“Before, seven years ago, we were a soft team, which collapsed when we reached the quarterfinals, anxiety got the best of us, we were easy prey,” admitted a former international player. “Spanish water polo had a complex,” David Martín illustrated in 2019 for La Vanguardia. “What that team needed was to change their chip, to believe in themselves, create a group capable of competing, mentally convince them that they could beat the greats…”.
And so did the Barcelona coach (I/2/1977), recruited in January 2017 by Rafa Aguilar, technical director of the RFEN, to revive a vulgar team, which had not won anything since the silver medal at the 2009 World Cup in Rome, and which had been a disaster in the 2014-16 triennium.
Martín, a graduate in Psychology, former player of Atlètic Barceloneta and the national team (he hung that silver in Rome), and second to his brother Chus at his club, had to apply a lot of left hand and a good dose of strategy to “change the mentality” and convince their players that “they could compete with the greats”.
The conversion in these seven years of the Martín era has been evident: Spain left behind a long journey through the desert of nine years without medals and is currently “one of the two or three best teams in the world”, affirms Dani López Pinedo emphatically , who was the national team’s goalkeeper until the Tokyo Games, and is now responsible for People and Values ??(human resources) at CN Atlètic Barceloneta.
The results prove him right: with the bronze won yesterday against Serbia in Fukuoka (6-9), Martín’s team has accumulated six medals in six years, three in a row in World Cups (silver in 2019, gold in 2022 and bronze now ) and three in a row in Europeans (silver in 2018, silver in 2020 and bronze in 2022). Only the Olympic metal has been missing (4th in the Tokyo Games, where Hungary snatched the bronze, as in Fukuoka it separated him from the final).
How has David Martín managed to turn a scattered group of good players into a true dream team?
“It is very clear: it is a sum of factors, which is fair to personify in David Martín…”, López Pinedo starts at the invitation of La Vanguardia to analyze the phenomenon of this highly competitive selection.
“First, David is a total coach: he physically prepares the team to perfection and he is a tactical beast.” Due to his accumulated experience as a player at Barceloneta, as a coach and psychologist, Martín is an excellent analyst who has been able to adapt his team to the new demands of water polo due to the changes in regulations.
“Physical, gripping, very vertical water polo has never been good for us, so with the new rules -shorter possessions and more contact fouls- this team squeezes more mobility, nothing more, defends with intensity…” says Pinedo.
Thus, one of the inventions made in Martín has been the application of “Japanese online pressing”, inspired by the Japanese team. “They advanced to defend in a very kamikaze way, in the middle of the pool, leaving a lot of free rein; Spain does it further back, but they can recover a lot of balls, it makes the opponent further away and positional attacks take less time, with a game that is more horizontal than vertical”, describes López Pinedo. “Spain is currently the most tactically worked team; even now Martín has given it a twist and combines it with zone, seeing that the Balkans imitate him”.
Another determining factor of the status achieved by Spain is its super-qualified workforce. “Three brutal generations have come together.” There are the veterans Felipe Perrone –best player in the World Cup, in his 10th World Cup appearance– and Blai Mallarach; the youngsters from the fifth of Álvaro Granados –one of the best scorers in the world– and Alberto Munárriz; the Roger Tahull-Miguel de Toro pair of buoys; and the impudence of the youngest, such as Unai Aguirre, the best goalkeeper in the world at 21 (despite an irregular tournament), Sergi Cabanas, Bernat Sanahuja or Álex Bustos…
“Without a doubt, Spain is at its full competitive maturity,” says López Pinedo. And the 2024 Paris Olympics are less than a year away.
