10's

• Iniesta: The emotional letter from La Mancha to Torres for his withdrawal
• Fernando Torres: A farewell in the strictest privacy

The retreat of Fernando Torres alludes to a ravage of time: we have fewer and fewer active world champions left. Not to mention those in Vienna, where it all started. It is true that there are some veterans, like Ramos or Piqué , who still endure not only in active, but in the first line of demand. But that generation is becoming terminal, far away, and can only return to become a batch of young new Spanish coaches. Actually, they have everything to crystallize as such: they were winners like no one before in Spanish football, they were educated as soccer players and matured as men in many countries, styles and languages, and they were depositaries of a hegemonic way of playing for several years , which they could reinterpret and transmit. The current bench of the selection seems, by comparison, much lighter than it would be if one of these world champions occupied it with all the milis of the grass made whose single presence instills respect and eagerness to emulate any litter Recent players.

Actually, this was what failed Argentina with Maradona . The World Cup in South Africa was the great opportunity for the generation of 86, with its presumption of infallibility, to return to a technical staff with no one less than its providential man in charge. That opportunity was destroyed by the win against Germany in Cape Town, but at least it served so that there was no doubt about whether Maradona was able or not to score the goal of the English as a coach. Not only was he not capable, but he also suffered a decrease in his super powers when he found that his mere presence in a locker room did not have thaumaturgical abilities nor did he therefore become invincible by imposing hands on Argentine players.

In fact, the Argentine legacy of 86 is poor considering how many great coaches left that team that over time and recurring frustrations is becoming increasingly mythological. I think only Valdano later won a great European league as a coach. In the end, those of the 86 have been constituted as a group of old comrades with a memory of shared glory, some of them custodians of the bilardista creed and professional anecdote counters that the televisions are used to relive the 86 again and again once, whose cohesion has been seen again in the emotional reactions and in the bearers of the coffin after the death of the Tata Brown , who is not even the first one suffered by that group: even more dramatic was the shotgun shot accidentally hit Cucciufo during a hunting expedition with only 43 years.

I resort to the club culture cliché to say that similar anxiety and nostalgia are unlikely in the case of our selection. Those of 10 will keep a fraternal memory or not, I ignore it, but they will not become a living reminder that deepens the impact of subsequent failures. Some will be commentators, other Champions coaches, others will establish relationships, who knows if as managers, with the clubs from which they have emerged and with those who maintain sentimental relationships. But, after 10, we have seen enough to fear that the selection will be diluted again without too much noise in a general indifference, an alternative to the almost sixty-ninety pain of the fatalistic times, where no one will ask the protagonists of Soweto to fatigue one and again the same anecdotes to try to relive a lost happiness. Certain things that have happened to the national team in recent years are, in that sense, almost panglossian. The championships failed in the traditional way of before. Bungling intrigues as in Russia. The casual selectors. If it was a question of conferring a halo of exceptionality on 10 so that no one was called to cheat regarding the future, it has been achieved. Everything is almost as deadly as Real Madrid.

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