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Spain

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.

Clear and Hold

Yes, they’re all European — but the other thing all three teams left in the World Cup share are shapes featuring two deep but complimentary midfielders…one creative, one holding. “[I]t is very difficult to establish control of a game without a composed player operating in central areas who is capable of picking a pass and either slowing or raising the tempo when necessary. Deploying two destroyers leaves a team bereft of that control in the middle of the pitch and unheathily dependent on their forwards for inspiration.” (Tom Williams/Football Further)

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)