Beep! Beep! Beep! Fabio Capello cranked the bus into reverse and, with barely a flicker of shame, slowly reversed it into the England six-yard box. According to the Spanish media that's what he did anyway. "England," said Sport on Sunday morning, "turned Italian to beat Spain". They could hardly have proffered a greater insult. As far as the Spanish are concerned, when it comes to football, "Italian" is another way of saying "boring". Boring and cynical and defensive. Lucky, too.

"It didn't matter to Capello that he was playing at Wembley in front of his own fans. He got his team to lock themselves in their own half and wait for a miracle," the Catalan daily Sport continued, before turning to its favourite subject: Barcelona. "The selección was a victim of the ultra defensive, mean tactics that Barcelona have suffered so often," said the paper whose cover said: "Wembley is only for Barça."

The sentiment was shared elsewhere in Spain. With just two shots on target, England had defeated the world and European champions and, many in Spain said, it was not just the miracle that Capello had waited for, it was also pretty unfair. After all, as one commentator put it, for virtually the whole game "11 poppies had chased shadows".

Marca had gathered together its very own "senate" of ex-players and coaches for the game and they all agreed. The former Atlético Madrid defender Miguel-Angel Ruiz said the result was "unjust", the former national team coach José Emilio Santamaría used the same word, and Miguel-Angel Portugal, ex-sporting director at Real Madrid and coach of Racing Santander, said: "Spain deserved a different result. England won with very little." Marca's Amalio Moratella agreed: "Rarely has a team won so much with so little."

Portugal later added on Twitter: "I'd be more worried if I was English." And Santiago Segurola, one of the country's most respected commentators, noted that England could end up falling victim to the "mirage of victory".

But the "Pross", as the Spanish media bizarrely insists on calling England, had one thing going for them: fortune. This time it had not favoured the brave. The giant flower on Capello's lapel, worn in honour of the wedding he should have been at, did not go unnoticed. When someone is lucky in Spain they are said to have a flower and the England coach had a hell of a flower. The headline on the cover of AS shouted: "Capello parked the bus: ACCIDENTAL DEFEAT."

"For the same reason that there are albinos in Africa, snakes with two heads and Japanese over two metres tall, England beat Spain at Wembley," wrote Luis Nieto in the opening paragraph of AS's match report. "It was anomaly, a caprice of fate." Tomás Roncero moaned: "If Spain won their games like this I'd convert to curling rather than puff my chest out and be proud of a footballing infamy like that."

And yet Spain were far from blameless. There was a recognition that they had been, in Segurola's words, "sterile, leaden … victim of a rhetoric without substance". AS said: "Tiki-taka lacked a killer instinct, Spain ended up sending themselves to sleep with their own lullaby."

The paper's editor, Alfredo Relaño, wrote: "This was an accidental defeat but it was still a defeat and it tastes bad. Spain played badly during a period, albeit no worse than England, who showed very little. But we have to learn. Sometimes we play so well with the ball we forget about the other goal. It was like when Diego Maradona said that Spain would be world champions if the goals were at the side of the pitch not the ends."

There was another apparent factor, too: motivation. Another friendly, another defeat. Spain have now lost to Portugal, Italy, Argentina and England and some were critical of their failure to "defend the [World Cup winning] star on their shirts with honour". Marca's headline said it all: "Damned friendlies."

Still, better damned friendlies than damned quarter-finals and la selección won the World Cup with the goals at the ends, too. The Spanish used to complain that they were the friendlies world champions, always winning the games that didn't matter and never winning the ones that did. Now it's the other way round. And that's the way they like it.