Why you should trust your own eyes during Spain vs Netherlands

Yesterday, in the final minutes before Brazil’s Oscar scored his team’s third and decisive goal against Croatia in the opening match of the 2014 World Cup, my nearly three year-old son pointed at the iPad screen with a serious look on his face. “Croatia not kicking the ball. The other soccer mans are kicking the ball.”

My son barely knows what a ‘country’ is, let alone a World Cup. Yet the urge to analyze and discuss football is irresistible at any age.

And he wasn’t wrong either. Croatia didn’t have the ball, particularly in the second half when the score was still 1-1 and Niko Kovac had clearly directed for his side to work a relatively inconsistent Brazilian defense on the counter.  

Today the Netherlands face Spain at the Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador. It will be one of the more “tactics heavy” match ups in the group stages, if only because Spain and Holland are so tactically distinct.

There have already been tomes written on Louis van Gaal’s Feyenoord inspired 5-3-2 and how it could help overcome the lopsided difference in talent between the two sides, forcing tiki-taka, possession-obsessed Spain to cross the ball fruitlessly into the Dutch 18 yard box. Or on the durability of Vicente Del Bosque’s tiki-taka with the aging of Xavi and Iniesta.

There will be panels of television pundits with electronic boards eager to tell you what to think, shouting positions and formations and player habits and club experience and previous tactical preferences in qualifiers at you during every pre, during, and post-match break at a pace any relative newcomer to the game couldn’t possibly keep up with. Meanwhile newspapers will clog your Twitter feed with reams of information on “What to Watch For,” analysis that could go out the window with an own-goal in the first five minutes.

All this will only reinforce the false and patronizing idea that understanding football tactics is a province of the game best left to the “experts.” Or worse, it will encourage others will a little bit of knowledge to try to imitate the same, bland authoritative tone whilst running roughshod over the grey truths that define tactical analysis.

I urge you, particularly if you are not a regular soccer viewer, to mute those voices and trust your own eyes. And if you are one of those self-styled “experts”, I would encourage you to suppress your derision or the need to “inform” and “correct,” and just listen.

Often the best insights come from those who watch the game with fresh eyes, and the World Cup offers a rare opportunity for hardened football nerds to have their perspective changed by someone who rarely watches football.

While your eyes are fixed on the space left behind Jordi Alba, theirs will be on the patient runs of Daley Blind along the channel. While you might be guffawing at yet another Arjen Robben cut and shoot, they may be noticing how Sergio Ramos and Gerard Pique are spaced too close together.

It’s football. We’re all experts, because none of us are.