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[好文赏析] ZT: The Glory of Spain - from my friends' friend:)

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发表于 2010-7-16 09:48:13 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
关键词: friends , Glory , Spain , The
My father played soccer semi-professionally in Poland in the years before I was born, and because of this he wanted very much to instill in me an appreciation of the sport. It wasn't an easy task. I was an American kid in the 1970s, and I was raised on Fonzie and Rocky Balboa, NBA games without defense, Wacky Packies and Pop Rocks, home runs and touchdowns, Evel Knievel jumping busses, cliff diving on Wide World of Sports. Subtlety wasn't my thing — I mean, seriously, I wanted candy that exploded in my mouth. Soccer, sure, I could appreciate a good Pele bicycle kick like the one in the movie "Victory." The rest of soccer seemed mysterious and European to me, like opera. It's not that I though that there was no interesting stuff happening. I just didn't see it myself.

But my father was never one to give up easily, and so he would tell me: Watch the touch. He would say this to me all the time while we sat in front of our small living room television and, through static that looked like a hailstorm, watched "Soccer Made In Germany," narrated by Toby Charles. Watch the touch, my Dad would say. Watch how the players seem to catch the ball on their feet. Watch how hard passes will hit their chest and the ball just falls straight down, as if following an order. Watch how this guy flips the ball high, over a defender, and runs to meet it on the other side. Watch the touch.

He had so much passion for it. But I'm not going to lie to you. I preferred watching Welcome Back, Kotter.

Throughout this World Cup, though, I have heard my father's voice echoing in my head. Watch the touch. Soccer really is a different spectator sport if you watch for skill as much as goals, for a beautiful give-and-go passing combination as much as good scoring chances, for a breathtaking four-second run as much as a dazzling save. And when it comes to these small moments of magnificence, no team in the world matches up to Spain. No team even comes close.

Spain, you know, beat the Netherlands 1-0 to win the World Cup on Sunday … and Spain now has the distinction of winning a World Cup with the fewest total goals scored. The Spaniards only scored eight goals in seven games, which if you think about it is just about as low as a team can go and still win. No one, I suspect, will ever equal their mark. In 2006, Italy scored 12 goals in its World Cup run, and that was considered a low number. In 2002, when Brazil won, their star Ronaldo scored eight goals by himself.

Once Spain advanced to the knock-out stage their results were as follows:

Spain beat Portugal 1-0.
Spain beat Paraguay 1-0.
Spain beat Germany 1-0.
Spain beat Netherlands 1-0.

Gripping, right? Well … strangely … yes. It was gripping because Spain didn't win those 1-0 matches with thuggery or by playing everybody back deep or even with stout defense. No, they won matches with their sheer brilliance at keeping possession, passing the ball to each other, showing off their preposterous talents for handling the ball. You couldn't get the thing away from them. The Spaniards were like pool hustlers running table after table, like Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler" who, when told by Minnesota Fats that he needed to quiet down and shoot pool, snapped off: "I am shooting pool, Fats. When I miss, you can shoot." Yes, that was Spain — when they gave up the ball, you could have it. Only they didn't give up the ball. Sooner or later, they would wear their opponents down with the sheer skill of their play. And once those opponents were properly worn down, Spain would strike. They scored the game-winning goal in the 63rd minute against Portugal, the 83rd against Paraguay, the 73rd against Germany. It was even later, as you know, against the Netherlands.

It's precarious to play that kind of soccer because it takes so much talent, so much concentration, so much confidence — one mistake, one good counterattack, one shaky official's call could make all the difference. Portugal had chances early in the match to take the lead. Paraguay missed a penalty kick. Germany had one brilliant opportunity to score. If any of them put the ball in the net … well, we don't know how Spain would have responded. Let's not forget that a not-especially great Switzerland team beat Spain in the first match of the World Cup. To win the Spanish way — by simply dazzling your opponents with brilliant passes and receptions — well, let's just say it's soccer played at the highest degree of difficulty.

Only Spain could even try to pull this off. I mentioned this once before, but last year there were only 18 players who received a first place vote for FIFA World Player of the Year. Six of those players were from Spain — Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Fernando Torres, Carles Puyol, David Villa and the goalkeeper Iker Casillas. This was a World All-Star team, a soccer collection of talent that overpowers even the Miami Heat's new trio. And together, they controlled everything about the games — the pace, the rhythm and, mostly, the ball. It was easy to watch a team with so much talent and think: Why don't they attack more? Why don't think win matched 3-0 and 4-1?

But the more you watched them play, the more you realized that they were going for something slightly different from goals. They wanted their opponents hearts. They wanted to break will and spirit and hope. The winning goal, they seemed to understand, would come soon after.

Entering Sunday's match, the thing you kept hearing from the Netherlands side was that they had a way to beat Spain. It seemed possible. The Netherlands' style was very different from Spain's; Holland's players have plenty of skill* and speed and goal-scoring talent, but their game seems more about about force of will, relentlessness and a knack of getting under their opponents skin. The Netherlands upset Brazil in large part by annoying the samba out of them — a little bit of pushing, a little bit of diving, an extra bump here and there. If Bill Laimbeer played soccer, he would have played for Holland.

*I spent a mesmerized 15 minutes before the Spain-Uruguay match watching four Dutch players do some sort of soccer version of Harlem Globetrotters magic circle, where they were doing trick passes over their heads and behind their backs, and the ball never touched the ground. It was one of the most remarkable things I saw in South Africa … and those guys were just doing it to warm up

So, I was interested to see what strategy the Netherlands would come up with to neutralize Spain's superior talent. It turned out, that strategy was not quite as imaginative as I had hoped. It was about a lot of fouls. This was Hack-a-Shaq brought to the beautiful game. The record number of yellow cards for a World Cup Final before Sunday had been six. There were 14 yellow cards in this match, nine of them given to Netherlands. The rough play choked the life out of the game … there was so little rhythm or flow or purpose.

There were, however, chances. Lots of them. Spain got the first few chances, including an amazing individual effort by Sergio Ramos whose shot sailed too high. It was about 15 minutes in, that play really started getting rough. Five yellow cards were handed out the next 15 minutes, the last of them to Holland's Nigel De Jong, whose nasty tackle really could have gotten him a red card. It was clear then — if it had not already been clear — that the Dutch felt like their one chance to win the game was to muddy it up to the point where it was barely recognizable and then somehow punch in the one goal they needed on a breakaway. It was, in the British understatement, a cynical strategy.

And … it almost worked that way. In the 62nd minute, Holland's great scorer Arjen Robben took a perfect pass from Wesley Sneijder, a breakaway, a one-on-one moment with the Spain's goalkeeper Casillas, and got him to lean the wrong way. He fired what might have been the game-winner only, somehow, Casillas managed to get his foot on it and deflect the ball away. It was, everyone immediately understood, the moment that Robben would not forget for the rest of his life. A few minutes later, Robben would wrestle his way through the middle of the field, into the box, and get another chance — he would be stopped by Casillas again. The first one, though, still lingered in everybody's mind.

Of course, Spain had so many chances too — including a wide open header in front of the goal by Ramos, an absolutely can't-miss goal that he somehow missed. The chances came, yes, but they came intermittently, without any pattern. All in all, the Netherlands still achieved their apparent goal. They turned the game ugly. Spain still dominated possession and still managed a few beautiful plays here and there — it seemed plain that Spain was the better side — but the game did not feel in their control. It plainly wasn't. For 90 minutes, the match was scoreless. If any of those chances for either side had gone in, it probably would have been decisive.

Then came extra time. And the Netherlands players seemed more exhausted by their efforts to keep up with Spain. And, like that, Spain looked like brilliant Spain again. Jesus Navas finished off a beautiful series with a shot that, as soccer optical illusions go, seemed to go into the net (it actually hit the side of the net). Twenty-three year old Cesc Fabregas made a spectacular run and got a shot off that skidded wide. And Spain just kept the ball, worked it around, found small openings, discovered mathematical angles, left the Netherlands breathless. When Holland's John Heitinga picked up his second yellow card for grabbing Iniesta from behind — leaving his team a man down — you sensed that Spain was about to finish this off.

Nine minutes later … it happened. The goal went like this. Fabregas got a loose ball just outside the penalty box and kicked it to the right side, where Iniesta was onside and open. Watch the touch. Iniesta caressed the ball so lightly that the ball jumped to the spot and just bounced straight up, like the Pixar lamp. It might have bounced waist high — Iniesta waited, just an instant, for the ball to come down to just below his belt. And then, he unleashed his shot, lower right-hand corner with such force that Holland's goalkeeper Maarten Stekelenburg had no chance to stop it. He did not stop it. Spain had the goal it needed to win its first World Cup.

It was the 117th minute of the match.

And when the match ended the general feeling seemed to be: (1) It was a shame that Netherlands had made this World Cup so ugly; (2) It was probably the only chance Netherlands had to win; (3) Spain is the best team in the world and so, in the end, we had the right champion.

I think all that's probably right, but I would add a fourth thing — for someone trying to learn and understand the world's game, Spain offers an interesting lesson. Even the most intense soccer fans seemed to think that Sunday's final was generally dreary, and that's certainly how it looked to someone learning the game (and to someone leery of soccer, I imagine it was a dud). But there were still those little moments if you were looking for them — an incredible pass by Xavi, a catch and turn by Iniesta, a six-pass combination to keep possession in the midfield, a ridiculously great run by Fabregas, the Iniesta touch just before the goal.

"Did you see that?" I shouted to my oldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was watching with the same inattentive eye that I used to watch "Soccer Made In Germany." They showed a replay, and I said "Watch the touch." She shrugged and asked if she could go upstairs to play Polly Pockets (her version of watching "Welcome Back Kotter"). Of course she could. Spain, during this World Cup, wasn't always an easy team to appreciate. It takes a sense of wonder. And you have to watch the touch.
发表于 2010-8-9 22:48:47 | 显示全部楼层
不错呀,值的一看呀,谢谢楼主的分享!
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