The cruellest punishment Spain imposed on France was not that they upended them and progressed to the final; or that they reduced them to futile escape artistes in an airless glass box, or that they imprisoned France’s vaunted forward-line in a grid-iron cage, but that they pushed them to utter hopelessness, that they sucked the fight out of them, that they infused an irrevocable sense of fatalism into a group smattered with high-class football artistes, a bunch that features the most expensive footballer, the Ballon D’or and Champions League winners.