Germany 0 - Spain 1

¡Thank you, Del Bosque!¡Thank you, Del Bosque!¡Thank you, Del Bosque!

For listening to our prayers, for playing five guys in the midfield, for adding a sixth one later (Silva), and for playing Torres at the right time. This is the way a brave and smart coach should play, trying to score the second goal and kill the game as opposed to just getting more and more defensive. Thank you, Del Bosque, because Spain advanced to the Final Game of the World Cup 2010!

And now, a few hours later and still hangover from football and happiness, let's review the game.

First of all, congratulations to Germany. It is a true pity to see it go for the third or fourth place. The game last night should have been the final game. This young, bold and joyful German team played a phenomenal World Cup. It deployed an elegant, fast, skilfull soccer with exquisite fair play and will certainly give Germany lots of good games in the years to come.

On the Spanish side, Pedro Rodríguez changed it all, and yet, it was not exactly him who did it, but the presence of a fifth guy of his characteristics in the midfield. It happened to be him the chosen one, and he did a good job, but it could have been just as well Silva o Mata, and we would have most likely watched the same game. Actually, I hold that it would have been better for Spain with either Silva or Mata instead of Pedro. They both happen to have played for a number of years with Villa on the same team, Valencia, whereas Pedro and Villa just met three weeks ago. In any case, my point is that the fifth advanced midfielder, a false wing, someone who at last helped out Xavi and Iniesta, made all the difference for Spain. He made the passing game possible.

Thanks to this fifth midfielder, Germany could not have numerical superiority in the creation zone. Del Bosque stubbornly avoided this solution against Chile, Portugal, and Paraguay, and Spain suffered a lot. All those teams had at least one more player than Spain in the midfield, often two more. The Spanish passing game was constantly interrupted. None of those teams got to steal very many balls, but they did commit enough fauls, kicked the Spainards hard enough, threw the ball out of bounds enough times for Spain not to find any rythm in its passing game and to rarely approach its opponet's strike zone. When a midfielder does not have enough friends around him, then he cannot play one-touch. He would need to run a little with the ball looking for an open friend. This few seconds of running with the ball would be enough for the opponents ovepopulating the midfield to tackle the guy with the ball. End of the passing game. Last night things were very different. Spain played one or two-touches constantly because there were always open friends showing up, often offering two passing options. This prevented the Germans from tackling the Spaniards This fact puzzled a lot of people who posted comments in the New York Times after the match. See, by the time a German would approach the Spaniard receiving the ball, the Spaniard had already passed it one-touch to a friend, who just did the same thing, and so on. No tackling can take place when the ball moves that fast. The defenders arrive always too late. The ball is not there any more. It's somewhere else now.

This was a killer for Germany. I have said this before, and I should repeat it. Constantly chasing the ball is not only physically exhausting. It is also psychologically very frustrating. It makes you feel likea fool, like they are playing monkey-in-the-middle, and yes, you are the monkey, and your family, friends, and entire country are watching it. Your legs start to feel heavier than usual and you wonder what is the point of chasing again the same guy that you just unsuccessfully chased two minutes ago. Meanwhile, the Spaniards were not randomly passing the ball. They were very consciously looking for a crack in the German defense. Any distraction, any giving-up on the chase, could have been fatal. It really sucks to play against Spain. I can see that. You just need to understand that this way of playing is very difficult, in general, and almost impossible against such a strong and competitive team as Germany, in particular.

Del Bosque had made fun the night before in a radio interview of a very well reputed Spanish journalist that I happen to like a lot, Alfredo Relaño, for consistently and insistinlgy asking for the passing game. Del Bosque said that just like his own father, who got mentally stuck in 1939, the year when the Spanish Civil War ended, Relaño got stuck in june 2008, the month when Spain won the European Cup of Nations under a different coach who brought to this team, precisely, the passing game. I got so upset by his unfair and unreasoned mocking that I wrote a very critical piece in the Spanish blog. (A day does not have enough hours for me to duplicate every single post into this blog in English, sorry about that.) I felt extremely disappointed. I had the strong conviction that only playing some version of the passing game Spain could beat Germany, and the radio interview just told me that it was not going to happen. After an entire World Cup not having seen this playing style, the words of the Spanish coach sounded completely credible to me.

I was fooled, and so was everybody else, including probably Joachim Löw. Spain had not played passing game in the entire competition, and we came to think that this was some ideological stance taken by the coach. He wanted to be more vertical, he thought that this playing style was too ineffective, whatever. Was he hidding Spain's most lethal weapon? Was he consciously trying to fool everyone? May be, I don't know, what can I say? If he really kept the most powerful Spanish weapon, its unique playing style, consciously in the closet holding on until the semifinals, he is either nuts or a genious, since Paraguay almost sent Spain home for not playing the passing game from the get go. But then again, Paraguay lost. I guess he must be a genious.

Watching five very skilfull Spanish midfielders on the field we did take the time machine and travel back two years to the final game against a Germany at the Euro2008. That day, however, Spain did not play good passing game. The players were a nervous wreck. It took them the first fifteen or twenty minutes to start calming down, but they were never completely themselves the entire game. Last night, however, Spain did play a decent version of the passing game against a much better Germany.

As expected, Germany rarely stole the ball, and was only able to mount two good counterattacks in the entire game. In the first one, Ramos fouled Ozil when he was coming into the box. On a frozen image it seems that the contact happened right before he crossed the box line. The foul was pretty clear, and it should have meant a yellow card for Ramos. The referee did not want to see it. On the second German counterattack, Casillas made a good safe. That was it for Germany. Germany shot 5 times in total, Spain 13 times. More important than the number of shots, and the shots on target (2 to 5), was the number of very dangerous plays for both teams that statistics never account for. Spain outnumberd Germany in that regard. Germany was permanently on its toes, Spain much less so.

Funny that Spain would end up scoring out of a corner kick, a German specialty. Some saw this as the irony of the game. After so much passing, Spain could only score out of a free kick. It certainly could be seen under this light. Nevertheless, you need to keep in mind that the passing game is as much a defensive strategy as it is an attacking one. It is the best defense for a team of small people like Spain. Defensively, this style paid off big time even if the goal came from a different route.