TEAMS CAN RECOVER from losing their opening match, Spain proved that themselves in 2010 when they rebounded from defeat to Switzerland to win the tournament, conceding only one more goal in six matches.
Free download our BlackBerry App here
What they might not be able to recover from is an opening game against the Netherlands that follows the same lines as their last meeting.
Johannesburg played host to a fiery World Cup final four years ago and this afternoon they will get reacquainted in Salvador, the largest African city outside the continent of Africa.
It is unlikely this city of three million people will witness a match as attritional as the battle played out four years ago. Vicente Del Bosque yesterday described as “brutal” some of the Dutch play in 120 minutes of football that saw 14 yellow cards shown — nine for the Netherlands, who were lucky to only have only Johnny Heitinga sent off by Howard Webb, the English referee inexplicably showed Nigel de Jong only a yellow card for a kung-fu attack on Xabi Alonso.
Were the Group B curtain-raiser to follow similar lines you would fancy Chile and Australia’s chances of picking up results against the top two seeds in subsequent matches.
Neither Spain’s European Championship and World Cup winning coach Del Bosque, nor his Dutch counterpart Louis Van Gaal, are likely to allow their players to open the throttle at Arena Fonte Nova today and goals could be as hard to come by as they were in 90 minutes at Soccer City four years ago.
While the Netherlands have undergone something of a reinvention since then, with the development of young stars such as full-backs Daryl Janmaat and Daley Blind, midfielder Jordy Clasie and attacker Jeremain Lens, Spain are still very reliant on the core group of players who ruled the world in 2010.
Full-backs Jordi Alba and Juanfran are valuable additions, as is Brazilian-born Atletico Madrid goal-machine Diego Costa, but Spain’s approach has not changed.
“We will win or die by our philosophy,” said their Plato, Xavi Hernandez, who has done more than anyone to make the pass-dense, possession-reliant “tiki-taka” the dominant style of the last decade.
Source : score.ie
Links: salovesfootball.mobi
App android: click here
