World Cup 2018: Spain in straight shootout with Portugal for top spot, but bigger problems remain unaddressed

For Spain, it is time to stop the debates - whether the unlikely figure of Fernando Hierro should be directing the campaign, whether David De Gea can continue in goal and whether Diego Costa is the right man to uphold their tradition of fluid, attacking football. Here by the Baltic, they need to win and win big.

It was always Sir Alex Ferguson’s rule of thumb that it was a marginal thing whether you topped your Champions group or finished second; all that mattered was getting through. However, in World Cup Group B, it matters very much.

Finishing second gives a route to the final featuring probable confrontations with the big beasts of world football, maybe Uruguay, probably Germany or Brazil, then possibly in the semi-finals, France. Topping the group sends you on a smoother dual carriageway towards Russia, Croatia and perhaps England.

On the surface, Spain have an easier task than Portugal. They are facing Morocco, who have already been eliminated and have yet to score a goal. Some 1,200 miles further east in Saransk, Portugal are up against an Iranian side managed by one of their own, Carlos Queiroz, who were unfortunate not to draw their last match against Spain and who can go through themselves with a win.

Portugal can be eliminated. The only unlikely combination that will send Spain home is the combination of a narrow Iran win in Saransk and a catastrophic defeat here in Kaliningrad. Right now, they are locked together on goal difference and goals scored. At the moment Portugal lead the group because they have one fewer yellow card.

As someone who survived 14 years at Real Madrid, Fernando Hierro is far too canny to start “speculating about the fourth game before we have played the third” as Spain’s unlikely head coach remarked. In Euro 2016, there were flow charts to show who and where Spain would play and much good it did them. In the first knockout round, they stumbled across Italy and were duly eliminated.

“Every World Cup is different, you can’t plan it out,” said Hierro. “You could focus on what happened in South Africa after we lost the first game. We ended up as world champions. We cannot waste time on past statistics; statistics are there to be forgotten. We have to show the world what we can do and top the group, that is our mission and that is our goal.”

Spain may be favourites to go through in first place but at their base in Krasnodar, in Russia’s deep south, there is a feeling of a team that is being very gingerly held together for the duration of the World Cup after which there will be an almighty debate about why their manager, Julen Lopetegui, came to be fired a few days before the opening match against Portugal.

For that frantic, breathless game in Sochi, Hierro claimed he picked the side Lopetegui would have wanted. Before the second match, against Iran, he said: “I am the national coach now and we all have to get used to it.” Asked if a team like Spain really just ‘runs itself’ with the implication that Hierro, is just a figurehead – like the FA appointing Trevor Brooking – he smiled: “That is a very good question.” It was one he declined to answer.

The trouble was that though they overcame Iran, 1-0, in Kazan it was a stuttering, uneven performance. De Gea once more looked nervous, the experiment of playing Lucas Vasquez wide did not work.

As they had been in the 3-3 bunfight with the Portuguese, Spain, the team that won three major championships playing one-touch football, looked over-reliant on the hulking figure of Diego Costa. In both games, they also appeared vulnerable to counter-attacks. Needing a decisive win to finish first, Hierro may play two forwards with Real Madrid’s Marco Asensio joining Costa in attack.

Asked if Spain required ‘more muscle’ in the centre of midfield, Hierro smiled: “If we had to put in more muscle we would be playing a different style of football. Muscles are not really our style. We have other qualities.”

He added: “We need to have faith and trust in ourselves. This team has been together a long time and we can’t keep second guessing what everyone else is going to do.”

There may actually be more Moroccan supporters than Spaniards in Kaliningrad – there were 40,000 in Moscow to see them lose narrowly to Portugal, undone by an early Cristiano Ronaldo goal and the failure of anyone to see Pepe’s handball in the area.

They were eliminated after conceding two goals – one of them an own-goal in stoppage time against Iran. Hierro remarked that the danger of coming across a side that has already been eliminated is that you do not know ‘how the team is going to react or what is in the coach’s mind.’

There is a sense of deep injustice around Herve Renard’s squad that their first World Cup in 20 years should have ended this way and that may fuel a real obstinacy. “When you aren’t up to the job, it’s easier to accept but to go out like this is very hard to take,” said Renard.

“I am going to play this as if we were trying to qualify. My job isn’t to try to please people. What I am paid to do is to challenge this Spanish team, cause them difficulties and make the Moroccan people even prouder of us. We will fight like lions. We are called the Atlas Lions and that is how we will play.”