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Spain World Cup

Read of the Day: The Left Hand Takes Charge

Vicente Del Bosque — a nice guy, went the party line in Spain, but a caretaker with a soft, “left handed” approach to the easiest job in the world, nothing more than rolling out the balls and telling the Barça 7 to play like Barça. Wrong – especially about his squad list, his lineups and substitutions, his use of Busquets and Torres (integral to Villa’s success) and Fabregas, holding him until the end, which liberated Iniesta to dominate in extra time. “Nice guys do not always come last…Vicente del Bosque is a good man. He is also a good manager.” (Sid Lowe/Sports Illustrated)

(Image credit: Univesidad Europea de Madrid/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Read of the Day: The Politics of Excellence

A “thick layer of moralizing” coated the World Cup final — which is one way the match fits the rest of the tournament, a “hallucinatory month, during which morality and politics seemed to lurk in every pass, shot and tackle.” Still, there is Spain’s triumph — not brilliant, but perhaps something more durable. “Working together, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, disdaining excess, treating the ball as an object to be shared…they became collectively what none of them could be individually…The sight of an excellent team is its own reward, and maybe even its own political message.” (Harry Browne/Counterpunch)

Reads of the Day: There is No Methadone for This

The party’s over, and we’re already forgetting what she looked like. Futfanatico says reality has already been digested by the Spanish metanarrative, while David Gendelman at Fair Play says we’re all already losers. At True/Slant, Zach Dundas argued before the match that the two squads embodied the two sides of soccer: control versus incident, era versus accident. Fake Sigi says it wasn’t the worst World Cup ever, just “crap soccer masquerad[ing] as the pinnacle of the sport.” And The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle enjoyed watching the upending of North American notions of sport as a series of Hallmark moments.

Why You Can’t Truly See Bastian Schweinsteiger

The milky refractions of history: Brian Phillips at Slate argues all soccer romantics (i.e., lovers of Dutch soccer history) should be rooting for Holland’s true heirs Spain Sunday, saying that “great teams in other sports beat their opponents. Great teams in soccer beat both their opponents and the game.” Stefan Fatsis at The Goal Post wonders for whom Papa Cruyff will be rooting. And Charles Holland (!) at Minus the Shooting says such “myths of the near past” obscure our clarity of vision for national teams — we can’t see how boring Spain really is, or Bastian Schweinsteiger as subtle and sophisticated.

Life After Bambi

Is it just me, or is there palpable relief at the puncturing of Spain’s balloon of virtue? Indeed, World Cup history is littered with the failures of favored purists and romantics — Hungary 1954, Holland 1974, Brazil 1982, etc. The lesson: Soccer is about artisans, not just artists: “Football without its grinding 0-0 and 1-1 draws, without its unpredictable collisions of mind and muscle, of beauty and bruises, would be like music with nothing below middle C.” (Richard Williams/The Guardian)

Spain: It’s Not You, It’s Me

Google “shock loss Spain” this morning and you get 209,000 results – but losing is no surprise when your play is marked by “constantly bad passes, poor movement and a lack of drive from [your] host of top-class players,” says Zonal Marking. “Whilst Switzerland defended well, the most notable feature of the game was quite how bad David Silva and Andres Iniesta were when they got the ball, how anonymous Xavi was, and how frustrating the full-backs were to watch.” Meanwhile, Laurent Dubois at Soccer Politics says Gelson Fernandes’ winner for Switzerland should remind that country to pause before enacting yet another restrictive law against immigrants.