Holland - Spain, Preview

Spain football must be very grateful to Holland. Spain's passing game is the direct heritage of the Dutch national team in the seventies. You can check out in this blog the full history and a few videos about all this in a previous entry "A Few Acknowledgments for Associative Football". The best player of that Dutch team in the seventies, Johan Cruyff, played and coached in Spain for years, and stayed in Spain after he retired. He planted the seed that today is flourishing. The funny thing is that he was not really a guy who would pass the ball much. Quite on the contrary, he was a pretty selfish dribbler. And yet, he became as a coach an utmost advocate of a very collective, very associative, very offensive way of playing football, based on constantly passing the ball. It was also Cruyff who strongly influenced the playing style of the most reputed Dutch football school, Ajax of Amsterdam's. Most of the Dutch players in this World Cup were raised in it, or else they grew up admiring it. Thus the Dutch also were raised in a very similar way of playing football. A game between Holland and Spain will be, therefore, a final game where the master meets the disciple.

The first factor in this final game will be how well both teams know each other. The best Dutch players have been team mates with the Spaniards in either Barcelona (Van Bronkhorst, Van Bommel) or Real Madrid (Robben, Sneijder, Huntelaar); then Van Persie and Fábregas are team mates at Arsenal; and Torres, Reina, Alonso and Arbeloa have been team mates with Kuyt at Liverpool. Here I think that Spain has an advantage. The Spanish goalie and right wing defender have shared team and training sessions with the best scorers in this World Cup for Holland, Robben and Sneijer, and the Spanish defensive line has already successfully played against them all and beat them consistently. The Dutch defense lacks such an experience. Except for Van Bronkhorst and Van Bommel, Dutch midfielders and defenders are pretty new at playing against the Spaniards and their kind of football.

It will be very interesting to see what strategy both teams will deploy. I expect, or to better say, I strongly hope that Del Bosque will play again a fifth man as a forward midfielder, whoever he might be, as opposed to playing a second striker (either Torres or Llorente) or a pure wing (Navas). The Dutch are expecting so too. Now, the Dutch coach is saying loud and clear that the Germans committed suicide by sitting on their field waiting for Spain to make a mistake. He says that Germany was scared, and Holland will not be so. Holland, he says, should attack Spain. I am not sure what this means. Let me make an educated guess. Holland will possibly try to press hard Spain really high up, much like Chile and Paraguay did. This is what some Dutch blogs are advocating. I wonder, however, whether Holland has the type of player capable of pressing like Chile and Paraguay did for 90 minutes. Dirk Kuyt could press like this and then run the marathon, he surely can. But the rest of the Dutch strikers and even midfielders are rather lazy when it comes to defending-they generally prefer to save their energies for their attacking speed-runs. I do not see Van Persie helping out consistently in this task, and I do not see Robben staying fresh for his break-through sprints if he has to run so much pressing the Spanish defenders at the start of every single Spanish play. In any case, hopefully the Dutch will not read this blog and will never realize that Spain was successfully blocked by Chile and Paraguay only because these teams played with 5 and often 6 players in the midfield, combined with the exasperating fact that Del Bosque was reluctant to match those figures. As soon as he did bring in one more midfielder (Fábregas) with just one substitution, those games changed and Spain scored. Holland is very different from Chile and Paraguay in this regard. Holland typically plays with only four midfielders, not five or six. And Spain will hopefully play with five this time from the get go. Pressing Spain high-up under these conditions might be much more of a suicide than the German strategy, if you ask me.

One more factor will be the jabulani, which has been proved by NASA scientists at the Ames Research Center’s Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to have funky aerodynamics that make its flight unpredictable at any speed higher than 44 miles per hour.



All right, all right, both teams play with the same ball. However, the Dutch are notorious for their long shot goals, and the Spaniards are not. I am not primarily thinking about Van Bronkhorst impressive goal against Uruguay. Even though it was not the first goal that he scored from such a distance and such a quality in his career, he is actually a rare scorer. I am talking about the bunch of absolute masters in this specialty playing for Holland, in particular Robben, Sneijder, and Van der Vaart. On the Spanish side, only Alonso is used to trying out. He does not have a high success rate, though. He must keep trying, even more so on Sunday.

Apparently, this erratic effect of jabulani's flight is increased by altitude. The final will be played at some 1700m, an altitude a bit higher than a mile. Spain will have to count on this and plan its strategy accordingly. The most important strategic move against long shots experts is to defend as far from the box as possible, much as Spain did against Germany. Whenever Spain needs to back-up pressed by Holland's attack, it will need to avoid fouling the Dutch close to the box, and then block the Dutch shooters by lots of two-to-one defensive moves. This will take a lot of coordination, and will require from Spain to play with very tight lines and also to draw the off-side line pretty high-up.

The Spaniards,on their side, will have to improve their shooting effectivity. They have stunk at it so far. I do not have a very high oppinion of the Dutch goalie, Maarten Stekelenburg, but it may be just me. The Spaniards should test him as soon as possible.

I have not made any prediction in this blog. Football is just unpredictable, and a final game in a World Cup is even harder to predict than any other game. A red card, a bad call, a defensive mistake, can completely change things. I will dare, however, to make to very general predictive comments. First, I do not think that this game will be necessarily won by the team scoring first. Both teams have impressive attacking formations. They both come back from a negative score to win the game. It should be, therefore, a pretty open game. Now, if Spain scores first, the probabilities for the Dutch to turn the game around will be significatly smaller than if the Dutch score first. Spain is much more versatile, its bench is much deeper and stronger and this allows Del Bosque to change the strategy completely with one or two substitions. The second predictive remark is that I see lots of goals being scored on Sunday. Let it be so.

After the game, it may take me a day or two to put myself together to write again in this blog, whatever the winner may be. I am sure that you will understand. Have a great final game everyone.