Russia coach Guus Hiddink wants his young team to avoid schoolboy errors when it gets a second chance to beat undefeated Spain in the European Championship semifinals.
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Former Socceroos mentor Hiddink blasted his Russian players for giving the ball away too easily after losing to Spain 4-1 in their group opener, and they seem to have learned the lesson.
Two weeks later, the Russians have kicked Greece, Sweden and the Netherlands out of the tournament while conceding only one goal.
“They have beaten very difficult opponents,” Spain midfielder Xavi Hernandez said.
“This match will be different, but were not changing our philosophy to dominate the ball for 90 minutes and play offensively.”
Spain knows they’re up against a different Russia this time, not least because playmaker Andrei Arshavin is back in Hiddink’s team after serving a two-match suspension in the group stage.
“There’s a lot of talk about Arshavin, but I think Russia is a bloc,” Xavi said.
“They have players that are not that well-known in Europe that are doing well, like Yuri Zhirkov on the left midfield and (striker Roman) Pavlyuchenko.”
Spain fullback Joan Capdevila got a knock in Tuesday’s training and left the session early but was not seriously hurt. The rest of the squad is injury-free.
Hiddink has slight worries, with midfielder Diniyar Bilyaletdinov, forward Ivan Sayenko and Alexander Anyukov all carrying minor injuries from the quarter-finals.
While they may be fit for Thursday’s semi-final match in Vienna, Hiddink will have to pick a team without central defender Denis Kolodin and attacking midfielder Dmitry Torbinski, who are both suspended after picking up their second yellow cards of the tournament against the Netherlands.
One possible replacement for Kolodin would be Roman Shirokov.
However, he played so badly in the first game against Spain that Hiddink dropped him and he has not played since. That leaves Vasily Berezutsky as favorite to start in central defence alongside CSKA Moscow teammate Sergei Ignashevich.
Spain, which is unbeaten in 20 matches and has won the last 10, is likely to stick with the lineup that beat Russia in the group stage and also knocked out Italy in a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals.
Coach Luis Aragones drilled the presumed starting players, led by strikers Fernando Torres and David Villa, in a practice match against the substitutes at Spain’s base camp in Neustift on Tuesday. Villa scored a hat trick against Russia and is the tournament’s top scorer with four goals.
Aragones said getting past the quarter-finals — Spain’s traditional stumbling block — had boosted the team’s confidence.
“We had a little handicap because people always talked about the same thing,” the 69-year-old coach said of breaking Spain’s quarterfinal curse.
“But the team needs to forget about those things and think positively.
“Now we’re facing a rival that is the physically strongest of the teams in the semi-finals. It will be complicated.”
Hiddink, who has coached three Spanish clubs, said he would have preferred to face Italy now.
“I’d really like the Italians because tactically you can work against them,” he said.
“It is a team where lots of people stay in one place behind the ball, but that leaves space elsewhere where you can play.”
He noted that Spain, like Russia, wants to control the match by keeping possession of the ball.
“Spain is a similar team to Russia — they want to play football,” he said.
“But if they go 1-0 up, as we’ve seen, they drop back and play on the counter-attack.”
While Hiddink will want to forget the group-stage loss, he has positive memories from his previous encounter with Spain. The Dutchman coached the South Korean team that beat Spain in a penalty shootout in the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup.
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