Release the pressure, let it out. All of it and all of them. Again and again they had come, again and again they had been halted but they would not be denied. A dozen different players had taken aim at Emi Martínez’s goal but somehow he was still standing and time was slipping away, yet Spain refused to do so, so they came some more.
And then, suddenly, only this wasn’t really sudden, the result instead of the purest logic, the clearest justice, Pedro Porro’s deep cross found Nico Williams at the far post and he headed back. The ball dropped deep inside the Argentina penalty area, bounced on the turf and just kind of sat there: waiting, willing someone take this moment.
So at 5.42pm eastern daylight time, 37 seconds into the second period of extra time, Ferran Torres did. And with Spain’s 20th shot of this final, with all his might and all his soul, he won the World Cup. The ball travelled at 102km/h, tearing into the net, and Torres turned and tore in the other direction, sprinting to the corner where he leapt into the air and volleyed that too. Not quite so hard as he had hit the shot, but hard. From the bench and the pitch his teammates raced towards him, liberated at last, the joy flooding out. Oh, the release.
Andrés Iniesta once said that the moment the ball sat up for him in the 116th minute of the final in South Africa in 2010, he heard the silence. Maybe Torres heard it too; maybe he heard history call. More often he has heard noise. Here there was an explosion, everyone at that end of New York New Jersey Stadium going absolutely mad. Torres stood there, doing a familiar gesture: jibber-jabber hands, ears “listening” wondering where the critics were now. Then he got the biggest hug Lamine Yamal has ever given.
Late in Spain’s victory over Saudi Arabia on the day that Luis de la Fuente celebrated his 65th birthday, Torres had come on as a substitute and scored the final goal – or thought he had – only for the video assistant referee to take it from him. As they reviewed the footage, Ferran had stood with his hands in front of his mouth in a praying position, muttering to himself: por favor, be a goal; por favor, be a goal. This seemed like a portrait of the pressure, of what players put up with sometimes, a picture perhaps of desperation too. Spain were four goals up already, but here he was pleading for it to count.
In the previous game against Cape Verde, he had hit the bar. In the next game, against Uruguay, he did it again. There was something that his critics took as confirmation, something cruel in how close it was. Too often he had felt that fate somehow was conspiring against him. Turned out, it was saving something for him: the greatest goal, the greatest moment in any player’s career. Justice had been done, not just in the game, which Spain had dominated Spain’s way – at that point Argentina had not had a shot – but to this team. This family, as De la Fuente calls them, all in it together.
It felt right almost that it should be Torres, a symbol of all of them – like this was another moment shared, the collective expressed in one man who hasn’t always felt it but will now be for ever beloved. Torres became the seventh different Spain player to score in the US. At the World Cup of the stars, a team took the trophy. The European champions were the best team here, lifting that trophy having conceded just one goal, and this was a victory for a system, an ideal, a commitment to an identity. In that, it can feel almost inevitable but it is not. This was also a victory for vindication, for the belief their manager has in them and they have in each other, even if others do not.
Coming into the tournament, Rodri, the captain, had not completed his rehabilitation yet. Lamine Yamal, the star, was returning from injury too, everyone waiting for him until they realised that maybe they didn’t have to. Williams, who had provided the assist, thought he wouldn’t get there: injured for much of the season, he fought back then feared Uruguay had kicked him out of the World Cup.
Fabián Ruiz had missed most the season injured. Aymeric Laporte, imperious again, suffered with Athletic. Behind him, the debate around Unai Simón wouldn’t relent. Eric García and Martín Zubimendi came on here to win it: neither had had a minute yet, meaning Spain finished the competition with only two outfielders who have not played. Who had Pedro Porro and Marc Cucurella down as the world’s best full-backs before the tournament? Plenty do now. Mikel Merino, the superest of super subs, had played only 28 minutes since March, but appeared to rescue them. Not once, but twice.
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And then, at the biggest moment of all, there was Torres.
De la Fuente said that Spain had been “stung” by the doubts in those early games, the lack of recognition. “They are the best players in the world,” he kept saying, and it turned out he was right. Spain’s coach is a man of faith; faith in his footballers, his “family”. Every day over the last month he has exchanged messages with a friend Antonio, who is like a son to him, expressing the conviction they both felt. “It is written,” the messages say, and now it is.
