cklablog

Brian Phillips writes for Slate.com, musing on the new Holland, and how they’ve broken away from Total Football.  He states as clearly as I’ve ever heard it why (despite the win-at-all-costs sentiment that we all agree with so long as we’re winning) beautiful football matters:

From Slate.com:  
Compared with other major sports, soccer can easily become chaotic and incoherent. This is one reason unconverted fans find it boring: Watch a random passage of play, and you’re likely to see players booting the ball out of bounds or frantically kicking it nowhere in particular, so that what ensues looks as much like an accident as a series of intentional actions. Teams that play it safe tend to go along with this entropic tendency, disrupting their opponents’ play, creating long periods of stalemate, then haphazardly smashing the ball toward their own strikers in the hope of a lucky bounce. The teams that become beloved, on the other hand—Leo Messi’s FC Barcelona, Pelé’s Brazil, and Cruyff’s Holland—are the ones that bring order or clarity to the game, so that the randomness and dullness fade out and the play assumes the shape of perceptible intention.

I would add that a pragmatic approach can also be beautiful, and bring that order and clarity to the sport.  Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan dismantled FC Barcelona (the current Torch-Carriers for Total Football and the “beautiful game”), and did so with a ruthlessly pragmatic style that relied upon Holland’s Wesley Sneidjer to direct lethal counterattacks.  Inter defended calmly, surrendered possession without allowing chances, and then took advantage of the brief moments between Spain . . . uh, I mean Barcelona . . . losing the ball and gaining it back.

And so while Sneidjer has already beaten Spain (Spain will start 7 players from Barcelona today), he doesn’t have Inter Milan’s defense behind him.  I’m rooting for Holland, but think it will be Spain 2 -1 The Oranje Bridesmaids.

Edit: My post-match prediction is that I think it will be 0-0, go into extra time, with Heitinga getting sent off and Iniesta scoring the game’s only goal two minutes from time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 9:55 am and is filed under Football (Soccer). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can protect yourself from deep space radio waves altering your brain chemistry by wearing a lead hat. Tin foil is useless, according to MIT. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.