STYLE & SUBSTANCE La Roja have carved a special place in history by redefining the game with their tiki-taka brand of football
It is only right that a unique team, as Spain are, should stand alone in the pantheon. No international side has won three major tournaments in a row before, unless you count the Olympics in the 1920s and 1930s. Since Euro 2008 they have exerted a numbing superiority over every team they have played and even those who advocate Satan for a living
might struggle to argue that Spain are not the strongest international side of all.
INVINCIBLE SPAIN
Spain's miracle has been drastically to minimise the variables of knockout football and make themselves near to unbeatable. Even a more talented Barcelona side could not come close to such invincibility. Spain have not conceded a goal in a knockout game since 2006. Iker Casillas's net has been untouched for sixteen and a half hours.
Before the night of the final, Spain had not been so spectacular at the other end, with only eight goals in seven games at the 2010 World Cup and eight in five here, yet their method of killing teams softly has an irresistible logic. The level of sustained concentration required to defend against them is almost indecent, a game of Tetris that can end only one way. If such demands were evident in an ordinary job, the Health & Safety office would have a field day.
The side generally perceived as the greatest of all, Brazil 1970,
were the antithesis of Spain; their defence was hopeless and their
attack peerless. They cannot match Spain’s longevity. With no Copa
América staged between 1967 and 1975, Brazil won just one trophy. At the
1974 World Cup they had turned into a thuggish rabble.
Spain have evolved significantly over the last four years, although their game can still be explained in one phonetically pleasing phrase: tiki-taka. Few sides have had such a concise identity, with Holland's Total Football in 1974 perhaps the only equivalent. Not since that team has football been so dramatically redefined.
BORING PLAY?
Teams who win multiple tournaments usually add stars to their shirt, just above the badge. Some will feel Spain should add an asterisk. It is a strange thing on which to reflect after such a joyous, unfettered performance, yet Spain's display vindicated only the naysayers. Discussion about the B-word has become boring in itself – it is surely more relevant to discuss whether Spain's matches are boring, a different point entirely – even if it is interesting to note that the team's heartbeat and rhetorician, Xavi Hernández, said "of course we were boring" at the 2010 World Cup, citing defensive opponents as the reason.
Spain's football is without precedent in its velvet grace but it is difficult to argue persuasively that their matches have satisfied conventional notions of football entertainment – goals, shots, engaging the viscera; that kind of thing. Their play at Euro 2012 had felt cynical and clinical, in a different sense of the word from that usually used in football; a kind of extreme tiki-taka, or tiki-takanaccio. For much of the tournament the only excitement came from the partnership of Jordi Alba and the divine Andrés Iniesta, simply the most beautiful player in football history.
Italy's relatively aggressive tactics were influential, yet the way Spain subjected them to death by silk suggested a team that had been hiding some of their light under a bushel. For plenty, rightly or wrongly, Spain will be remembered as a side who engaged the brain more than the soul and who could, with their talent, have won three consecutive titles even more impressively than they did, a binary team whose games, before the final at least, had been so predictable as to be a bookmaker's nightmare.
Spain have evolved significantly over the last four years, although their game can still be explained in one phonetically pleasing phrase: tiki-taka. Few sides have had such a concise identity, with Holland's Total Football in 1974 perhaps the only equivalent. Not since that team has football been so dramatically redefined.
BORING PLAY?
Teams who win multiple tournaments usually add stars to their shirt, just above the badge. Some will feel Spain should add an asterisk. It is a strange thing on which to reflect after such a joyous, unfettered performance, yet Spain's display vindicated only the naysayers. Discussion about the B-word has become boring in itself – it is surely more relevant to discuss whether Spain's matches are boring, a different point entirely – even if it is interesting to note that the team's heartbeat and rhetorician, Xavi Hernández, said "of course we were boring" at the 2010 World Cup, citing defensive opponents as the reason.
Spain's football is without precedent in its velvet grace but it is difficult to argue persuasively that their matches have satisfied conventional notions of football entertainment – goals, shots, engaging the viscera; that kind of thing. Their play at Euro 2012 had felt cynical and clinical, in a different sense of the word from that usually used in football; a kind of extreme tiki-taka, or tiki-takanaccio. For much of the tournament the only excitement came from the partnership of Jordi Alba and the divine Andrés Iniesta, simply the most beautiful player in football history.
Italy's relatively aggressive tactics were influential, yet the way Spain subjected them to death by silk suggested a team that had been hiding some of their light under a bushel. For plenty, rightly or wrongly, Spain will be remembered as a side who engaged the brain more than the soul and who could, with their talent, have won three consecutive titles even more impressively than they did, a binary team whose games, before the final at least, had been so predictable as to be a bookmaker's nightmare.
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