Viva España!

Allow me to state for the record that I have been a loyal Dutch football fan for as long as I can remember playing football. The concept of Total Football that was nurtured by the stellar international play and later grassroots developmental prowess of Dutch legend Johan Cruyff, and executed with such verve and panache by club team Ajax, in fact, continues to fuel my love for the game. But this was truly Spain's World Cup, and the Spanish victory bodes well for soccer fans everywhere.


While the performance of the Spanish team in the World Cup finals could not compare with the aesthetic fluency with which they captured the Euro 2008 title, they were clearly the better team for the sole reason that, and my Oranje heart bleeds as I type this, they tried to play football.

I have no doubt that tactically, the Dutch team executed a well-crafted, deliberate strategy. But the Dutch didn't really play football. No less than Johan Cruyff lamented the almost joyless, workman-like football that the Dutch subjected a worldwide audience to for almost two hours, claiming in the end that, "They were playing anti-football."

Spain, on the other hand, played with a passion, creativity and artistry that could only have been honed by a disciplined commitment to beautiful football. One competitor described playing against Spain as "death by a thousand passes". One is tempted to extend the metaphor to the creative arts, where a singular, sublime spectacle is often the result of a thousand deliberate, almost anonymous strokes of quiet aesthetic fervor. The Spanish team never stopped probing, never stopped moving, and never stopped attacking.

Spain also never stopped believing. The difference between the previous, prodigiously gifted Spanish squads and the current, wondrously gifted World Cup team is not merely tactical. It's almost spiritual.

Phil Ball, a writer who has been following Spanish football for some time now, noted that "In the past, Spanish sides have always looked capable of winning tournaments, only to fall prey either to their strange inferiority complex, their lack of cultural and political unity, or their tendency to lose their heads."

All that is gone now. The new Spanish team is skillful, crafty, patient, and above all, united in a way no other Spanish team has ever been. One need only look at their skillful, visionary midfielder and finals goal scorer, Andres Iniesta, to realize just how much Spain has grown as a team and as a football nation.

Ball goes on to write, "A measure of the scorer is that at the moment of his apotheosis, he took off his shirt and dedicated his goal to Dani Jarque, the Espanyol player who died in August last year of heart failure at the age of 26. It was an extraordinary gesture, to a man with whom Iniesta had never even played. It summed up the Spanish squad, mystically united, more concerned with the collective than the individual, more focused on how your team-mates feel."

Not all nations can play with the skillfulness, cohesion, and deliberate passion of Spain. But we can only hope that the other football nations learn to play like them. This Spanish team exorcized its tortured sporting past, riddled with outstanding players who never won it all, by embracing a sporting future where its talented players can celebrate goals by reminding everyone of the real goal of all sporting endeavors: to provide poignant reminders of how the human spirit triumphs when joy is shared among many, even those no longer with us.

Viva España!

Photo Credit:

Picture of Andres Iniesta comes courtesy of Telegraph.