IT'S UP TO AMERICA TO SAVE THE GAME:

Flawless Spain are a footballing pain: I blame the English parents (Simon Burnton, 7/16/10, The Guardian)

[I]t has recently become apparent that football isn't the greatest sport at all. Worse, it wasn't any good in the first place.

It turns out that football is only enjoyable when most people are no good at it. We enjoy watching brilliant wingers mesmerise outclassed full-backs. We applaud great sides as they destroy inferior rivals. We adore useless no-hopers who somehow conjure shock wins over massively superior opponents despite manifest technical failings. We are mildly entertained as two top teams tap away at the granite hunks of their defences before finally finding a faultline and merrily skipping through it. We embrace the greatest players, but we like them a lot more when they have a drink problem, require anger-management counselling and have a way with the ladies. It isn't the football that we love so much as the flaws – all football did was help us see them.

Over time, teams sought to become less imperfect – which was fine, admirable even, and we found that football was more good when those involved were less bad – but, and this is crucial, only up to a point. Now there is a team with almost no faults, and they are no fun at all. The new world champions are almost error-free, but against decent opponents Spain disappear into a world of flawless but joyless technical showmanship, like that bloke with an alto sax you saw once when the bar you were in turned out to be hosting an open-mic jazz improv evening. Once you have spent a while marvelling over each player's ability to accept a ball from a team-mate and shuffle it off to another one, there is very little left to love. This is not a complaint about Spain, who are merely the first to achieve what everyone has attempted. It is a problem with the sport itself. This is what football is, when played without faults: all technique and no mystique.

Spain's opponents behave like escapologists stuck in a flawless, airless glass box: first they seek a simple way out, for they are trained to believe that there is always a simple way out; then they try to break the walls open by throwing themselves into them or kicking them really, really hard. Once that has failed they start complaining loudly to anyone who will listen and might be able to help. Finally, they die of suffocation.

By taking football to hitherto unexplored peaks of perfection, the Spanish have ruined it for all of us. Imagine if everyone were as good as them – nothing genuinely interesting would ever happen. It's not just the players, either – soon we'll have goalline technology and video replays, and not even the referees will make mistakes.

Not only did we handle them 2-0 in the Confederations Cup but even the Swiss beat them in this World Cup by aping our methods.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 17, 2010 5:45 AM