“Let me loose in a prison and I’ll end up owning the place,” Pedro Porro once said. Let him loose in the penalty area and that will belong to him too. The whole world might: to him and the entire gang. When the Spain right-back burst into the box like a jail break, sprinting on to Dani Olmo’s superb layoff, and steadied himself to guide the ball into the net and score the second goal in Dallas, there was still half an hour to go in this semi-final, but it was done. They knew it was. Somehow, it was like they always had.
Porro kissed the badge and raced to the corner, his teammates streaming across the pitch and off the bench towards him. He was there to protect them from Kylian Mbappé, the tournament’s top scorer and one member of that terrifying French forward line, projected as if they were the four horsemen of the apocalypse: the toughest, most fearful men in the joint. Or so it goes. Yet he won’t back down, never has, and when it came to the decisive blow, he was the one who delivered it. Instinct had taken over, if only for an instant. And what an instant it was, guaranteeing Spain would go to the World Cup final.
This was Porro’s second goal here; he has scored more than he has allowed. There was a moment before the semi-final when he was asked where the balance lay between going at opponents and holding firm, not allowing them past you. “It depends on who you’re playing: against Belgium I was basically with [Jérémy] Doku all game. I only really went forward once,” he replied, adding with perfect timing: “And that was our goal.” Well played, sir. Well played all of you. Here, he went only once too, but it will be for ever. “Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this,” he said.
Spain, though, could. There was a reason for that a sense of certainty when Porro scored the second. Not only because the lead was two goals but because the match was theirs. Playing out exactly as planned. Because if he was there to defend, he had done that too. Because they all had; not so much through heroism but through domination, control, mastery of the game. “We knew one of the keys was keeping the ball,” Pau Cubarsí said. France had not been able to hurt them until then and would not be able to hurt them, they knew. Not if they played their way.
Which they did. When Unai Simón saved from Ousmane Dembélé on 94 minutes it was only the second time France had had a shot on target. Spain have conceded once all tournament. They were superb, a collective with no flaws. That was seen in how they took the lead and how they now held it, playing out the rest of the game, this historic occasion, with the kind of calm that hadn’t been seen since … well, since Mikel Oyarzabal scored the penalty that started it all.
Of all the people in all the world that could have stood over the penalty that put them 1-0 up, there was no one they would have rather had. “Few things in football make me nervous,” the striker said recently, and penalties are not one of them. The biggest games aren’t either. He has scored in every final he has played, including the winner against England at the Euros two years ago. From the spot, he took Real Sociedad to their first Copa del Rey title in 34 years and another one five years on. He had taken 53 and missed six, scoring 89.65%, and he wasn’t about to miss this one.
The quiet man took it with the same conviction and assuredness, the same steel, with which the selección played all afternoon. “We knew that with calm we could hurt them,” Oyarzabal said. With one break for it, they killed them off. Exhausted, Porro made way late on. From the bench he watched Spain see it out to a soundtrack of olés and with a sense of complete superiority.
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In the stands Xavi Hernández, Iker Casillas, Carles Puyol and Sergio Ramos saw it too. When they won the World Cup in 2010, Porro had celebrated by leaping into the fountain in the Plaza de España in Don Benito, Extremadura. He was a 10-year-old kid whose parents struggled to make ends meet, working all hours, his grandad Antonio took him everywhere. Now, the day after Antonio’s birthday, he and his generation are one step from emulating that side.
“This isn’t mine, it is all 26 of us” Porro said. This belonged to him and Marc Cucurella, Aymeric Laporte and Cubarsí, their other absurdly talented 19-year-old. To Rodri, who was on another plane, alongside Fabián Ruiz. To all the men who have been on the road for a month and have one more stop left, the “family”, as the coach keeps calling them, who made France look so ordinary. They may not be stars, Lamine Yamal apart, but this was a victory for the good people. Spain were Spain, just as Luis de la Fuente had asked them to be. “Tranquility is power,” he likes to say, although once in a while, when the time is just right, you have to let loose.
