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| Fernando Torres and Andres Iniesta dejected how the game turned |
Unexpected thrashings don't make much sense at the time,
which is great, because everybody is far too busy laughing or crying or gasping
or vomiting or doing the conga. And that's as it should be. But unexpected
thrashings don't make much sense afterwards either, which is a problem when it
comes to writing entertaining-yet-informative features for a discerning
international audience. Tempting as it is to just write 'LOL OMG WUT' over and
over, it's not really what you've come here to read.
If it had been just a normal victory — If Netherlands had won
2-1, say — then things would be straightforward and sensible. Louis van Gaal's
decision to embrace wing-backs would have been laudable, David Silva's miss at
1-0 would have be regrettable, Iker Casillas and his defenders would have been
mildly castigatable, and the world would have carried on as normal. The
heat-mappers would have heat-mapped, the punners would have punned. Ah, folks
would be saying, but they lost the first game in South Africa too.
Instead, all of the above is true, but it's true to a
remarkable and slightly disquieting extent. This was a Spinal Tap loss:
everything dialled right up to 11. It could have been six, seven, eight, said
Robin van Persie after the game, and he was absolutely right. Ten wouldn't have
been a surprise. Yes, Spain lost the first game in South Africa too. But not
like this.
Take van Gaal's wingbacks. For a Dutchman, playing anything
that doesn't look like a 4-3-3 is an act of sedition akin to finding tulips a
little tedious. But even van Gaal, having made his peace with his treason, cannot
possibly have imagined that Daley Blind would take possession of the left flank
to such a ludicrous extent. That van Persie and Arjen Robben would take it in
turns to find so much space between Spain's centre-halves. That Spain's only
goal -- and these, it's worth remembering, are the world champions -- would
come from a generously awarded penalty. That Xavi would lose the midfield
battle against Nigel de Jong, and it wouldn't even involve that much applied
violence.
Nor could he have conceived that the reigning world
champions, who haven't so much as conceded a goal in ten major tournament
knock-out games, would defend like strangers. Like drunk strangers. Like drunk
strangers who, upon meeting one another for the first time, had taken an
instant and belligerent dislike to one another. On the BBC, one pundit
suggested that both Ramos and Pique had simply forgotten how to play against
two strikers; certainly, as van Persie and Robben took it in turns to saunter
into the acres of grass between them, it seemed that this was something bigger
than a simple bad performance. They've played badly before, but they've rarely
(if ever) looked sillier.
And then, Casillas. He's been teetering on the edge of proper
dodgy for a while, but was a performance that sang of the glue factory. Not
only did he let in five, which is never a good look, but he did so in a manner
that handily emphasised all the question marks that hang over him as a keeper
and as an aging professional. The first goal was made possible by an unwise
advance from his line into noman's land, while the third was accompanied by a
jump limp to the point of impotence. The fourth bounced off his foot to the
lurking striker, while the fifth saw him scrambling helplessly around his
penalty area. It was, a couple of excellent saves in between times
notwithstanding, a catalogue of inadequacies.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a man nicknamed San Iker
should end up getting crucified in public. Of course, there was some monstrous
bad luck involved as well. In another universe, van Persie goes for that header
and only succeeds in putting the ball wide and his back out. Or the referee
gets the goalkeeper off the hook for the third, or the pass for the fourth
isn't quite so firm, or Robben has decided to be Bad Robben rather than Amazing
Robben, and so trips over his own sense of overweening self.
"This is inexplicable. We trained all those weeks for
this. The match has gone exactly as the coaching staff predicted." Van
Persie sounds like he's talking happy post-victory drivel — surely, Shirley, a
thing can't be both inexplicable and predicted — and yet it kind of makes
sense. Going up against a team like Spain doesn't lend itself to plans that are
supposed to work every time a side strolls forward. Keep it tight, plug away at
those semi-weaknesses that the coach has identified, and maybe there'll be a
couple of opportunities. That's why Sneijder's early miss felt, at 0-0, so
significant. It's not like chances that good aren't going to come along every
five minutes. That would just be ridiculous.
Ridiculous is right. Everybody's seen these games once or
twice before: the ones where every ball leaves their (or sometimes your)
striker's foot and arrows into the corner. Where your (or occasionally their)
goalkeeper makes poor decision on top of poor decision. Where everything breaks
one way and collapses the other. Games where the outcome is correct, but the
magnitude of the outcome is exaggerated by the unfortunate intersection of a
bad performance with a good performance on top of something almost mystical, a
ley-line of perfection, a perfect storm. Everything Netherlands tried came off.
That isn't supposed to happen.
Such a convergence is rare, and while Spain absolutely have
to improve by a considerable margin, they can at least console themselves that
they're unlikely to get dissected with quite such ruthlessness again. They lost
because they deserved to lose, but they ended up getting smashed into white-hot
fragments because the Netherlands had the best of all possible days at the
office, and because football, sometimes, is weird and completely brilliant, and
all you can really do is shake your head.
