Every Napoleon, a wise man once said, has
his Watergate. (I think he meant to say Waterloo.) The great Spanish team which
won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup, and Euro 2012 has met its Waterloo in
Brazil. Like the Victorian-era Scots with their Combination Game, the Austrian Wunderteam of the 1930s, the Hungarian Aranycsapat of the 1950s, and the Dutch
pioneers of totaalvoetbal, Spain
wowed the world with its tiki-taka
before everyone else worked out how to beat it. After 5-1 and 2-0 defeats to
the Netherlands and Chile respectively, the Spaniards have been made to look
like a band whose old stuff is so much better than their new stuff. In their
final group match, they faced a Socceroos outfit who had pushed the Chileans
and the Dutch all the way, and who hoped to leave Brazil with the scalp of the
reigning champions, something which looked possible even in the absence of the
suspended Tim Cahill.
The venue for this dead rubber was the
Estádio Joaquim Américo Guimarães, more commonly known as the Arena da Baixada,
located in Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná. There had been
controversy in the lead-up to match about the state of the pitch; in fact, it
was in such a poor condition that your humble correspondent’s first thoughts
were that Ange Postecoglou had erred by not picking Shane Warne in the starting
eleven, such was its resemblance to a dusty spin-friendly wicket on the
Subcontinent.
The Spaniards, looking very haute couture in their black away
strips, had a few chances in the opening half-hour before the Melbourne Heart-
City-bound David Villa backheeled a pass from Juanfran to put them 1-0 up in
the thirty-sixth minute. The Socceroos, not looking as if they were missing
Cahill, had a few chances of their own and had obtained forty-three percent of
the possession by the break (this figure hit forty-five late in the match, a
telling statistic against the masters of tiki-taka).
Villa was taken off eleven minutes into the
second half to allow Juan Mata his first spell on the pitch of the tournament;
the Manchester United man would get his name on the scoresheet, but first it
was Fernando Torres’ turn. In the sixty-ninth minute, Andrés Iniesta broke
through the Australian defence to find Torres, who coolly slotted it home. Mata
made it 3-0 thirteen minutes later when, unmarked, he got on the end of a Cesc
Fàbregas cross and banged it through Mat Ryan’s legs. By the end, it felt that
the Socceroos’ defence was being too easily breached, but this shouldn’t
detract from the fact that they got out of this group with a goal difference of
minus six; a phenomenal improvement on their late-2013 form, which saw them
lose two consecutive friendlies to Brazil and France 6-0.
As far as Socceroo World Cup campaigns go,
it wasn’t 2006, but it wasn’t 1974 or 2010 either. The group table shows three
losses, but this is a team which led the Netherlands for four minutes and which
kept Spain down to fifty-five percent possession. Watch out for the Socceroos
in 2018.
Australia 0 – Spain 3
(David Villa 36’; Fernando Torres 69’; Juan Mata 82’)
Cautions: Sergio Ramos (Spain) 62’; Matthew
Špiranović (Aust.) 88’; Mile Jedinak (Aust.) 92’
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