AFTER ALMOST two hours of gridlock in Soccer City, the World Cup final finished with some olé olé oléas Spain for the first time ever took the trophy with a goal late in extra time.
It was a win they just about deserved, hewn from a match none of us really deserved.
The South African winter had a nasty nip in it last night, and Spain and the Netherlands caught the mood, snarling and hissing at each other through much of soccer’s showpiece final and failing to compensate us with a goal.
As the game lurched toward a penalty shoot-out. the Dutch defence was found flatfooted, with Andrés Iniesta lurking to the right. The ball came to him and, with an assassin’s heart, he placed it in the Dutch goal.
At last! The Spanish and the Dutch had given 84,490 cold fans an hour and a half of football unpunctuated by goals and peppered with bad fouls. Nine yellow cards were issued in that time, a record for a World Cup final. Keeping count was the only diversion on offer.
Then they treated us to the cruel and unusual punishment of 25 more minutes of extra time. No goals and a red card. And then Iniesta’s intervention.
In the Netherlands and Spain it scarcely mattered, of course. The tedium wasn’t the message.
Football commandeered almost every significant public space in Dutch cities as the nation huddled in front of big screens to watch their side attempt to win the trophy in their third appearance in a final.
In Spain it was the same even in Barcelona where a million people marched on Saturday seeking more autonomy and then regrouped yesterday to cheer the Spanish team.
As a closing chapter to this World Cup, the game may have lacked quality but the night itself came with stars.
Nelson Mandela, the nation’s beloved father, came across the pitch on, of all things, a golf cart. Accompanied by his wife Graca Machel and thoroughly insulated from the cold, Mandela had the natural grace and elegance to carry it off as the vuvuzelas and the lusty applause shook the night.
Mandela was joined in watching the match by many lesser figures. South Africa’s scandal plagued president Jacob Zuma and Zimbabwe’s reigning tyrant Robert Mugabe were both outshone.
And after a month of football, 32 teams and 64 matches, FIFA and its great circus took leave of South Africa. They left behind their card in the form of an almost cruel jape during the closing ceremony. In the cold wan light of Soccer City, hard by the struggling township of Soweto, one of the final theatrical images of the ceremony was a watering hole. Out of the darkness, toward this little oasis came some elephants. All of them white. As clear an illustration of the World Cup’s legacy as could be made.
Take the trophy Spain. South Africa gets to keep the white elephants. So long and thanks for all the vuvuzelas.