Spain, reign­ing Eu­ro­pean cham­pi­ons, got goals from four dif­fer­ent play­ers as they ham­mered Japan 4-1 in their open­ing Group C match of the Fi­fa Un­der-17 Women's World Cup at the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um, Cou­va, yes­ter­day. Af­ter a slow start, the Spaniards showed their class and pun­ished their Asian op­po­nents on the counter-at­tack. The Japan­ese start­ed sharp­er, mov­ing the ball around while the Spaniards took a while to set­tle.

The Asians were un­able to turn their ear­ly su­prema­cy in­to goals, de­spite hav­ing two good chances from Haruna Kawashima and Chi­ka Ka­to as both were de­nied by Span­ish goal­keep­er Do­lores Galar­do. When Spain fi­nal­ly took the lead in the 26th minute it was a big sur­prise, as they had yet to put any­thing to­geth­er in the at­tack­ing third. Ira­ia P�rez took ad­van­tage of a huge mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the Japan­ese goal­keep­er and cen­tre-back, round­ing both and push­ing the ball in­to an open net.

The goal seemed to rat­tle the Asians as two min­utes lat­er Spain's Alex­ia Putel­las made no mis­take with a calm fin­ish for a 2-0 lead.

The frus­trat­ed Asians re­spond­ed with a fren­zied at­tack, but they left them­selves open at the back and be­fore the in­ter­val Lau­ra Gutier­rez head­ed home a cor­ner kick to make it 3-0. On the re­sump­tion, Japan came out with re­newed spir­it, but were un­able to re­verse the course of things as Spain dom­i­nat­ed pos­ses­sion.

The Spaniards even­tu­al­ly added a fourth item in 55th minute, on the coun­ter­at­tack when Raquel Pinel com­plet­ed the move with an el­e­gant lob over the Japan­ese goal­keep­er. Ku­mi Yokoya­ma man­aged to pull a goal back for Japan a minute lat­er, but it was too lit­tle too late to change the re­sult. Spain will next face New Zealand on Thurs­day while Japan takes on Venezuela. New Zealand and Venezuela faced off in last night's sec­ond match in Cou­va.