World Cup – the final

Spanish Bombs (live at Shea Stadium) – The Clash

Okay, so it wasn’t a final for the ages.  In fact it was a pretty dire game all around.  That said, there was a lot of tension in the build-up even if the product on display couldn’t really live up.

I attach the blame in the following proportions: 50% to the Dutch, 30% to the occasion itself, 15% to the Spanish, and the remaining 5% to Howard Webb.  To elaborate…

The World Cup final is in some ways doomed to this sort of display regardless of the teams involved.  In a game that matters this much, with teams of the sufficient quality to get there, teams are always going to play a lot more cautiously.  What was the last ‘classic’ World Cup final?  I guess you could make a case for 98, but it wouldn’t be much of a case.  Far more often these days you’re going to get cagey matches between teams who are extremely well drilled and capable of executing the game plan.

It’s not a coincidence that the 3rd place play-off involves far more ‘entertaining’ football every time.  When teams don’t really have anything to play for they’ll be a lot more free.  That’s the tradeoff, though.  You get more entertaining when the stakes are lower.  It’s fun to watch high quality teams play that way, absolutely, but I’ll take the cautious 1-0 in the final over the 3-2 goal-fest in the meaningless game.  Others may differ as is their wont.

The 15% of the blame for the Spanish is an admission by me that maybe tiki-taka is a bit more of a problem than I was willing to see in my last post.  Spain is really, really good.  But it’s undoubtedly true at this point that every other country in the world is going to play in a way designed to frustrate the beautiful passing.  The difference I see between Barca and Spain (who share 6-8 players, depending on who is on the pitch at any given moment) is Leo Messi.  Not surprisingly, if you add the best player in the world to the best team you get something virtually unstoppable.  Messi has the incisive eye for goal and the capacity to dribble through a crowd of 6 defenders and somehow emerge free on goal.  Both of those skills are somewhat lacking in Spain.  In fact, it’s the single true flaw in their game.

A fit Torres could have really changed that.  He’s not in Messi’s class, but he’s still one of the 5 or 6 best attacking players in the world when he’s on.  But apart from him, they don’t quite have a player with that nose for the goal.  Villa is ridiculously good, but he’s simply a different type of player–whose immense skill gets him a ton of goals, but who is at his worst when he’s asked to play centrally as the focus of the attack. Most of Villa’s best work came when he was out on the left, for example.

That’s the thing about Spain.  As much as people complain that they’re not willing to take shots…most of their best players are not actually all that good at shooting.  Xavi may well be the best player in the world (non-Messi division), but his game relies entirely on being surrounded by a cast.  He can’t score the goals himself.  To put it another way: stick Messi or Ronaldo on Burnley and they’d still contrive to score 30 goals.  Put Xavi there and he’d be marked into oblivion and only help marginally.  Iniesta always seems to pop up in the biggest moments (see, the World Cup final) but isn’t really a clinical finisher.  He can make the occasional mazy runs into the box but those are notable for their relative rarity.  Alonso can shoot from range but isn’t that impressive in the box. Of all people, Pique sometimes looks to be one of their most composed players in front of goal.  But he’s only there a few times a game.

All of this is to say that it’s not just stubbornness that has Spain playing the way they do.  They recognize the parts of the game where they simply dwarf the rest of the world, and force the game into those channels.  So the efforts by teams to shut down the game is the big part of the problem, but Spain’s dogged insistence that they’ll continue to play the same way (because they would expose themselves to more danger if they changed things) probably does deserve some of the blame.

Howard Webb only gets 5% of the blame.  I thought he did moderately well in tough circumstances.  He made some mistakes, but I don’t think they were the sort of mistakes that ruin games.  While the foul that actually produced the red card was pretty minor, the aggregate fouls from the Dutch were so extreme that virtually anything would have deserved a second yellow for repeated offense at that point.  The only real ‘mistake’ he made that undermined the quality of the game itself was his hesitance to send off a Dutch player early.  De Jong’s karate style kick probably deserved a straight red.  Van Bommel probably should have had a second yellow.  I can see why he was cautious, but as it turns out the administration of endless yellow cards was simply not going to quell the kicking and biting.  Maybe a red would have pulled them up short.  I’ve read a surprising number of people who say that Webb gifted the game to Spain, which seems very peculiar to me.  I think he made decisions that we generous to both sides but on balance the failure to seriously punish the out-of-control play from the orange team seemed far more significant than the non-call on the Robben breakaway or other Spanish-leaning rulings. If anything, he seemed to be treating the game as a problem of two teams playing recklessly, rather than a problem of the Dutch entering the game with a clear plan to foul and foul again.

Which is to say that, despite the blame I’ve already apportioned, the lion’s share of it remains with the Dutch.  They were far more interested in kicking Spanish legs (and chests!) than the ball for the most part.  From the very start, they committed to a strategy of rotational fouling, and counted on Webb to be scared of actually sending someone off. So even though he kept fairly doling out yellows, they never made any effort to change their game. It was a good bet by them, I suppose, but I can’t see how you can play that way and then be angry about getting a guy sent off in the second half of injury time–when you probably should have been down to 8 or 9 at that point.

It was horrific to watch, mostly for the sheer cynicism of it.  And it’s not just the many dangerous or reckless challenges.  It’s also simply the number of niggling fouls, with the clear intent of disrupting the flow of the game.  It’s a bad state of affairs when one team clearly has zero desire for the ball to remain in play for longer than 30 seconds.  It makes for a stop-start game that is not pleasing, even to those of us who think goals are overrated and tactics are interesting.

Anyways, taking a step back: I’m willing to overlook these problems.  I can understand why the Dutch did what they did, and to their credit it almost worked.  If Robben had finished his chance they might well have won.  And they were mighty close to reaching penalties.  But in the end the better team won.

I think Spain has done something truly astonishing in the last three years.  As holders of both the European title and the World Cup they’ve ensured themselves a place among the truly great national sides of all time.  The only real problem there is the impression that they won this World Cup by grinding out dull 1-0s is likely to erase a lot of the good will they built up with their delicious style in the previous years.  It will probably take another top-class performance in Euro 2012 for the general public to talk about Spain as a contender for ‘best team ever.’  In by book, though, they’re already quite close.  They’ve got as much skill as any team through the ages, and they play together as a team.  They’re disciplined, have a style of play that is flexible enough for it to produce stunning 6-0s and boring 1-0s depending on circumstance and necessity.

And they’re young!  Puyol may have played his last truly big game.  And Xavi probably won’t be up to it for 2014 (but may be for 2012), but a lot of the big guys are still in their early 20s.  If Xavi has to go, they’ve got this Fabregas character who can’t even make the starting 11 right now.  Casillas should be a world-class keeper for years to come.  Torres, Iniesta, Ramos, Pedro, Busquets, Pique.  All those guys could still be going strong (some maybe even better than they are right now) for 5 or 6 years.

I got a lot of predictions right in the past month, but I also got a lot wrong. Brazil did not win and Kaka was not even remotely close to the Golden Ball.  Villa did tie for the Golden Ball (though missed out on it due to having less assists).  I was pretty accurate up to the quarterfinals–where I got basically everything wrong–and then after it.

I may post on football again in a day or two.  I’ve got a few more things floating around in my head that may or may not take on a more coherent form.  And now that things are over with, I’m really missing the World Cup.  It seems cruel that we have to wait another 1400 days for the next one.  But I know that part of the magic is that it only comes along so often.  In the meantime, I’ll watch some baseball, and wait for the club season to start up again.  This is the year Reading get back to the Premiership.  I can feel it.

Thanks for everyone who put up with my World Cup coverage for the past month.  I promise to actually write about some music soon.