Jaime Gil de Gomez
Martha Velenzuela
ENC1101
11/10/2014

South Africa 2010 The 11th of July of 2010, took place at the “Soccer City Stadium” (Johannesburg, South Africa) the final of the FIFA World Cup between Netherlands and Spain. That was a day I would never forget because we became world champions for the first time in our history thanks to a goal of Andres Iniesta during the overtime in the minute 116. But to get to the final we had to suffer a lot. Everything began when a team full of very talented and very shameless players managed to gain the UEFA Euro 2008 against the almighty and fearsome Germany. This fact permitted the whole Spanish people to dream and to ask themselves: Why not? Why not becoming the next national team to conquer the world cup? Two years later, the world cup began. The 16th of June of 2010 Spain made his debut against Switzerland, an adversary that was supposed to be easy to beat, but because of the nerves, the pressure, and the excessive confidence, we lost. Then, the critiques came, people started to lose confidence in the squad and the press made us doubt the players who were defending our country. In spite of the doubts created around the whole team, they were able to stay together, they gave all they had for winning the following games and they managed to qualify to the next round. Portugal was waiting. Round of 16, the phase of groups has concluded and the removal phase began. In that moment, things became more serious, any kind of mistake could have sent us home. We faced the dangerous Portugal of the one that possibly is the best player of the world, Cristiano Ronaldo. The game was very physical, both teams respected each other a lot and didn´t want to risk. The equality broke down thanks to a collective play of the forward. We combined a few times near their goal and finally we managed to score, winning the match and qualifying to the quarter-finals. Spain in all his history, the have never achieved to play any final or semi-final of a world cup, fact that we used to call “The Quarter-Finals Curse”. However, we were confident and we knew that this time it was going to be different. We played against Paraguay, strong team with very fast and vertical players, they made us play the worst match of the championship because they develop a very solid defensive system which kept us off their goal. The end of the game was close, Paraguayan players were exhausted so the Spain´s coach decided to send the entire team to the offensive and we finally scored and won the match. Germany was the next step to get in to the final. Until then, Germany had realized a very clean championship. They really wanted to play against us to take revenge from what happened two years ago, but the revenge will have to wait. The victory was deserved, we played a very complete game and we beat them in all the facets of the game. Only one bump left for winning the title, Netherland. The final was there, that was the moment that all Spanish people had waited and dreamed for decades. They knew we were better and their head coach didn´t want us to play and dominate the game so he proposed a very violent game full of fouls and aggressive plays which in my opinion can be qualified as extremely violent, but we still following our philosophy of soccer and 120 minutes later Spain was the Champion of the FIFA World Cup 2010. It is amazing to see how a sport can link up a whole country. Everybody forgot about their differences, no matter if you were from the South or from the North, no matter if you supported F.C Barcelona or Real Madrid F.C. Everyone got together for the same purpose: animate our national soccer team. Personally, I feel really excited on having seen how a squad made by 23 amazing players that made us shout and cry of happiness.