Barney Ronay

This is The Guardian.

Hi there, everyone.

he was i thought he was he was just so i've seen games like this where the keeper is a bit flappy and eventually cost him and he was just brilliant for the whole game yeah i mean barry's right they were incredibly disciplined and it wasn't it wasn't simply up backs to the wall kind of frantic defending it was a brilliant team performance i have to say i do like watching spain malfunction you know spain have been the most beautiful team of the last 16 years

But when it goes wrong, there's something quite gripping about seeing that kind of glitch in the machine where they just can't stop passing.

They can't stop going sideways.

It's like someone with a tick who just can't help themselves.

And I quite enjoy, obviously, nodding to myself, saying things like, hmm, the absence of an Eva and Tony-like figure, and hmm, haven't worked on the set pieces enough.

But they just couldn't stop

doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.

And it was really gripping.

I love, I love the, um, the guy who came on to Mark Laminia mile who plays in Romania.

Yeah.

And, um, really is just the ultimate kind of, I want to have a career in football somewhere guy who's obviously worked so hard and he's up against this kind of prodigy and this, this genius, um, obviously there'll be injured and they will be different when he's fully fit.

If he's fully fit, um,

But yeah, the World Cup wins again.

Can I just put in a word for the Fox coverage of this game?

I watched it on Fox here in Dallas.

And I think it was the perfect...

example of the issues football sometimes has in this country because here you've got a nil-nil draw um which we're talking about in joyous terms there's one of the greatest results in world cup history and to a u.s sports fan that's um baffling like what it's nil nil after 90 minutes

But this is an incredible, joyful, everybody's just buzzing from it.