui’s career as a goalkeeper took in stints at Real Madrid and Barcelona, though he was first choice at neither. He played at Rayo Vallecano, but it is as the coach of Spain’s Under-19s and Under-21s that he has really stood out.
He won the European Championship with both age categories and many of the those players are now in his senior squad. In a nod to Gareth Southgate, he says the Under-21s is the perfect place to learn how to do the senior job.
‘It means you get used to competing in a couple of games every two months and then you have your “Champions League”, which is six or seven games in the summer,’ he says. ‘That means you have a lot of time to prepare what you are going to do but very little time to make it have an impact so you have to make the most of that time and be very clear about what you want.’
He denies that this makes the job hard and even unrewarding: ‘There’s something wonderful about it because you’re on edge, you have no margin for error. You need to find a way to ensure that the little “pill” that you give the players is the right one, the right dose, and that’s fascinating and exciting.’
Even without Costa, Pique and Ramos, Lopetegui will have superior options to Southgate. ‘Every time we name a squad we commit an injustice,’ he says, being the manager who can afford to overlook players such as Atletico Madrid captain Gabi, or Pedro; or decide to wait before making Arsenal’s Hector Bellerin a regular fixture.
He also has the luxury of being able to call on a pool of players who have become more complete professionals by plying their trade in other leagues, something English players have long since stopped doing.
‘Breaking down those barriers, living in a country that is not your own and understanding a culture and a football other than your own and still finding a way to succeed makes you much stronger,’ he says of the 35 Spaniards in the Premier League.
Del Bosque was a reluctant traveller but Lopetegui will be completely the opposite. With three of his former U-21 charges — De Gea, Juan Mata and Ander Herrera — all in his plans, Old Trafford will be a frequent destination.
Of Herrera, Lopetegui says: ‘He’s an intelligent boy who has adapted to what coaches asked of him. He has managed to survive in a very physical type of football because he has been clever enough to adapt.’
For Cesc Fabregas, whom Herrera seems to have overtaken, the door is not shut but Lopetegui is yet to pick him or his Chelsea team-mate Pedro. ‘They’re both good players,’ he says. ‘Pedro is playing now but Cesc not so much. In Conte’s system it is quite hard to find a place for him.’
No one he permanently ditches from here on in will make more of an impact than Iker Casillas, whom he left out from day one. Could there be a parallel with Wayne Rooney? Lopetegui interrupts the suggestion. ‘I like him, eh! I like him,’ he says of Rooney, who remains the one England player everyone in Spain sees as world class, no matter how his stock may have fallen at home.
Getting the atmosphere right again was Lopetegui’s biggest task after the disappointments of the Brazil World Cup and France last summer.
He looks to have succeeded so far. There are some survivors from the first European Championship win in 2008 but there are plenty of young players hungry for success.
And he is doing a good job of taking the pressure off them. ‘Comparing anything to that previous success is not fair,’ he says. ‘That doesn’t mean we haven’t got good footballers. But they need to follow their own path, not someone else’s.’