The cup has a new home in the depth of the German Football Association’s headquarters, and the great prediction of Gary Lineker were just as valid in 2014 as when he made it in 1990, though in this case it was a 120mins of football before the Germans won. The Germans were good throughout the tournament and deserve all the praise they are getting.
In any case I discussed the final on Tuesday, and the pain still hurts, so I shall cast my gaze wider and look back at the tournament as a whole, and see it for what it truly was, the best world cup ever, or at least since 1986. For one it has the most goals scored at a world cup, joint with France 1998, but also had some of the best goalkeeping displays in all tournaments, with notable performances going to Tim Howard (most saves in a single match -16), Keylor Navas (saved 21 out of 23 shots on goal) and Manuel Neuer who picked up the Golden Glove, as he kept 4 clean sheets with an 82% save rate. The other main individual awards went to James Rodriguez (Golden boot with 6 goals) and Lionel Messi (Golden Ball); although Messi was less than enthusiastic about winning the best player award after losing the final.
The attacking flavour if this world cup has made it a great spectacle to watch, and the great defending (Brazil’s last two games notwithstanding) made the games tense and not predictable. Some of the younger players and teams did very well also, which makes the four years to the next cup (hopefully) a long wait to see how these teams do next time round. It also made prediction of these games very hard indeed, with both Numbernine and I failing miserably at any of our predictions done at any time during the cup. Also in New Zealand the TAB had a 5 million dollar prize for anyone who could successfully predict the outcome of each game at the cup (just a win/loss/draw result) and before the end of the first week no one was left in the running. Some people picked up good wins with betting on Germany to win the tournament, but that wasn’t that surprising given it was correctly predicted all the way back in 1990 as well.
In the end this cup was entertaining, full of heroes, and a villain (Suarez) as well as some fools (the Brazilian Defense) and that made the entertainment that much better for us, the audience as we watched from our golden thrones and roared our appreciation and cried our tears of grief as the players on the stage did their parts to perfection.
NineSixFourTwo 