This closing ceremony is just absolutely amazing. Amazing. That is all for now.

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesia's political blog took a brief and (as usual) dubious detour into the Americans-don't-like-soccer-why-is-that-oh-yes-they-do-oh-no-they-don't-it's-because-of-the-low-scoring-well-actually-are-other-sports-really-so-different-I-hate-the-diving-I-don't-like-nil-nil-draws-but-actually-nil-nil-draws-can be-quite-compelling-et-cetera-ad-nauseum debate.

So, I've been feeling a little churlish all day, like may be the ramble below did not give Spain due credit. To be honest, I was so disappointed in Russia—who were worse today than the counterfeit Stolichnaya I drank in Moscow in 1996—that I was not sufficiently impressed by Spain. I just watched the highlights, and feel the need to make amends: la Furia was, at least a moments, great.

Well, that's that, then. After we all convinced ourselves that the opening group game no longer mattered (why? because!), Spain proves that it was, in fact, a pretty good gauge of the two sides' relative quality. Arshavin—Arsh-who? Maybe the poor lad started reading this blog, that blog and the other blog, all of which got into a tizzy over his two-game wonder.

I rate that one a solid 8/10. Rattling crossbars. Bloody heads. A meaty geopolitical backstory. Sweaty coaches: Joachim "Es ist nicht ein Fashionmullet!" Loew, guiding the Mannschaft home, if you know what I mean; and that Turkish fella. That Turkish fella! Can we get him in MLS like yesterday, please?

Hmm. I honestly can't say if this makes sense or not.

Here's what a day of baby-sitting will do to a man: I just spent 17 good minutes of my life watching highlights (?) of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying matches, including Jamaica's 7-0 win over Bahamas and Guatemala's 6-0 win over Saint Lucia. I'm all for the minnows having their God-given World Cup chance, but doesn't it seem sort of cruel and unusual?

That was just a brilliant game. As many have noted, Holland had the air of a successful, confident young man who suddenly runs into his more successful, more confident Doppelganger on the street: they didn't quite know what to do. And in retrospect, maybe the Dutch had it too easy in the so-called Group of Death, feasting on an Italy that obviously sent out the wrong XI, a France in steep decline and an all-too-Romanian Romania.

I admit it: I wrote Russia off after Spain poleaxed them in the first group game. I forgot who Guus Hiddink is, and I'm afraid I just didn't know much about Arshavin. I stand corrected.

A Dutch-American friend writes:
What was once an ideological empire tempering the market fundamentalist tendencies of the West has itself become the very caricature of capitalist excess. It is a national morality tale, like 1920s America. Today's Russia is the Great Gatsby writ large.
And that only highlights what a great duel could await us in today's Holland v.

Usually, a bittersweet feeling sets in at the end of the group phase of a major tournament. Friends old and new must take their leave, and all of a sudden half the storylines in the soap opera disappear. In the World Cup, there's always some spunky underdog—a Trinibagonian or two—to mourn. Teams that may have played some tasty football—yer Cote d'Ivoires and so on—fail to survive.

Made a brief stop at the Thirsty Lion, just in time to see Ballack pop his header past Ricardo, with just enough time before I fled back to work (it will make you free, you know) to engage the guy sitting next to me in a vigorous debate over whether the bludgeon-skulled German striker fouled his defender.

If, as Spangly Princess suggests and his form with both Barcelona and France seems to confirm, Thierry Henry is as past it as a reality show about talentless (but slut-riffic) starlets living among the commoners...does that mean we can crank the Thierry-Henry-to-MLS rumor mill as high as she'll go? We already saw an Henry boomlet when Seattle got the MLS nod (as a result of a malign cosmic conspiracy) and let drop some press-bait re: a plan to stuff the Frenchman's pockets with Cascadian-American dollars.

I long ago stopped caring about soccer-bashing American sportswriters—or, anyway, I decided to try to stop caring, in preference to my former habit of allowing the 17,492nd version of the "soccer: sport of pederastic Trotskyites" opinion piece drive me into insane, fist-gnawing rage. Now I just shake my head with rueful amusement and put the writer in question on my long list of people never to read again.

As I survey the shattered particles of the so-called Group of Death, scattered like so many discarded Legos at the feet of Marco Van Basten, I have to wonder. Like everyone else, I have developed an enormous man-crush on this Holland team, which so casually dispatched its group opponents and, into the bargain, seems intent on playing football about as lovely as can be played under the modern conditions of production.

Why, when pretty much everyone reviles penalty shootouts as a means of deciding knockout games, would anyone want to install the bloody things in group games? Has the world gone INSANE?

If you're Marco van Basten, with first place in the group locked down and a bench full of players who haven't seen the field yet, do you:
—let the reserves have a highly alliterative run-out against Romania?
—stick with the same basic XI to make sure no rust sets in before the knock-outs?

So, after two demolition jobs performed on the effective co-world champions, is it safe to say that Marco van Basten is cooking up genius in the Dutch ranks? That was a fantastic performance, abetted by France's inability to finish, Ribery's penchant for trying to dribble through good tackles and a goalkeeper who will be in the male modeling trade by this time next week.

Ah. Courtesy the Guardian, a clip from one of the first real football matches I ever watched:

I must say, as fanatically executed conceits go, it's hard to top a full-scale recreation of Euro 2008 from an alternate reality in which England made the tournament. It's a dangerous concept: it very nearly tempted me to compose a detailed Wikipedia entry from the universe in which the United States, rather than Brazil, develops a singularly gorgeous national style of football to match its obsession with the game, and goes on to win five World Cups.