Are the Spanish football team the death of football?

Having been all excited about the World Cup, the whole thing seemed to fall flat. All the initial optimism was washed out by a run of workmanlike performances from the big teams. The biggest shock of the first round of games was Spain's defeat to Switzerland. Brought in on a wave of enthusiasm about their flowing football, the European Champions seem to have strengthened the team with the addition of Barcelona's Pique at centre half and some flying wingers in Navas and Juan Mata.



Instead though, we saw them come up against a very well organised Swiss team, who set their stall out early and set out to frustrate them. They took their chance well and frankly, should've scored a second later on. Spain have made it through the group stages and will almost certainly crack on to the later stages of the tournament, but it has to be said, I can't say they excite me.

One of the things I enjoy about Dundee is the number of people I meet from different backgrounds and the majority of people tell me that Scottish football is shite. As I've probably mentioned before, this is nonsense. I love it. Scottish football gives me nights like this:



Which I'll never get bored of watching. Anyway, I digress, I'm not comparing Spain to the SPL, thats silly, but as a reference point, I'd far rather watch players going at it, taking on players, blood and thunder matches. What I don't want to see is Xavi standing in central midfield knocking passes 5 feet either side of him, only to receive it back, make another short pass, then some more. Passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy-passy.

The thing that really baffles me about it, is that the Spaniards are held in such high regard. In 2008, Walter Smith guided Rangers to the UEFA Cup Final in Manchester with a string of organised performances against what were player for player, probably better teams. Earlier on in that campaign, Rangers came up against Barcelona and were criticised by Lionel Messi for their 'Anti-Football' approach Messi claimed: "It's incredible. Rangers didn't want to play football. Right from the start they went for anti-football and I'm left with a bitter taste in the mouth at not having been able to win the match because we had a decent number of chances. All we lacked was the finish."We were tired and they weren't interested in trying to win so it was inevitable that the pace would drop,"

The Opta round up from the first round of games also gave some revealing stats, unsurprisingly Xavi is around the top of a lot of them.

.	Player Surname	Team	Passes Attempted Final third	Passing Accuracy Final third
.	Xavi	Spain	46	89.13%

Player Surname Team Crosses Attempted Jesus Navas Spain 19 Seitaridis Greece 10 Capdevila Spain 8
Player Surname Team Team Total Passes Passing Accuracy Melo Brazil 98 91.84% Xabi Alonso Spain 96 89.58% Rodríguez Mexico 95 93.68% Xavi Spain 94 94.68%

Along with this though, not a single Spainish player features in the top ten of shots on target (its topped by Messi on 7.) The other data is available here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/datablog/2010/jun/17/opta-world-cup-2010-data#data So what we could say is that the Spaniards are getting the ball, moving it well, getting it forward and then going back again. This is all very well and good, but in doing so it feels like they're wasting probably two of the top ten best strikers in the world. I understand that posession and pressing are the name of the game, I'm going to support Chile, with their flying wingers, manic defending, centre forwards with 20+ goals who can't get in the team and no end product from a single one of them. Go Chile!