David Raya: ‘When you lose a Champions League final it destroys you inside’

“N o, no, there’s someone else,” David Raya says, leaping out of his chair at Spain’s training camp in Chattanooga, Tennessee, pulling his phone from the wash bag sitting on the floor and starting to scroll. Ah, look, here it is,” he says eventually, reading from the screen: “‘… the goalkeeper, who played in yesterday’s match, was at Southport on loan from Oxford United…’ Yeah, Max Crocombe. I think that is right” And so then there were four, another name to add to the list. Peter Withe, Stan Mortensen, him, and now New Zealand’s No 1: the men who played for Southport and went to a World Cup . The first senior competitive game Raya played was in front of 1,405 people away at Macclesfield in the Conference; the last was in front of 61,035 at the Champions League final in Budapest , making him only the third footballer to play non-league football and the biggest club game of all. The other two, in case you’re interested – and Raya is – were Steve Finnan and Chris Smalling. Four days later, via an open-topped bus parade with the Premier League trophy, he joined the favourites to win the World Cup. The best days of his career, he calls them. Those ones, not these ones. “That time took me where I am now,” Raya says. He was 18 when he joined Southport. “I was with the Under-21s [at Blackburn] and there were no demands, no pressure, no sense that the three points really mattered,” he says. …