Skip to main content

‘Frightening’ Spain have 100% record, 25 players firing – and Lamine Yamal

Luis de la Fuente is excited by his squad’s variety and says his 16-year-old forward was ‘touched by God’s wand’

Luis de la Fuente is losing sleep and it’s only getting worse, yet it isn’t panic, it is preparation. Spain have known for five days where and when they are going to play their last-16 tie – Cologneon Saturday night – but not who they are going to play against, only that it will be someone who finished third in Group A, D, E or F. By they time they find out, a week will have passed since they secured their passage. When they reached the dressing room in Düsseldorf after their final group game, 11 different teams could still be their next opponents; the reward for excellence is uncertainty.

“If we’ve only slept two, three hours a night so far, we’re going to have to go a few with almost no sleep at all because we’ll have to study more opponents and be ready for anything until we know for sure,” Spain’s coach said. “It will be Wednesday night before we do but there’s no other choice. In any case, we’ll be prepared, mentally ready to try to go through.” The midfielder Mikel Merino, meanwhile, insisted: “It doesn’t matter who we get; they’re all going to be very hard.” He was probably half right: it may not matter, but not so much because potential opponents are the same level – they are not – as because surely Spain are just better than all 11 of them.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/ZsQCk8o

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0

Trump to campaign in 4 states - including in Biden's hometown - during week of Democratic National Convention

Trump plans to hold a series of events next week in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Arizona as Democrats nominate Joe Biden for president.             from USATODAY - News Top Stories https://ift.tt/3al6qn7

The danger in saying yes to Pascal Soriot’s pay rise at AstraZeneca | Nils Prately

Despite rebellion, approval of £18.7m package opens door to likelihood of US-style executive pay elsewhere Is Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, “massively underpaid”, as the chief investment officer of Florida-based GQG Partners, one of the company’s big shareholders, argued this week? Well, of course he’s not. Soriot has been paid £120m over the past decade, which is a helluva sum even for someone who has been brilliantly successful in leading what is now – but wasn’t when he arrived – the UK’s second-largest listed company. The history-turning moment in 2014, when AZ and Soriot managed to see off a bid from Pfizer’s grim number-crunchers, has probably been worth many multiples of £120m to the UK economy. But such a sum for a single employee in an organisation of 90,000 still looks absurd: Soriot doesn’t do all the work himself. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/V2FnCkM