David v Goliath

The Spain result yesterday crystallised something. France drew, England drew, Argentina won narrowly 1-0, Italy drew, Brazil narrowly won 2-1. Of all the favourites, and they weren't even a favourite, only Germany have looked assured. They have surely been the team of the tournament so far, they were pretty amazing the other night.

But this is not necessarily the big teams underperforming, as a lot of people have been saying. Clearly no-one wants to lose their first game and so conservatism wins out over adventure in most cases. And the big players need to feel their way into a tournament like any other. I've read elsewhere that the standardisation of training regimes means that tournaments are unlikely to turn up a real clash of styles and approaches like they used to (did they use to?). An additional, and perhaps unseen, aspect of the globalization of football.

But what I think this shows too is the psychology of football, the tactics, the results of careful and methodic studying of DVDs of the opposition in order to pick their weaknesses and work out their strengths. Studying your opponent is not a new idea, but there seems to me to be an ever-increasing emphasis placed on the psychology of the game, and thus the role of the manager. José Mourinho is talked about in such glowing terms because of his tactical masterclasses (see Inter's win over Barcelona in last season's Champions League), whilst managers like Marcello Lippi, Fabio Capello and Guus Hiddink are prized so much because of their adept readings of the game. You see evidence of this emphasis when you look at the managers of so-called "lesser teams" - Ottmar Hitzfeld is managing Switzerland. He's one of the very small group of managers to have won the Champions League with 2 different clubs. Sven-Goran Eriksson is managing the Ivory Coast. I know Sven's not the best manager ever, but time was when smaller countries would find much smaller profile managers. You have Carlos Alberto Parreira managing South Africa and if Russia were in the World Cup, they would be managed by Guus Hiddink.

Teams are going out with very carefully plotted game-plans. North Korea executed theirs almost to perfection, Switzerland certainly did. They are drilled on these again and again and the test of the players is how much they can stick to it once they're in the glare of the floodlights and the TV cameras.