French squad is one of the strongest in the world. No doubts about it. I was really nervous before the match kicked off last night. Mbappe, Olise, Dembele,... had outperformed every single team in this World Cup, so that I had concerns.

However, once the match started I could watch in the Spanish team the same pattern than in other matches. They were trying to play the ball, not rushing to attack, letting the French team to chase them and wait for the opportunity.

Going back a few days, the U19 Spanish team won their European Championship against Germany (2-0) doing exactly the same thing . Obviously you could notice a few differences, as players are different. But the spirit is the same: hide the ball, pass it to your friend and be patient. This is what we have been building the last 20 years.

Twenty years ago, Spain changed the way to play football. We were focused on individualities that hopefully could beat other teams. The results were pretty awful. We only won an European Championship back in 1964. Apart from this one, the outcome was always similar : quarterfinals (with an exception in 1984 where we lost in the Final against France).

Then Luis Aragones, Spain head coach at that time, made some changes to the squad and gave powers to the "small" players to move the ball around and be patient. The first championship they played was not good. They lost against France in the last 16 round of the 2006 World Cup. Far from losing the faith in the new model, they persevered on it.

2 years later , Spain won the Euro 2008, then 2010 World Cup and 2012 Euro, again. It's true that we have gone through the dessert for the last decade. However, the idea stayed with some changes like adding Lamine and Nico as wingers, that has added solutions to some matches. We ended up winning the Euro 2 years ago.

This year, due to these two players coming out from injuries, we received critics as we were going back to previous mistakes with an excessive amount of passing and not scoring.

Finally, we played last night's match. There has been plenty of comments about Lamine whether he is performing or not, trying to compare him with other stars such as Vinicius, Cristiano, Haaland, Mbappe and so on. All of them were performing well. But, most of his critics were not paying attention to the rest of the players.

This was the difference last night, we were a team and played like a team to beat the best squad in this tournament.

Tonight England will face Argentina for a spot in Sunday's final . I wish the best of luck to both and look forward to playing against the winner in 4 days time.

Good luck!