• The stirring 116th minute goal by Andrés Iniesta that produced Spain’s first World Cup championship also produced one of the more poignant storylines of the tournament. Iniesta then pulled off his jersey to reveal a message, as many goal-scorers do. This one said: “Dani Jarque, siempre con nosotros.”

It was a salute to Iniesta’s friend, former Spanish youth star Dani Jarque, who tragically died of a heart attack last fall at the age of 26. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports writes about how Iniesta’s tribute also demonstrated the character of a humble star who reflects the best qualities of his nation:

“Spain is a beautiful country. Spain plays a beautiful game.

“And this is why it’s so easy to miss the Andres Iniestas – and Dani Jarques – that make it hum. To not realize the immense economic difficulties its people are suffering through. To forget about the construction workers and family tavern owners and working class people who made it so great for so long.

“Spain is about guts too, about tough guys living blue-collar dreams and trying to take their buddies along with them in any way they can. Even the ones who’ve passed away, even if it’s just a name scribbled on a T-shirt.

“For all the dashing glory and all the postcard towns and all the Mediterranean sunsets, it’s a country and a people that believe in hard work and an honest chance.”

• Johan Cruyff is an honorary Spaniard for the indelible imprint he left on Barcelona, Iniesta’s club team, and how the Dutch style of “Total Football” he embodied in the 1970s has been grafted into the Spanish game. So it was not surprising to read Cruyff’s scathing review of Holland’s negative fouling tactics that resulted in a total of 13 yellow cards for both teams, including an ejection for Dutch defender John Heitenga:

“And regrettably, sadly, they played very dirty. So much so that they should have been down to nine immediately, then they made two [such] ugly and hard tackles that even I felt the damage.

“This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style, yes it served the Dutch to unsettle Spain. If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they ended up losing. They were playing anti-football.”

• In anticipation of Sunday’s World Cup final match between Spain and Holland, I’m quickly re-reading two books I first picked up some years ago that perfectly explain the way each nation has played the game. In trying to win the World Cup for the first time, both are having to overcome some of their history.

David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, explores the “Total Football” approach of the great Dutch teams that twice finished as World Cup runners-up in the 1970s. The “talisman,” of course, was Johan Cruyff, who later coached Barcelona to European Cup glory and who said this week that it is Spain that plays the game the way he prefers. Winner sums it up thusly:

“Almost every Dutch team agrees with Johan Cruyff that ‘Football should always be played beautifully, you should play in an attacking way, it must be a spectacle.’ And everything you’ve heard about the Dutch love of spectacle and attack is true.”

• Ruud Gullit, an ESPN World Cup commentator and a Dutch Master of 1990s vintage, says forget that and just win, baby. The game has changed and so has the Dutch style:

“It’s so hard to play sexy, exceptional football all the time.

“It’s far easier to demolish a house than to build it. In the same way, a lot of teams have become difficult to beat because they’re so organised. Look how hard a technically gifted team like Spain have had to work for every result. It’s so difficult, with the speed of the game and the players’ athleticism. Football has evolved.

“The good news is that two teams who are capable of playing attacking football, Spain and Holland, have reached the final so defensive football hasn’t won – just yet.”

• This is Spain’s first World Cup final and the sense of national unity that most countries experience has been absent in the Iberian nation. Phil Ball, the author of Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football, wrote that intense regional pride and stubbornness has been a drag on national soccer ambitions:

“Cervantes would have enjoyed the antics of the national team, for they have been nothing if not Quixotic. Their story is a faithful reflection of the adventures of Quijote and Sancho Panza — noble self-delusion, well-meaning failure and hubris by the cartload — although the pride of the Spanish has always been a complicated, neurotic sort of pride, tinged as it is with that fatal dose of inferiority.”

Now Spain has united soccer purists who love its glittering, skillful offensive play, although goals have been hard to come by in the knockout stage. Says former England international Jamie Redknapp:

“We expect so much from Xavi and Andreas Iniesta that they might not have quite lived up to those high standards so far, but we saw against Germany that even if they are not hurting teams, they keep the ball so well that they just frustrate them.

“If they go 1-0 up they will take the life out of the opposition – and the game – with those little short passes, one-two’s, short corners. Even if they are not ahead, the situation doesn’t make a difference, because these two – and to an extent the rest of the Spanish side – still trust each other with the ball.”

• The World Cup still has a third place match, to be played Saturday between Germany and Uruguay. And neither of them would ever regard it as “The Empty Cup.”