Monday, July 12, 2010

"And regrettably, sadly, they played very dirty. So much so that they should have been down to nine immediately, then they made two [such] ugly and hard tackles that even I felt the damage.

"It hurts me that I was wrong in my disagreement that instead Holland chose an ugly path to aim for the title.

"This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style, yes it served the Dutch to unsettle Spain. If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they ended up losing. They were playing anti-football."
(Johan Cruyff)

2 comments:

thankgodimatheist said...

I couldn't watch it as i was on at an unChristian hour,4AM.But I saw highlights of very ugly tackles. What do you think? Did Spain deserve to win?

Jemmy Hope said...

They certainly deserved to beat the Dutch, the alternative would have been a travesty. The Spaniards played with skill and occasional flashes of brilliance, but they didn't set the tournament alight. A lot of people expected Germany to win, I thought Argentina, but all fell by the wayside. Spain went into the competition as champions of Europe which must have given them a psychological edge.