Though nobody made a really big noise, I came to love the vuvuzela

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10 April 2012

So that's it, then, the carnival is at an end, with the right team having won. It seems hard to believe now that, after five weeks in which there always seemed to be a game on after a long day at the office, South Africa 2010 was the tournament in which Robert Green was dropped after a first-game howler against the USA and ITV pundit Robbie Earle was sacked after his complimentary tickets somehow found their way into the hands of a group of orange-clad babes involved in an ambush marketing stunt. But it was! It was!

If there were few truly great games and many of the world's best players were either out of form or fatigued after long European seasons, there was still much to savour. Here are my highlights and a few lowlights as well.

Best players
Diego Forlan, of Uruguay, and once of Manchester United, impressed throughout with his unstinting enthusiasm, his wonderful movement and the precision and power of his shooting with either foot. More than any other player he seemed to master how to strike the Jabulani ball, as he demonstrated yet again with the free-kick which unluckily struck the bar in the final act of the third-place play-off against Germany, which Uruguay lost 3-2. Small wonder that Sir Alex Ferguson spoke wistfully of Forlan during the tournament as someone who "could have been a great United player" had he not been sold. Yet even better than Forlan were Xavi Hernandez Creus (more commonly known as Xavi) and Andres Iniesta, both of Barcelona and Spain. A product of the far-sighted Barcelona academy, the Masia, Xavi plays in what the Catalans call the "number four" position. He and his fellow Barca pass master Iniesta, who scored the winning goal in the final, are the playmakers who control the game through their passing and movement, always dictating the tempo and setting others in motion. What Xavi and Iniesta have above all else is patience: if it means passing backwards or sideways, in order to progress, so be it. They epitomize the relentlessness and patience of the Barcelona and Spain tiki-taka passing game. If you haven't got the ball you can't win a game and Xavi, who completed more passes than any other player in South Africa, and Iniesta nearly always have the ball.

Best Goal
Holland captain Giovanni van Bronckhorst's 45-yard strike which opened the scoring in the 3-2 semi-final win against Uruguay. The left-back struck the ball so hard and true that it seemed still to be gathering pace as it hit the back of the net. Not even the comic book heroes Roy Race or Gorgeous Gus ever struck the ball harder or with such precision-guided accuracy.

Best pundit
The suave, polyglot Clarence Seedorf was a surprise and impressive addition to the often lacklustre BBC team in Cape Town. Always relaxed and verbally expansive, he came across, in style and manner, more like a super cool international businessman in South Africa to open his latest luxury spa hotel than a footballer earning a few extra quid as a pundit. Unlike Alan Shearer and Co, he also seemed to know something of the deeper history of the country and of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Heartbreaking moment
When Uruguay's Luis Suarez handled the ball in the final minute of extra-time in a dramatic quarter-final against Ghana, all of those watching across the African continent must have held their breath as Asamoah Gyan prepared to take the resulting penalty-kick. The whole match was being distilled into one final kick, a kick that could have sent Ghana into the semi-final, the first time an African team would have reached the penultimate stage of the World Cup. Here was an opportunity for what the Americans call the "Hollywood ending". Gyan missed. Never before had a player seemed so devastated. And yet, somehow, he strode up to take and score a penalty in the shoot-out, which Ghana lost. After they were eliminated, Gyan was inconsolable; he wept uncontrollably and it was as if a whole continent was weeping with and for him.

Manager of the tournament
Germany's Joachim Low for his daring commitment to youthful exuberance and attack, for his natty pale blue V-neck sweaters, worn in coordination with his coaching staff, and for his well-groomed, thick-fringed Beatles haircut. Vincent del Bosque may have won the World Cup for Spain but then he benefited from having inherited a team that were already the European champions. Even France coach Raymond Domenech would have won the tournament with this Spain team. Or, then again, maybe not.

Best haircut
Aside from the obligatory long-haired Latins and some African braids, there was nothing too imaginative or flamboyant on show at this World Cup, nothing to compare with, say, Colombian Carlos Valderrama's bleached uberperm or some of David Beckham's more ludicrous offerings. But collectively I did like the haircuts on display whenever Japan played. Keisuke Honda, with his bleached boy band spikes, and Marcus Tulio Tanaka, with his shaved sides and ponytail combination, led the way.

Worst Team
Poor North Korea may have conceded more goals than any other team, including seven against Portugal in a game broadcast live in the vast open prison that passes for their homeland, but at least they were always spirited and, what's more, they scored against Brazil! France, by contrast, disgraced the tournament in every possible way, on and off the field. A nadir was reached when, after losing against the hosts in their final game, coach Domenech, who is presently perhaps the most loathed man in France, refused to shake hands with South Africa's Brazilian coach Carlos Alberto Parreira. "The French team suffer from ethnic and religious divisions," said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. "It is a team of hoodlums, with mafia ethics — a team of people who don't care [about France]." And we thought England had problems.

Dirtiest player
Holland midfielder Mark van Bommel kicked and fouled his way through the tournament without ever transgressing quite enough to be sent off. He was especially brutal in the final. With his wiry dark curls, pallor and fierce, small, black eyes, he resembles nothing so much as a younger Martin Keown. He plays like him, too — an uncompromising destroyer.

Worst England player
This was a tournament in which the deep-lying, holding midfielder was venerated. The most accomplished teams — Germany, Spain, Holland, Brazil — each used two holding players, whose role it was to screen the defence, interrupt play and to liberate their more creative team-mates. Predictably, England ignored modern trends and opted for an inflexible 4-4-2, in which Gareth Barry was the sole holding player. But Barry was horribly exposed as a leaden-legged toiler in the Germany thrashing. He was implicated in both Germany's third and fourth goal, where his lack of pace and poor first touch were exposed. Perhaps he wasn't fully fit after his late season injury struggles. Whatever, he was a huge disappointment and returned home with his reputation diminished.

The vuvuzela
I began the tournament calling for the vuvuzela to be banned from stadiums and ended it completely at peace with and almost oblivious to the sound of the incessant horn being blown. The music of the vuvuzela will in retrospect come to define South Africa 2010 just as the snowstorms of ticker-tape defined Argentina 1978. As my New Statesman colleague Daniel Trilling wrote: "For devotees of pure sound, massed vuvuzelas are a fascinating thing: more than simply the aural equivalent of a Mexican wave, the constant, tiny variations in volume and tone turn the crowd into a single, responsive entity. When a goal is scored, there is merely an intensification of the sound already there." Long after the football has been forgotten, the sound of the vuvuzela will resound through all our dreams.

Jason Cowley is Editor of the New Statesman

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