Knee-Jerk Know-It-Alls

It is an unavoidable fact of life in today's 24-hour round-the-clock football-mad media that journalists and pundits will hastily rush to judgement only to end up with egg on their faces when all is said and done.

Of course, this only happens because there is a demand for it; we feel the need to try to make sense of the madness before the dust has even begun to settle, only to later realise that making sweeping judgements during the heat of the moment is utterly foolish.

This process has been especially evident during the World Cup. Barely two weeks ago we were being told that this was South America's tournament and that it signalled the decline of the European nations on the international scene; all six South American teams had made it through to the second round, whilst traditional European contenders like Italy, France and England had floundered.

One newspaper article even suggested that FIFA would be forced to restructure the South American World Cup qualifying system to make sure that this dominance would not go unchecked in the future.

Fast-forward to the end of the tournament and the top three teams are all European, and more than a few football 'experts' are looking somewhat foolish.

Naturally this knee-jerk reactionism is never more apparent than in the British tabloid's opinions on the England team. According to many, it is now clear that every man, woman and child in England is better at football than Wayne Rooney, and Capello clearly deserves to sectioned under the mental health act.

And whenever another team won a game in the tournament we were presented with a long list of things that England need to copy from that nation's international set up. Indeed, just before the final we were told that England could learn so much from the current Holland team's tactics, selection policy and professional 'winning' attitude. Fast forward to after the game and that same Holland team apparently now represent 'total thuggery' and are an utter disgrace to football.

I'm not suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from the World Cup. I think Spain legitimately do have a national set-up that greatly increases their chances of success in major tournaments. I think there has been an undeniable shift in the tactics and formations of winning teams (although some experts will have you believe that no team playing a 4-4-2 will ever win again in the history of football). I also think that there are some inevitably harsh conclusions to be drawn from England's performance, and changes that do need to be made.

However, tournaments like these essentially boil down to only a handful of games which are decided by a handful of moments, with luck being a major player throughout. These are split-second things that can easily go either way, yet we still insist on basing our written-in-stone judgements on these fickle moments.

What if Arjen Robben's shot had been a few inches higher when he was clean through on Casillas? What if the USA had not scored in the final seconds against Algeria to send them through top of the group? These are just two examples out of hundreds, and every World Cup has them; brief moments in time that shape the way the tournament is remembered forever. It's a massive reason why we love it so much.

I truly believe that if we were to go back in time and play the tournament from the start again, the results, and the iron-clad conclusions we draw from them, would most likely be very different. Or perhaps it truly was all down to the will of the octopus. Nobody really knows, and that is exactly the point.