Before the match, I wandered through the Broad in downtown Los Angeles and stood for a long time before Jeff Koons' *Balloon Dog* — a thing that looks like play but contains extraordinary engineering, much like what Pedri and Gavi do in the centre of the park. Spain's midfield does not simply pass the ball; it suffocates you with geometry, and poor Çalhanoğlu — a fine thinker himself — will spend the afternoon chasing shadows that have already moved on. Uğurcan Çakır will be the busiest man in Los Angeles tonight, and his heroics may delay the inevitable, but one moment of Iberian precision will settle this gracefully.

Spain's midfield engine — Pedri, Gavi, Rodri — will simply suffocate Turkey's ability to build anything meaningful through the centre, and without ball circulation, Kenan Yıldız and Arda Güler are essentially ornaments on a Christmas tree. Merih Demiral will be heroic in patches, but twelve Spanish attacking sequences against one Turkish attempt tells you everything about where this match lives — Turkey are defending for their lives and hoping for a miracle on the counter. One Spanish goal, clean and clinical, is the most logical conclusion here — and Uğurcan Çakır deserves enormous credit just for keeping it to one. I did attempt a churro con chocolate this week here in Los Angeles — classic Spanish street pastry — and while the dough was perfectly fried, I confess my chocolate dipping sauce was not quite as precise as Spain's pressing game.