[Football Thursday] Euro 2008 recap

OR: How Spain won and George is eating crow.

For reference, my post from one week ago, June 26:

"If Spain goes through, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that they'll choke hard against Germany."

Yeah, totally.

So those crazy bastards did it. Even though it was the one Spanish team in recent memory that most people wouldn't call triple-A quality, and had a distinct lack of "star"-quality players, even when their fans were making t-shirts saying "Guess who's gonna get us disqualified at the quarter-finals", after all they are perennial losers when it comes to quarter-finals. They still did it.

It's funny how things work. In Euro 2004, I was waiting for Greece to eventually play like they did in this year's Euro and get mauled/disqualified. Instead they kept playing at their best, which for that year proved enough to win us the cup. Now arguably Greece's best still makes for fairly horrid football, but it was leagues above the sorry effort they put up this year. Honestly, our game against Sweden was probably the worst footbal game I've ever had the misfortune of watching.

Same deal with Spain this year. Ever since the group strage was finished, I was expecting them to choke. First against Italy, which also happens to be their arch-nemesis, but they weren't really the favorites in that game, exactly because of their history. So they won that one, even if it were in the penalty shoot-out.

Fair enough, since they were the underdog they went through so I thought that they'd choke against Russia, since now they were the favorites, and against a team they had defeated 4-1 in the same tournament. Yet they man-handled the Russians again, in a very convincing 3-0 victory over the second best team in the tournament.

Surely, then, they would choke at the final, and against Germany, a football team that has made a name after destroying young teams filled with ambition, and at their peak at that (Hungary 54, Holland 74, Czech Republic 96, etc.), right? Nope. Somehow, the Spanish team managed to defy all preconceptions/curses/expectations/call it what you will, and delivered a solid 1-0 victory over a German team that, in fact, choked hard at the most important game. All this when the Spaniards remained calm and concentrated throughout. Impressive, to say the least.

As a matter of fact, after this final and the one from the World Cup of '02 against Brazil (and perhaps the Eurobasket '05 final against Greece), I'm starting to think that perhaps this generation of German teams are starting to become chokers themselves, when it comes to finals.

All in all though, Spain rightly won by managing to do away with all their ghosts of the past, as well as being the best team of the whole tournament. Holland started out great but fizzled real quick, while Russia and Germany picked up their stride slowly, reached an impressive level, only to sink to the bottom in their most important matches again. Spain was consistant, while not exactly dazzling, and thoroughly deserved a cup they hadn't won in about five billion years.

If anything, I personally much prefer it when teams such as Spain, Greece in '04, and Denmark in '92 win such a big tournament, as it adds to the whole mythos of the Euro tournament. It's the kind of victories people still discuss years after the event, when discussions about the World Cup are rarely about its finals, as those are usually dominated by four teams in the last 30 years (Brazil, Italy, Germany and Argentina), with the exception of France in '98. Instead, people talking about the champions of Euro championships can talk about how teams can defy all expectations and win the cup against all odds.

(At this point I should point out that Spain has always been the better team, by a fairly wide margin, when compared to Denmark and Greece, but this victory was mainly a triumph against the expectations that they had been setting for themselves these past few decades).

TL;DR version:

So who do you think is going to disqualify the reigning European Champions, Spain, in the quarter finals of World Cup '10?