Spain Turn It Round at Wembley: Kane's Miss and the Double Change That Won It
On paper, Saturday's Nations League meeting at Wembley was the best fixture European football could offer. Spain arrived as world champions and England as the side that finished third at the same tournament. It was also a rematch of the last European Championship final. In practice it was a gala night between the two European teams with the strongest record across the last two major tournaments.
Neither side played for a draw. Both came out open, and the match that followed reminded me of the third-place play-off at the World Cup: end to end, and never settled for long.
Spain scored almost immediately, with Lamine Yamal finding the net in the second minute. For a spell they could have put the game out of reach: Ferran Torres had two enormous chances to double the lead and missed both. Football tends to punish that, and it did. Gordon equalised in the 36th minute from Bellingham's pass, and four minutes later Harry Kane, set up by O'Reilly, put England 2-1 in front. That was the score at half-time.
The turning point came in the 54th minute. After a VAR review, Davide Massa awarded England a penalty, and a soft one in my view. Kane missed it. A third goal there would have been very hard to come back from. Instead, it was Spain who moved.
One minute later De la Fuente made two changes at once, and both men had started the World Cup final. Oyarzabal replaced Ferran Torres, the man who had missed those two chances, and Álex Baena came on for Williams. The game changed with them. Baena equalised in the 60th minute from Olmo's pass. Fourteen minutes later he turned provider, and Oyarzabal scored the winner.
England 2, Spain 3. For me, it confirmed Spain as the best team in the world right now.
What our model said before kick-off
England 32%, draw 29%, Spain 39%, with expected goals of 1.30 against 1.56. It leaned towards Spain, but only just: 7 points separated the two sides, with 29% left on the draw. Both teams to score was at 58% and over 2.5 goals at 54%, and both happened.
The scoreline on our card was 1-2, while the single most likely score in the grid was 1-1, at 12%. Right result, wrong route. The match page still shows the numbers as we published them, and the track record shows how calls like this one land over time.
The probabilities and expected goals above were read from our own prediction log, published before kick-off. The events of the match were watched by the author and checked against the official timeline. None of this is betting advice.