A “boring” Spain side never looked like hurting Russia in their shock World Cup round of 16 exit, according to Kevin Kilbane.
Despite dominating the possession statistics and completing over 1100 passes, Spain offered little penetration and only had nine shots on target across the 120 minutes.
Kilbane revealed he did not enjoy watching La Roja’s performance last night, while likening them to Arsenal and criticising their lack of attack.
“Spain, I want to say, I thought they were boring,” he said.
“I do not enjoy watching that type of football where they’re never going to hurt anyone, penetrate anyone. It reminded me, and I said it last night, of watching Arsenal. That game last night is exactly how Arsenal play.
“They’ll pass you to death off the pitch, but they’ll never hurt you, and I personally think it’s a boring watch cause there’s no excitement in the games.”
“You look at all the stats, and everything is stacking up to say Spain have dominated. They had over 1000 completed passes, up against I think it was around 150-200 passes that were completed from Russia.
“You wouldn’t want to say arrogance, but they have that way about where ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll pass you to death, we will just continue to play the way that we do’.
“But if you stay in a game against Spain you think ‘I’ll tell you what we may not necessarily score before half time, we may not necessarily score before 60 minutes, 70 minutes - but as the game progresses you continue what you’re doing, you’re not going to hurt us, you will not get in behind us because we play a certain way, but we’ll try hurt you with a set piece, we may be able to counter-attack against you, that’s where we can hurt you.’
“Clearly that was a game plan from Russia.”
And while Kilbane did praise the endeavour of Diego Costa up front, he was largely critical off all Spain’s players, including Atletico Madrid’s Koke.
The midfielder, who missed in the shootout for Spain, was called out for lacking any forward thinking by Kilbane.
“If you are going on the stats, and it’s something that really gets to me, it was about 97-98 per cent pass completion, but Koke did nothing,” he said.
“Every pass he made was five yards out to a full-back.
“He was on the periphery throughout the whole game and he just didn’t get involved, and if you’re looking at these players you’d say yes, they’re talented players, but they offered nothing too the match.
“That was Spain in a nutshell yesterday - a lot of the talented players offered very little.”
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Written by Alex Dunne.
