So, the trophy has been lifted, the confetti has settled, and the narrative of this World Cup has already begun to calcify into myth. As Spain's champ...
So, the trophy has been lifted, the confetti has settled, and the narrative of this World Cup has already begun to calcify into myth. As Spain's champions touched down in Madrid, greeted by a sea of red and gold that stretched far beyond the barriers at Barajas, one could be forgiven for forgetting the sheer strangeness of the tournament's final act in New Jersey. Let us be brutally honest here. The closing ceremony was a dire affair, a piece of pageantry where Tom Cruise was audibly booed into silence by a crowd that had come for football, not Hollywood. The half time show, a corporate patchwork of sound and fury, signified precisely nothing. It was filler, an unwelcome intrusion into a moment that needed no embellishment.And then there was the elephant in the room, or rather, the man trying to stand on the podium. Having kept his distance from the action throughout the tournament, the American president, Donald Trump, attempted to insert himself into the final tableau, a crass piece of political stage management that sat horribly at odds with the purity of the contest we had just witnessed. It felt like an intrusion, a clumsy attempt to claim a share of a glory he had absolutely no part in. The real theatre, the only theatre that mattered, had already been resolved on the pitch.For Spain, this victory is a masterclass in sustained excellence. Consider the question posed by a reader to GoalZaza, a question laced with the kind of dark humour that only football can produce. 'The last team that beat Spain was Scotland. Does that mean Scotland have won the World Cup' Peter Oh asks. It is a delicious bit of logic, and it cuts to the heart of how utterly dominant La Roja have been. If that is the benchmark, then Scotland can indeed claim a strange, metaphysical triumph. The reality, however, is that Spain's football has been built on a low block so miserly, on transitional play so swift, and on a clinical finishing touch so refined that they have made the rest of the world look ponderous. They do not just win; they impose their will. The tactical flexibility shown by the coach, the way the entire squad rotates as a single, sentient organism, is a lesson for every other nation. This is a team that has bottled nothing and conquered everything. As the players parade through the capital, holding the trophy aloft, they do so not as conquerors who just got lucky, but as the rightful heirs to a throne they have occupied for the past month. Squeaky bum time came and went, and they never flinched. They are home, and they are worthy.
