England 2-3 Spain: two goals given away in the build-up, a penalty off the bar, and two substitutes who decided it

Most of the reaction to this match has been about mistakes, and I understand why. When the world champions score twice from balls you gave them in your own half, the mistakes are the easiest thing to see. But "stop making mistakes" is not a coaching instruction. The useful questions are why the mistakes happened where they did, why England still had spells on top, and why the match turned so quickly after Spain's double substitution.

The usual limits apply. I am working from the published reports, UEFA's match data and what the coaches and players said afterwards, not from full tactical footage. Where the sources agree, I state it as fact. Where they differ, I say so. Where I am drawing my own conclusion, I mark it.

What happened at Wembley?

The facts, from the FA's match report, UEFA's match data, the Guardian's report and Sky Sports:

• 2 minutes, 0-1. Marc Guehi had the ball deep in his own half and turned back towards the goalkeeper, James Trafford. He had not seen Lamine Yamal behind him. Yamal took the ball, went into the box and scored in off the post.
• 36 minutes, 1-1. From a Spain corner, Elliot Anderson won the ball, and Anthony Gordon and Jude Bellingham exchanged passes on a fast counter-attack before Gordon finished low.
• 40 minutes, 2-1. Nico O'Reilly clipped a cross into the box and Kane met it with a diving header, which deflected in off Marc Cucurella. The goal is credited to Kane.
• 54 minutes, still 2-1. After a VAR review, England were given a penalty for Rodri's challenge on Bellingham. Kane slipped as he struck it, touched the ball twice and hit the crossbar, and Spain were given a free kick.
• Straight after the penalty, Spain brought on Alex Baena for Nico Williams and Mikel Oyarzabal for Ferran Torres.
• 60 minutes, 2-2. O'Reilly lost the ball deep in his own half, Dani Olmo moved it on to Baena, and Baena curled a shot into the corner from the edge of the area.
• 74 minutes, 2-3. Baena slipped Oyarzabal through and he lifted the ball over Trafford.

Both teams started in a 4-2-3-1. UEFA's figures give Spain 52 per cent of the ball, 15 attempts to England's 13 and five on target each. England attempted 21 crosses to Spain's four. According to the match stats on the BBC's match page, England had 36 touches in Spain's box to Spain's 15. The FA and Sky both note that the result extends Spain's unbeaten run to 39 matches.

Why did Spain score from England's build-up?

The first goal is the one everybody has seen, and the detail in the reports matters. The Guardian's David Hytner describes Guehi facing upfield, trying to build from deep, with his passing lanes blocked. He checked back towards his goalkeeper and walked into Yamal. The Spanish federation's report says simply that he took too long on the ball.

That sequence has three parts, and each one is coachable. First, the passing lanes were closed: when Guehi looked upfield, Spain had shut off the forward options. Second, he did not know where the nearest presser was. Third, when the forward option was not there, his next choice was backwards, towards his own goal, rather than out of play or long. In my view, the third part is where the damage is done. Going back to the goalkeeper is a good option when the goalkeeper is open and the presser is in front of you. It is the worst option in football when the presser is behind you.

It was not a one-off either. Sky and the BBC also trace the corner that led to Torres's disallowed goal on nine minutes to a poor Myles Lewis-Skelly pass across his own area, and Torres's big chance on 27 minutes to an Anderson pass that Yamal intercepted. Then, on the hour, O'Reilly lost the ball in his own half and Baena scored. Four times, then, England gave Spain the ball, or in one case a corner, and Spain turned it into a goal, a disallowed goal or a clear chance.

Playing out from the back is not a style. It is a decision you make every time the ball comes to you, and the best teams are just as good at deciding not to.

Thomas Tuchel was blunt. "Clear-cut mistakes were too high on our side," he said, in comments reported by Sky Sports, adding that Spain were more clinical in the last twenty metres "to convert our ball losses into clear-cut chances". Gordon went further on BBC Radio 5 Live: "I think all of their goals came from us really and at that level you can't afford to do that." I would not go quite that far, because the third goal was a proper Spanish move, and Tuchel himself said as much.

Should England stop playing out from the back?

No, and the numbers from Saturday explain why the answer is more interesting than a yes or a no.

Trafford was not the problem. UEFA's player data has him completing 36 of his 40 passes, and the BBC's player ratings singled out how comfortable he looked with the ball at his feet. The damage came from outfield players losing the ball under pressure, mostly near their own box. And here is the detail I would show a squad: Spain, the team famous for keeping the ball, played 41 long balls to England's 29, according to the match stats on the BBC's match page. My reading is that the world champions do not treat a long pass as a failure. They use it when the short option is not on.

For Tottenham supporters there is a familiar echo. Aston Villa's second goal at Spurs this month came from one long goal kick that nobody dealt with, as I set out in my breakdown of Tottenham 2-3 Aston Villa. The long ball is a weapon, and a team that refuses to use it makes itself predictable to press.

What I would coach is not a style but a set of triggers for abandoning the build-up:

1. If the forward lanes are closed when you receive, the ball goes long or wide, not back. Decide before the ball arrives, which means scanning over the shoulder before every pass comes to you.
2. The goalkeeper and the nearest centre-back own the call. One word, "away" or "man on", said early enough to change the decision. It costs nothing.
3. Full-backs do not receive facing their own goal near their own box. If they are pinned there, the ball goes down the line or into the stand.
4. Have a long option ready every time. A striker or wide player positioned to compete for a long pass gives the defenders somewhere to go. Without it, every press becomes a trap.

The second-ball work that goes with this is the same I described in defending the long goal kick, from the other side: if you play long, have your second line ready for the knockdown.

What did England do well?

Plenty, and it would be wrong to write this only as a story of errors. After a difficult first half-hour, England had their best spell in the ten minutes before half-time and carried it into the start of the second half. Tuchel said afterwards that he thought his side were the better team after ten or twelve minutes. The reports are less generous, and Spain's coach Luis de la Fuente conceded only a short spell: "The game was under control most of the time, except for six to seven minutes, when England dominated us," he said, as reported by Sky Sports. Kane told ITV Sport that the spell "was as good as we've played in a long, long time."

Two things drove it. The first was the press. Tuchel told BBC Radio 5 Live: "That only goes against a team like Spain if we play man to man, so we were very brave." In post-match comments published by the FA, he said his side had "12 or 15 more ball wins in the opponent's half than Spain". The published match data I have seen does not split ball recoveries by zone, so I cannot check that figure, and I would treat it as the manager's own count. The reports do give one clear example of the press paying off. Early in the second half Anderson intercepted a Rodri pass, and the move that followed ended with Rodri's foul on Bellingham and the penalty. Gordon's equaliser came from a different kind of regain: Anderson won the ball after a Spain corner, and England scored on the counter about thirty seconds after the corner was taken.

The second was width. On BBC Radio 5 Live during the match, the former England goalkeeper Paul Robinson noted that Spain were defending very narrow and that England's success would come in wide areas. Kane's goal came from exactly there: a clipped cross from O'Reilly, the same player who would later lose the ball for Spain's equaliser. That is worth saying out loud to a young defender. One bad moment does not cancel a good one, and the job is to keep being brave with the ball in the right areas.

Was the penalty the turning point?

England thought so. "If Harry scores that penalty, I think it's match point," Gordon said afterwards, as quoted by the FA. Tuchel said the penalty "maybe would have been the decisive moment". At 3-1, Spain would have had to chase the game against a team that was pressing well and breaking quickly.

There is not much to coach about a slip. The BBC describes Kane's standing foot giving way and the ball being touched twice before it hit the bar, and the referee gave Spain a free kick for the double touch. Penalty routines can be rehearsed, and the choice of boots for the surface can be checked, but any taker can slip. What I would look at instead is what happened in the next twenty minutes, because that is where the match was really lost.

How did Spain's substitutes win it?

Spain made their double change straight after the penalty. Within six minutes Baena had scored. Fourteen minutes after that, he set up Oyarzabal for the winner. Two substitutes, one goal each, one assist between them. Oyarzabal, as the BBC noted, also scored the winner against England in the Euro 2024 final.

De la Fuente did not tie it to the substitutions directly, but in his press conference he said, in the Spanish federation's translation: "Perhaps we weren't quite right in our runs in behind, and that's when we decided to approach things differently." My reading is that Spain changed how they attacked the space behind England's defence, not just who was attacking it.

The timing mattered too, although this is also my inference rather than something the reports state. Spain made the change ten minutes into the second half, straight after the penalty miss and at the end of England's best spell: Robinson had described them on 5 Live as starting the half on the front foot, pressing high and playing in Spanish territory. UEFA's tracking data does not show England out-running Spain overall, so this is not a claim that England were exhausted. It is that a man-to-man press asks individual players to chase individual opponents, and two fresh attackers change those duels. Gordon said afterwards that he had done a lot of long-distance running at high speed and had no complaints about being taken off on 70 minutes. Tuchel said England's deep defending was excellent "except for the third goal where we got cut open through the middle". That is where a beaten press shows first: in the gaps between players who used to be connected.

It is the same pattern I described in my piece on defending set pieces and in Australia's draw with Brazil: late in a match, the opponent's substitutions change the questions, and a team that does not change its answers gets punished.

What should England take into Prague and Rijeka?

England are third in Group A3 after one match, behind Spain and Croatia, and play Czechia in Prague on Tuesday and Croatia in Rijeka on Saturday, according to UEFA's fixture list. Two away matches in five days is not the time for a new philosophy. It is the time for three simple rules.

• Keep the brave press, but plan who comes off. If the press is the plan, the substitutions have to be part of it, made before the pressers are spent rather than after a goal goes in.
• Agree the exit triggers from the build-up. The four above, walked through on the training pitch, not just shown on a screen.
• Protect the middle when chasing. Spain cut England open through the centre for the winner even with the score level. When England push for an equaliser, the players who stay behind the ball need to be the calmest on the pitch, which is the whole idea behind rest defence.

What does this mean for India against Brazil?

India play Brazil in Kolkata on Saturday. If Brazil press high, India's defenders will face the same decision Guehi faced in the second minute at Wembley, many times over. My advice to India's back line would be the same as to England's, only more so: when the forward lane is closed, go long or go out, and never turn back into a presser you have not seen. India's goal against Panama came from a long pass behind the defence, which I broke down in my review of that draw. A long ball is not a lesser option. Against a team like Brazil, it may be the best one India have.

The deeper lesson from Wembley is about decisions rather than style. England were brave and, for a spell, better than the best team in the world. Four times they gave Spain the ball in places where Spain could hurt them, and two of those cost goals. And, as I read it, Spain's bench changed the match just as England's best spell was ending. Both of those can be coached. Neither of them is fixed by talking about mistakes.

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