Shackle Rodri the metronome and Argentina’s passion play can floor Spain | Jonathan Wilson

In the 37 minutes between England going ahead against Argentina and falling behind, they had 12% possession. It’s fair to assume that in the World Cup final Spain will provide a rather different challenge. They do not suffer the Mafeking tendency of the English, seeking to re-enact some famous siege every time they take the lead. The finalists have averaged 64% possession so far in the tournament. Spain could hardly be more different to England: their way is not of panic but of process.There is a clearly defined Spanish style, as there has been since Vicente del Bosque replaced Luis Aragonés as Spain manager in 2008, and arguably before. In that, perhaps, there is hope for England. Spain once were even greater underachievers but Aragonés inspired the revolution against the furia roja orthodoxy. The result has been three Euros and a World Cup in the past two decades, with perhaps another to come on Sunday.The patience and emphasis on ball retention can at times become predictable – no system or style is ever without flaw – but Luis de la Fuente has reinvigorated the juego de posición model. A view of the alternative in Atlanta on Wednesday, a team pathologically unable even to attempt to retain possession, is instructive of how valuable can be the capacity not to lose the ball.It helps perhaps that De la Fuente is of the system. He is not a club coach dabbling in the international game, but a federation man who has known many of his players since they were in the national youth teams. This has been a bad tournament for big names signed up by wealthy nations – not just Thomas Tuchel, but Carlo Ancelotti, Julian Nagelsmann and Mauricio Pochettino. It’s no coincidence that Argentina’s Lionel Scaloni, like De la Fuente, also took the senior job after being under- 21 coach. He knows the players, knows the style, knows the system, knows the mentality.Rodri clashes with France’s Michael Olise. A man-to-man marking job on the midfielder would stifle Spain. Photograph: Jean Catuffe/Getty ImagesJoachim Löw, similarly, led Germany to the 2014 World Cup after coming through the federation. England’s improvement in international form – four semi-finals in five tournaments since 2018, after four in total before then – came after a revolution guided by Sir Gareth Southgate, who had worked with the FA in overhauling the academy system and the England DNA project before becoming under-21 coach.It increasingly feels that international football, at the highest level, is about systems (which may be an argument for Lee Carsley, who has led England Under-21s to two European Championship successes, to have been given the senior job).Under Scaloni, there has been a self-conscious effort to restore a more traditional Argentinian game, based less on physicality (in the sense of longer passes, bigger forwards, more running; obviously this side is quite prepared to be physical when it comes to regaining possession, as best embodied by Giuliano Simeone trying to wrestle Marc Guéhi off the ball with his head) and more on short passing.That’s why their analyst Matías Manna cites the Boca Juniors midfielder Leandro Paredes as the key presence in this side. “He wins the ball a lot from the front and knows how to defend behind him,” he has said.“If a team is built around passing, it’s important to have a holder like Paredes who interacts well with the inside players and the No 10. He’s the Argentinian who best finds Messi between the lines. You can’t analyse the game individually. The game is in the relationships between players.”Manna is obsessed by the idea that everything should be integrated, that the formation is less important than the tactical and emotional bonds between players. Under Scaloni, Argentina’s greatest strength is their togetherness, the sense of common purpose, the need to endow Lionel Messi with a second World Cup to invert the old argument and give him one more star than Diego Maradona.Where Spain have abandoned the notion of la furia, Argentina have embraced it. It’s obviously not as simple as just staying in the game until Messi can do something brilliant, but equally his capacity to turn matches through ability and force of will is in an enormous asset. The Messi-inspired late surge has been the defining feature of Argentina in the knockout stage.It seems likely that Argentina will do what they did against England and set up not in the 4-4-2 of earlier in the tournament but in a 4-5-1 with Messi as a loose centre-forward and Julián Alvárez on the left. Whether Simeone is used again as an irritant on the right – his clash with Marc Cucurella could be spectacularly antagonistic – or whether Rodrigo De Paul, Messi’s more familiar bodyguard, is deployed is perhaps the biggest decision Argentina have to make.The key, though, will be to try to unsettle the Spain midfield, to prevent them settling into their rhythm, which may mean Alexis Mac Allister or Enzo Fernández effectively performing a man-to-man job on Rodri, the metronome in the Spain midfield.Cape Verde and Egypt had both exposed Argentina’s vulnerability to pace. England, bafflingly, did not try to exploit it and it’s not something that Spain can obviously do. Their great asset at the last Euros was combining suffocating possession with directness they had in wide forward areas. But injury has restricted them in this tournament.On the left Nico Williams, who was such a force at the Euros, has been restricted to substitute appearances and Álex Baena looks exactly what he is: a central creator without great natural pace filling in on the flank. On the right Lamine Yamal, who came into the tournament carrying a hamstring problem, has been looking fitter game by game, but has not yet been at his very best.There is a sense in which the final is a classic clash of the process team with a side riding an emotional wave. Passion always brings with it a risk: it could boil over to hand the cool rationalists an easy win. Should Spain take the lead, it’s easy to imagine them frustrating Argentina, denying them the ball and picking them off on the counter.But Argentina are a more self-aware side than, say, Brazil in 2014, better able to direct their drive and the longer the game goes on without a goal, the likelier Argentina fulfilling Messi’s manifest destiny becomes.