his balls are bigger than a jabulani

It interests me that I’m spending so much time trying to defend Spain’s style of play, when it would seem to be the opposite of what I usually like. Partly this is a good sign, I hope, of my trying to learn something new. But it’s true, the impetus comes from wanting Spain to win; without that, I’d hate ‘em.

Meanwhile, Barney Ronay seems to have written an entire column using his dick as a pen. Apparently, Spain are boring because they aren’t manly, lower-class brutes:

Spain play a kind of platinum-selling dinner party football – Coldplay Football – that is clearly and undeniably high spec, but also devoid of jarringly revelatory spikes and twists. Playing against Spain must feel a little like playing a chess computer: strangled, impotent, you gawp helplessly at its robotic grace….

This is a hyper-modern style. It stands right at the frontier of what 20 years of fine macro-engineering by the game's twin governing bodies – Fifa and television – has decreed football is now going to be.

It is important to note that football has changed beyond recognition over this period. The element of concussive physicality has been decisively muted. This is no longer a violent contact sport. Watch a little of even the 1990 World Cup and you keep wondering where all the free-kicks are; how the players keep getting away with all that leaning and chopping and barging.

For more than a century this was the essential appeal of the game: moments of beauty gouged out of something unyielding and often gruesome….

Spain's is a televisual style, the evolutionary fruit of 20 years of rule-tinkering and spectacle-promotion. Football's physicality, the style that still endures in the lower leagues in England, only really makes sense in the flesh. The thrilling audible crunch of physical collision does not translate to the screen…. we crave something more flawed, a more rugged and potholed contest, less exactingly marshalled and stewarded.

Revelatory spikes … concussive physicality … violent contact … chopping and barging … often gruesome … the audible crunch of physical collision … more rugged … the real question is, why did they let a rugby fan write a column about soccer?

Comments

[Sean]

http://www.runofplay.com/2010/07/09/thirteen-world-cup-theses/#comment-10218

Phillips does all the heavy lifting, but facts are facts.

[Steven]

I liked WBE Jerry: "The fault, dear Portugal, Germany, Paraguay, lies not in the Spanish stars but in yourselves."