Spain no longer Italy’s to knock around, as two old rivals meet in crucial Euro 2016 knockout

Luis Enrique is bloodied after taking an elbow from Italy's Mauro Tassotti during the 1994 World Cup. (File photo by Henri Szwarc/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Euro 2016 quarterfinals: Spain v Italy

Monday, 8pm, Saint-Denis

It is a defining image of when Spain were international football’s nearly men, destined to depart tournaments before the end, often indignant, usually confused, always wounded. It is the photo of Luis Enrique, a dynamic, versatile player in his day, now head coach of Barcelona, with blood streaming from his nose.

The assault took place in the quarter-final of the 1994 World Cup, the weapon the elbow of Mauro Tassotti, a tough defender from AC Milan, then the reigning European club champions. Fifa took the unprecedented step of imposing a retrospective ban of seven matches on the villain, but that was of little solace for Spain, beaten 2-1, eliminated by an 88th minute goal from Roberto Baggio.

The incident seemed to Spaniards to epitomise the difference in the football cultures of southern Europe’s two big beasts. Italy were more sly, more rugged, more pragmatic, and, for that, more successful. That Italy won four World Cups before Spain won their first.

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Time was, that Italian club football also held the aces. In the early years of the Champions League, formed in 1992, Milan and Juventus monopolised the gold or silver medals. Only towards the turn of millennium did Real Madrid and Barcelona begin to displace them. In the late 1990s, Italians like Christian Vieri, the prolific striker, could thrive in La Liga; Spanish stars, lured to Serie A by its then high salaries and high standards, often struggled there.

It would not stretch a point to say that when the current generation of Spanish international footballers were little boys taking their first interest in the game, Spain had an inferiority complex about Italy. Patterns were established. Italian cunning would overcome Spanish creativity more often than not, and for all that Spain and its pundits and opinion-formers would boast that their technical skills and enterprise made theirs the nicer football to watch, Italy, land of the great man-marker, seemed more savvy.

But the Spain who take on Italy at Saint-Denis in the last 16 of Euro 2016 Monday evening will include men who discovered the antidote to an enduring sense of inferiority.

“The matches between Spain and Italy have always been close,” said Cesc Fabregas before adding, a little mischievously, “apart from the one in 2012, where we played an extraordinary game.”

That game made Spain the European champions for the second time in succession, and gave them the title they defend here in France.

That game was the final, in Kiev, of the last edition of the tournament, 4-0 to Spain. Italy had been defeated in Euro 2008, too, at the quarter-final stage, a watershed moment in the story of La Roja. The teams were inseparable over 120 minutes, goalless and destined for a penalty shoot-out. Fabregas hit the winning spot-kick, and in the duel of the goalkeepers, Iker Casillas outshone Gigi Buffon.

That paved the way for Spain to win the tournament, and as the players of that squad, Fabregas and Andres Iniesta among them, tell it, the confirmation that Spain could hold their nerve against an Italy who were then World Cup holders was the catalyst for what followed: Spain’s first senior European title since 1964, Spain’s maiden World Cup success, in Johannesburg, and then Kiev.

Both teams come to northern Paris off the back of a defeat – Italy’s against Ireland, Spain’s to Croatia. That leaves dents on the auras they had established in the first week of this tournament: Spain as the fluent, Iniesta-inspired pass masters that has been their trademark style through the years of plenty; Italy as the finely marshalled, defensively impenetrable tough guys with their Juventus core, with Buffon intimidating, and his club colleagues Leo Bonucci, Andrea Barzagli and Giorgio Chiellini his trusted sentries. All of them men with a sixth sense for snuffing out danger. And with elbows as sharp Tassotti’s.

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