Spain show their steel to flatten Germany’s hopes in brutal spectacle
Everyone knew they were fluent and clinical but here Luis de la Fuente’s side showed they could win a physical battle
And so it came to pass that the final touch of Toni Kroos’s storied career was also the final kick of this two-hour kidney-punch of a tournament game. Moments earlier Anthony Taylor’s own last act of an impossibly difficult refereeing assault course had been to award the free-kick that Kroos would float one last time into the Spanish area.
The ball was grabbed by Unai Simón, in the process sealing Germany’s exit from their own tournament. Almost as an afterthought Taylor had also just sent off Dani Carvajal for a deserved second yellow. It was just that kind of game, an endless matrix of score-settling and applied aggression.
