In the end, the only surprise was the ease with which Spain humiliated La Azzurri in the Kiev. Spain lived up to their FIFA rankings and held the trophy last Sunday and as always the bookies got it right from Day 1. Here are some final thoughts and reflections of the last month.
One, Kudos to both Poland and Ukraine. What fantastic stadia, what wonderful coverage and in the end - nobody came back in a coffin. Sol Campbell, we would never hire you as the World Tourism authority's ambassador. You are better off playing for Birmingham or maybe First Division.
Two, Italy, Greece and Portugal clearly outperformed. Italy was ranked 8th coming into this competition and clearly deserve to move ahead to atleast 3rd or 4th (in Europe, I mean) after their Runners up in Kiev. Italy clearly did this at the expense of Germany and England (ranked 2nd and 4th respectively going into this tournament). The Dutch were the clear under performers - ranked 3rd but failing to make it past the first round.
Three, some scary La Rioja statistics. Jordi Alba who scored that goal after a brilliant 70 metre run will be 25 for the World cup in Brazil. Xavier will be the oldest player in the squad (34) and pretty much everyone in the current team will still be around and under 30, if selected. We know that pretty much everyone in the Spanish squad comes from FC Barcelona....but here is another scary bit....12 out of the 21 footballers used by FCB in the 2011/12 season scored 150 out of their 190 goals and all 12 of these footballers were products of the FCB Youth program. Of these 12, 5 featured in the finals last Sunday - for Spain, just to clarify ;)
Before I end this post, I want to take some readers back to 2002. One of my ex-bosses from Procter and Gamble - Vijay Santhanam used to have an in-company blog (circulated via company mail of course in those days of no Twitter or Facebook) on sporting events.
Vijay and Shyam (another ex colleague from P&G) then went onto write two super books ...yes you guessed right - one on Sachin Tendulkar and the other on Sports Marketing.
Although bulk of the banter in these mails was around Indian cricket and mostly a guy called SR Tendulkar and the countless statistics about his success - he used to change the topic to football...once every 2 years. We used to have stalwarts like BVP (Bharat Patel, ex MD and legend from P&G, India), Shireesh Joshi, football pundit from Italy - Mr Balaji Ramanujam etc..actively participate in the group. Back in 2002 (some of you may recall) I had made a small observation in my post on the importance of 'familiarity' in national football teams. My reasoning was simple...if most footballers spent their playing career during the season in a different land or under a foreign coach, how can a national team achieve success when these 11 players came together usually a month before the tournament like the Euro. And then the Germans of 2022 gave us a glimpse of the answer to this question. The 2002 world cup runners up Germany under Rudi Voller was composed of players from just three clubs. Bayern Munich (4 players including captain Oliver Kahn), Bayer Leverkusen (5 including the famous Michael Ballack) and B Dortmund that had 4 players. Voller himself had played for Leverkusen. Very clearly, the familiarity of playing with and against each other under a coach that pretty much had the same view on the national stage as the club teams had helped propel Germany to a strong performance - finishing only behind Brazil.
The current Spanish squad has the same if not better familiarity advantage. Almost the whole team is picked from two clubs - FCB and Real Madrid, they play with each other every week and against each other almost every two months, they have all been schooled in the same formations and most importantly, almost all of them come from the La Masia academy of FCB. It looks like Spain had already laid the foundation of this team by bringing back Alonso from Liverpool and Fabergas from Arsenal to ensure the core squad stays in Spain. And with the World cup only 2 years away, the La Rioja is sure to finish in the top 4 if not hold the cup in 2014. Only the Brazilians of the 70s have done better! So after a very tiring season, need to hang up my boots.....EPL is only 6 weeks away, Thank God.
P.S: One final note. I think Spain holds another fantastic advantage in the sense that it is one of the few countries that has a Premier League with two fantastic clubs and 16-18 average clubs. This means that life for the National selection Committe becomes easier when they pick from two clubs. Imagine picking the english team from just Man U and Arsenal !!
One, Kudos to both Poland and Ukraine. What fantastic stadia, what wonderful coverage and in the end - nobody came back in a coffin. Sol Campbell, we would never hire you as the World Tourism authority's ambassador. You are better off playing for Birmingham or maybe First Division.
Two, Italy, Greece and Portugal clearly outperformed. Italy was ranked 8th coming into this competition and clearly deserve to move ahead to atleast 3rd or 4th (in Europe, I mean) after their Runners up in Kiev. Italy clearly did this at the expense of Germany and England (ranked 2nd and 4th respectively going into this tournament). The Dutch were the clear under performers - ranked 3rd but failing to make it past the first round.
Three, some scary La Rioja statistics. Jordi Alba who scored that goal after a brilliant 70 metre run will be 25 for the World cup in Brazil. Xavier will be the oldest player in the squad (34) and pretty much everyone in the current team will still be around and under 30, if selected. We know that pretty much everyone in the Spanish squad comes from FC Barcelona....but here is another scary bit....12 out of the 21 footballers used by FCB in the 2011/12 season scored 150 out of their 190 goals and all 12 of these footballers were products of the FCB Youth program. Of these 12, 5 featured in the finals last Sunday - for Spain, just to clarify ;)
Before I end this post, I want to take some readers back to 2002. One of my ex-bosses from Procter and Gamble - Vijay Santhanam used to have an in-company blog (circulated via company mail of course in those days of no Twitter or Facebook) on sporting events.
Vijay and Shyam (another ex colleague from P&G) then went onto write two super books ...yes you guessed right - one on Sachin Tendulkar and the other on Sports Marketing.
Although bulk of the banter in these mails was around Indian cricket and mostly a guy called SR Tendulkar and the countless statistics about his success - he used to change the topic to football...once every 2 years. We used to have stalwarts like BVP (Bharat Patel, ex MD and legend from P&G, India), Shireesh Joshi, football pundit from Italy - Mr Balaji Ramanujam etc..actively participate in the group. Back in 2002 (some of you may recall) I had made a small observation in my post on the importance of 'familiarity' in national football teams. My reasoning was simple...if most footballers spent their playing career during the season in a different land or under a foreign coach, how can a national team achieve success when these 11 players came together usually a month before the tournament like the Euro. And then the Germans of 2022 gave us a glimpse of the answer to this question. The 2002 world cup runners up Germany under Rudi Voller was composed of players from just three clubs. Bayern Munich (4 players including captain Oliver Kahn), Bayer Leverkusen (5 including the famous Michael Ballack) and B Dortmund that had 4 players. Voller himself had played for Leverkusen. Very clearly, the familiarity of playing with and against each other under a coach that pretty much had the same view on the national stage as the club teams had helped propel Germany to a strong performance - finishing only behind Brazil.
The current Spanish squad has the same if not better familiarity advantage. Almost the whole team is picked from two clubs - FCB and Real Madrid, they play with each other every week and against each other almost every two months, they have all been schooled in the same formations and most importantly, almost all of them come from the La Masia academy of FCB. It looks like Spain had already laid the foundation of this team by bringing back Alonso from Liverpool and Fabergas from Arsenal to ensure the core squad stays in Spain. And with the World cup only 2 years away, the La Rioja is sure to finish in the top 4 if not hold the cup in 2014. Only the Brazilians of the 70s have done better! So after a very tiring season, need to hang up my boots.....EPL is only 6 weeks away, Thank God.
P.S: One final note. I think Spain holds another fantastic advantage in the sense that it is one of the few countries that has a Premier League with two fantastic clubs and 16-18 average clubs. This means that life for the National selection Committe becomes easier when they pick from two clubs. Imagine picking the english team from just Man U and Arsenal !!
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