Spain coach Luis de la Fuente on Lionel Messi: “I’m going to tell you something funny about Messi.
“I met Lionel Messi when I was coaching at Sevilla under-19s and we played a Copa del Rey game against Barcelona.
“We went to Barcelona. They had spoken very well about a boy called Messi, so we put a man-marker on him.
“In the 70th minute, it was 0-0. When they gave a yellow card to the player who was marking him, I took him off. And in 15 minutes, Messi scored four goals.
“Does that mean we are going to man-mark him? No.
“Does it mean we will pay close attention to him? Yes, but in exactly the same way that Argentina are going to have to pay attention to our players.”