Xavi & Iniesta: The diminutive midfield giants

Xavi and Iniesta. Iniesta and Xavi. These are names forever linked in the history of the game, the little masters whose towering presence was never more apparent than in the final. Others scored the goals that destroyed Italy but it was Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta who ran the show.
And so Spain marched to another triumph on the shoulders of these two diminutive giants. This was an exhibition of the game's capacity for destructive creativity even more conclusive than the one with which they captured the trophy against Germany in Vienna four years ago or the intervening World Cup victory over Holland in Johannesburg.
This has not been Xavi's best season. He is 32 years old now and even his greatest admirers feared that his game had lost its edge and its snap in recent months. The angle and timing of his passes no longer combined to act, as they had for so long, like the instructions from a GPS device to the man receiving the ball.

While he seemed to fall marginally off the pace, his younger sidekick emerged as the dominant partner. The two of them tend to play on a linked diagonal, from deep-lying inside right to advanced inside-left, and it was to Iniesta's position that the focus switched.
The younger by four years, he accepted a greater share of the spotlight, while still demonstrating his ability to score goals as well as make them. It was around the connection between these two that Vicente del Bosque constructed his extraordinary formation, in which his attackers were virtually interchangeable, ready to switch position and function at will, driving defenders to distraction through the lack of a conventional focal point.
Had Spain really gone, as charged, from being exponents of joyous attacking play to using their ability to retain possession for long periods merely to stifle opponents? The suggestion seemed not just impertinent but laughable as Xavi and Iniesta controlled a fiesta of positive movement.