I need more time to write my postmortem on Brazil’s World Cup campaign, and the previous thread has almost 3000 comments on it, so here’s a new thread in the meantime.

We’ll see what comes of the final. On the one hand, I think Spain are the better team on paper, Argentina have shown themselves to be vulnerable against the sort of patient buildup play they can produce, and I think the Spanish game plan is so well-established and ingrained in their players that it’s highly unlikely they’d fuck things up by abandoning it like England just did. On the other hand, you can’t ever count on Spain’s scorers to turn their general dominance of a game into actual goals, and Argentina have repeatedly shown that they’ll refuse to quit and can dramatically turn up the intensity when chasing games. (Then there’s the whole “the refs seem to give their players the benefit of the doubt and turn a microscope on their opponents” thing.) As much as I’d love to see Argentina suffer a 7-1 of their own, I think they’re too good and too mentally tough for that, and Spain are too respectful to really run up the score should they get the chance.

I’d say perhaps it’s time to root for Team Meteor, but I live close enough to the stadium that that’s probably not advisable. So I might as well preemptively congratulate Argentina for pulling a win out of their asses in the dying minutes, and just hope that meeting Donald Trump during the trophy ceremony gets his sports curse all over them so we can blow them out of the water in 2030.