“Yes, it’s over”, Andrés Iniesta said on his way out, leaving the World Cup and the Spain team for the last time. “Sometimes goodbyes are not the way you want them to be.” Sometimes, though, they are the way you expect. It was easy to say now, listening to him talk as slowly and sadly as Spain had played at the Luzhniki Stadium but, while the pessimism was repressed and rarely expressed publicly, deep down they knew the chances of this ending in defeat were high. There were tears, Sergio Ramos’s voice breaking as he insisted that it was “extremely hard to take”, yet the flight back to Krasnodar was not funereal. They had been prepared for this from the beginning.

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And in the beginning there was a big bang. On the eve of the tournament, having informed the Spanish Football Federation five minutes earlier, Real Madrid announced that Julen Lopetegui would be their new manager. It was less than a month since he had renewed his contract as Spain coach but now he was leaving after the World Cup. After? Before. Furious, José Luis Rubiales – the new president of the Spanish Football Federation – dashed to the airport, caught a flight 1,196km south and sacked Lopetegui at dawn. As he was sitting before the media, slumped in his chair having barely slept, there were two words Rubiales repeated often: “Two days.”

Two days. Two days before the World Cup, Spain had no coach. That simple and shocking fact is the starting point of everything: of what happened and any analysis of what happened, any debate that must now be had. Lopetegui had been due to lead them but two days before the World Cup began he was gone. A few hours later they announced that the director of football, Fernando Hierro, would take over, the same Fernando Hierro who a day and a half earlier had said he was not even contemplating becoming Spain coach ever – let alone now, like this, 40 hours before it all began. “I came in a suit; I will leave in a tracksuit,” he said. He would also leave early.

Hierro’s mission, in his own words, was simple and not exactly a ringing endorsement: just don’t touch anything. It was not so much a team he had to manage as a crisis; popular, well-liked, he was a logical enough choice, given an illogical situation, one that was so avoidable. “I am here because of circumstance, not curriculum; that’s a reality,” Hierro said. Spain’s accidental manager turned the page, talked normality and tranquility. They all did. The football came as a welcome release and the opening game against Portugal certainly did, a sign that sometimes the game defeats all, but what came next helped to demonstrate that the game does not live in a vacuum. Players definitely do not.

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They moved on or claimed to. They did such a good job of looking the other way that Hierro felt obliged to remind people that this was “not easy at all” for them. But it was a mind-blowing way to begin a World Cup and moving on entirely was not easy. Relationships had changed, everything had, and most of the players were deeply unimpressed with how it had been handled. “There will be a time to tell the story,” Gerard Piqué said. If that was a hint, halfway through the tournament, Saúl Ñíguez broke ranks to say that it was not the right time to sack their manager.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spain’s opening group game against Portugal was a breathless 3-3 draw but in the matches that followed they struggled for fluency. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

It was not an ideal solution. Perhaps there was no ideal solution once the news broke and relationships had already changed, the announcement conditioning everything. Keeping Lopetegui would not have guaranteed anything. But last night, Koke noted: “They took our leader away.” A national team manager is different from a club coach: the players are there because of him, he has called them up and he had built an idea, a structure, a model over the previous two years. For all that the model may have been flawed, may have failed anyway and did not work in the final two warm-up games either – when Spain were the sluggish team of sterile possession and defensive vulnerability seen here, it was a model nonetheless.

Lopetegui’s departure partly removed that and perhaps replaced it with something for everyone to hide behind. “This team has Julen’s copyright,” Hierro said. Yet continuing it without all the tools at his disposal, the innate feel for it, the mastery of the nuances and alternatives that Lopetegui had, was complex. Increasingly, too, there were calls for him to change it, maybe even to lead a revolution, to turn his back not just on certain players but on a style, an identity. This felt oddly beyond his remit, maybe beyond his capabilities too, at least in these circumstances. He spoke calmly and well, with a gentle charisma and quiet authority, but little real content, although bit by bit football crept into his analysis.

Last night he said he had taken the job out of a sense of “responsibility”. But responsibility lay everywhere and nowhere at once; it was easy for everyone to assign it to others after all that had happened. At some subconscious level maybe it was a ready-made excuse handed to them at the beginning. At the end of it all Rubiales said he had no regrets over the decision to sack Lopetegui but he must have doubts now. It might have all been so different; or it might not have been different at all. Like Rubiales Hierro reminded those listening on Sunday night of that foundational fact: “Three days before Portugal.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fernando Hierro, pictured following Spain’s exit against Russia, took over as his country’s coach just three days before their opener against Portugal. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA

There might be something in Hierro’s argument that these are “fine lines”. But the problems felt broad, not fine. Spain never felt right and there may also be something in his analysis that football has shifted, turning more defensive. Implicitly, that suggests that Spain’s style needs a rethink – especially when Xavi has gone, Iniesta is going, and so many individuals were so below their level. Others argue that actually it was the failure to apply it correctly that was the problem. Either way, there was little clarity and no one to deliver it – certainly not the time to build it.

The players trained well, Hierro said, and they behaved well too. They had not played well – in fact they mostly played dreadfully. Few return having enhanced their reputation except perhaps Isco, Jordi Alba and Iago Aspas, who might have deserved more minutes and definitely deserved more luck from the penalty spot. Piqué and Ramos were awful: clumsy, slow, out of position and vulnerable. Throughout the side they looked flat, not in the best shape, lacking sharpness. Diego Costa scored three times but remains an awkward fit. David de Gea made just one save, although it is worth adding, which too few have, that he made just one error too. David Silva, Lopetegui’s key player, faded out. The best football came when Iniesta combined with Isco but that was fleeting.

It started badly and ended worse. Four minutes into the opening game against Portugal, Spain were down. They responded: Costa’s goal offered some hope, and for perhaps 60 minutes they played superbly. Yet they did not add the finish to go with their football. Against Iran they dominated possession but were vulnerable when Carlos Queiroz’s side chose to attack. Against Morocco they were fortunate, overrun in the second half after 20 impressive minutes in the first. But they were through – in first place and on the “easy” side of the draw too.

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For all that had happened, this was a unique opportunity. That they did not grasp it underlines how bad it got. Hierro said: “The last message I said to them before we went out was: ‘This is a World Cup. Enjoy the experience. We’re ready, we will compete and the most important thing is that, when we come back into the dressing room, we can look each other in the eye.’ And, honestly, we can.” Perhaps he said that because he knew what lay beneath. He also knows that they failed but he insisted: “My conscience is clear.” Most agreed; he was not perfect but he was not to blame. And yet the last game, perhaps the first that was his, was the end.

The team that used to deliver death by a thousand touches passed the ball over a thousand times but could not pass Russia, a limited side hoping for penalties. “Walking home,” Marca’s headline said, pointedly.

And so in the end Spain were defeated on penalties, which may sound unlucky and, as Hierro said: “It’s not a collapse, it’s football.” But their football was absent and they had defeated themselves. They didn’t get far but, given the circumstances and the play, they had probably already come further than they should.

“We have given everything we could,” Ramos said, and after everything that had happened he might have believed that was true.