"Why, oh why did the dirty Dutch trade beauty for the beast in Sunday’s World Cup final?
When time has passed and our memories of all that was so thrilling about the first finals on African soil, the only thing that will remain in focus will be how the Netherlands tried to kick Spain off the park.
It was a display of outright thuggery in front of 84,000 people in Soccer City Stadium — and it must have left most of North America wondering what, in God’s name, makes this the planet’s most popular sport.
Even Don Cherry would have been wincing at the kung fu antics of a country that, until now, has carried a justified reputation for soccer played in its purest sense.
It goes back to the days when Johan Cruyff was the Dutch hero, the man at the heart of what the world called Total Football. It was a slick passing, fast-paced game full of movement and skill. The world rightly declared it beautiful to behold.
On Sunday night that all changed.
It wasn’t the Dutch who tried to play that way, it was the Spanish.
Maybe we should not be so surprised. Before the game the Netherlands’ most exciting player Arjen Robben was eager to tell us: “We have heard enough talk about how our football is very nice, but it gets you nowhere, we want to achieve something.
“No one in our team is too special to get their hands dirty. I’d prefer to win a very ugly game than lose a beautiful one.”
Well, the Dutch achieved one half of that objective. They got their hands dirty and the game was so disappointingly ugly.
And playing ugly didn’t do them any good because they lost.
The other hint of what was to come, apparently, came from Dirk Kuyt who said his team was going to attack. We must have all hoped he meant attack in the soccer sense, not attack as in flying boots and bodies.
Referee Howard Webb was forced to hand out a record 13 yellow cards and one red card — eight yellows and a red for the Dutch — and there could have been far more.
In the soccer-style sense, the Spanish tried to play their rat-tat-tat passing game, which was admirable. Unfortunately, they also continued their most annoying trait, diving all over the pitch with varying degrees of skill.
On top of all this, players on both sides produced Oscar-winning performances with theatrical protests whenever a call did not go their way, arms spread wide as they sat on the ground or rolled around in agony before leaping to their feet to chase the next pass.
Quick recovery time, don’t you think?
Even worse, from my perspective, was the distinct lack of respect they showed to referee Webb. I lost count of the number of players who screamed in his face. That’s the sort of disrespect that deserves a card. Trouble was, had Webb called everything, there might not have been enough players left on the field to make a contest.
Let’s stop blaming the ref, as the Dutch have been doing, and set aside a minute to congratulate the Spanish, deserved winners and clearly the best team in the world.
On Sunday, 15.6 million Spaniards — that’s nearly 80 per cent of television market share — watched the game and the figure was 90 per cent in the Netherlands.
On Monday, maybe a million people turned out to greet home their heroes in Madrid after what is being judged as one of the most important victories of any sort in Spanish history.
Certainly it was a victory for Spain. But it most certainly was not a victory for the beautiful game. And that’s a crying shame.
Here we are with 700 million people looking on — including major TV crowds in Canada and the United States — and the players cannot provide us with a half-good game of soccer. One team hacks too much, the other dives too much.
I hate to think that I am in agreement with FIFA president Sepp Blatter when he says: “It was not what we expected to see as fair play on the pitch.”
This continent is still trying to warm to the game in a serious way and we get served up something like this."
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