Girls who want to play like Spain are England’s future

It was coming. And while it may not feel this way right now, we may later look back with gratitude on the day Spain’s women won the World Cup.

If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, we are told. And now a generation of English girls have seen the future. They have seen Ona Batlle and Olga Carmona, they have seen Aitana Bonmatí and the 19-year-old Salma Paralluelo. Not that England’s European champions haven’t provided mighty peaks and admirable role models, too. Yet the signposts in the women’s game have been pointing in the direction of the technical for many years now. Just as house-buying is location, location, location, women’s football is increasingly a matter of technique, technique, technique. Spain passed England to