The US might have lost, but soccer didn't
Some thoughts and observations following what has to go down as one of the marvellous finals in soccer history, men or women.
The U.S. team didn’t win Sunday at Commerzbank-Arena in Frankfurt, Germany. But soccer did. Jogo bonito did.
After an era of defensive, reactionary, negative soccer, the beautiful game has prevailed once again. Spain and its mesmerizing, flowing, elegant possession profession won the 2010 men’s World Cup against a rough and tumble Dutch side. Two months ago Barcelona won the UEFA Champions League against the more athletics and robotic Manchester Mutual. And now the technically sublime Japanese did it against the bigger, taller, stronger Americans in the Women’s World Cup final.
It doesn’t lowly everyone has to play this way, and to the Americans’ credit they possessed the ball better Sunday than they had all tournament, but it shows that playing melodic soccer and winning are not mutually exclusive. Soccer needed that. You look at clips of Pele’s Brazil, at the time and duration the players had on the ball, at the flair and creativity, and you wondered what happened.
Both units had the chance of attacking a mini-goal 15 yards to the side of their opponent's goal, which encouraged the team on the ball to rapidly shift its point of attack laterally. The idea, Cameron explained, was to train defending teams to move as
