Desastre español!! (spanish disaster)

Disaster strikes Spanish football down into the doldrums by 'Gelson Fernandes' super strike'. Another 'park-the-bus' performance undoes the Catalan tactics of Barce/Spain. The first big upset, not including England v USA, of the tournament and Spain are down and about as usual. All it took was a ball down the middle to make a terrible defence weep. Capdevlia had an awful game, leaving big gaps in defence, whilst Pique and Puyol looked like they had never been asked to defend a long ball in their lives before, ironically similar to Arsenal's defence of the long ball to Ibra at the Emirates.

Now, I am not one to discount a team on one performance, after all this is a team who have only lost one game, against USA, coming into this tournament for the last gazillion years but the team looked like they had run out of ideas when sticking Pique upfront was not working. The best Spanish player was definitely Jesus Navas who stays wide and stretches defences. I think he could be the equivalent to Camoranesi for Italy, where he is not the best player in the squad but he allows moves to continue. It is clear that Spain cannot deal with direct football as none of their defensive players have really dealt with plays like that in their day-to-day footballing lives. Maybe Sir Alex Ferguson saw this in Pique and allowed him to leave for this specific reason, but you would have thought that any international defender could deal with a ball like that.

I have always had an issue with Iker Casillas, whilst he is a great shot stopper he does not seem to be able to organise a defence as I have never seen him open his mouth on a pitch and he always seems to be a bit naive when rushing out to an attacker. This was illustrated perfectally in the Switzerland goal when Derdiyok was dribbling towards him, Casillas came feet first out and took the striker out without touching the ball, which should have been a straight red card even with the goal standing. It looked as though he was scared of getting hurt, which is never a good sign.

All in all, not an impressive performance from Spain, but they should still be able to make at least the quarter-finals, though if they come second in this group, they will have to play Brazil, and I know who I would back to come through that tie, and they speak Portuguese.