• 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.”

• Temperatures are rising along with the collective blood pressure of many in the sports-and-media world over the LeBron James farce on ESPN. The best read I came across is from Jake Simpson of the Atlantic Culture Channel in a post titled “LeBron James and the Rise of Sports Reality TV.” Slam dunk bucket here:

“Skeptics would argue LeBron-mania is an isolated incident, an overreaction by the media and public to a transcendent sports figure making a career-altering decision. But that doesn’t explain why Dallas Braden is more famous for yelling ‘get off my fucking mound’ at Alex Rodriguez than he is for pitching a perfect game. . . . That Braden achieved perfection for a day and carved out a permanent place in baseball history is somehow less marketable than his outburst of bravado and his grandmother’s now-immortal comment: ‘Stick It, A-Rod.’ The sensational has won out over the sublime. And sports franchises are nodding happily.”

• Thanks to the Sports Business Daily for taking its roundup on “The Decision” out from behind its paywall. Lots of good behind-the-scenes details on how James’ publicist, the aptly named Maverick Carter, concocted this prime-time circus.

• John Ourand, the crack media writer for SBJ’s parent publication, the Sports Business Journal, is bothered by today’s column from ESPN ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, which he calls “stupendously weak” for delving deeply into World Cup vuvuzelas but is stone silent about its James coverage.

• My Twitter follower Mark Zemek is upset, but for other reasons. Huffington Post is featuring a 39-shot photo gallery of Paraguayan model Larissa Riquelme, who has promised to run naked through the streets of Asunción to celebrate her nation’s World Cup team reaching the quarterfinals. If I had a body like that, I’d probably be bold enough to make such a pledge. 700 comments and counting, folks. It’s a bit more G-Rated than this item elsewhere on Queen Arianna’s “sports” page.

• Thank God they won’t have to be on the lookout for Diego Maradona in the rah in Buenos Aires. But I would cry for Argentina if he changes his mind.

• I’ll have plenty more on the World Cup finals tomorrow, but this piece from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports about the “Oracle Octopus” has me very hungry. The critter correctly predicted Spain’s semifinal victory, and now some German fans want to “throw him in the frying pan.” One suggested recipe:

“Cut him up in thin slices and grill him on all sides with a dash of lemon juice, olive oil and garlic on it. Delicious!”

That does sound tasty, but it’s just too darn hot to stand over a stove tonight.

• If I can’t be in Brazil for the next World Cup in 2014, then I’ll cut a shuck for Vanuatu or any other place on the planet except the United States. Nothing against my country, but rather the America media that every four years insists on deconstructing their fellow citizens who like the sport. This post-U.S. vs. Ghana psychoanalysis comes from Jeff McGregor at ESPN.com, who has made what I believe is the most confounding analogy I have ever read about this infatuation:

“Weirdly, while the rest of us struggle, some of the original American fans, the deep believers and postwar pre-modern footie zealots don’t want to let the game go. They want to keep it for themselves, keep it small and cool and solitary. Like when you were a teenager and you discovered a passion of your own and you held it close and tight; and as soon as your parents found out about it, or even your friends, it was ruined. No matter what you say about soccer, it seems to them like the wrong thing to say about soccer. If you don’t believe me, read the comments on any American soccer thread on the internet. There’s a core constituency there holding the game in trust only for themselves. Holding it hostage, like a priesthood.

Well, so much for complaints that American soccer fans are trying to shove the sport down everyone else’s throat! Been too self-absorbed for that, apparently:

“These are the same kind of folks who loved jazz to death in this country, smothered it with the same ‘You can’t understand the beauty of this’ condescension and obsession. Come to think of it, that’s another strike against soccer in the American mind, too: It’s too much like jazz. Too improvisational, too fluid, too ungoverned. Maybe that’s why jazz as a going concern fled this country to Europe all those years ago. We tend to prefer games and melodies that keep us thinking inside the box.”

I know you can fire up the Internet from anywhere and read this stuff, and I realize that we have so many commentators who have to say something they think is relevant — everybody’s gotta have a take, you know — but really now? First they came for jazz, now they’re coming for soccer! What will they seek to destroy next? Sudoku?

To equate devotées of a sport that red-blooded Americans think is too foreign with those groovy cats who are passionate about the quintessential American art form is quite a bit of a stretch. And quite silly.

American soccer fans I know experience nothing like an existential crisis. It’s those who treat them like anthropological matter who can’t seem to let go of assumptions that have little basis in fact.

• The Sports Illustrated World Cup preview edition included a well-crafted profile of Landon Donovan and his odyssey of carrying the burden for the U.S. soccer team. While it was a bit rich to include the genius references to Mozart, Picasso, etc., Joe Posnanski cut to the heart of Donovan’s dilemma, which is rooted in his early crashing out in Europe.

In light of what he’s done at the World Cup, and the role he’s expected to play as the Americans face Ghana Saturday in the second round, this piece is especially illuminating now. Donovan found his emotional and psychological breakthrough earlier this winter, while playing for Everton in England’s Premier League on a short loan stint:

“It isn’t because he proved himself on such a stage. It isn’t because, at 28, he established himself unquestionably as a world-class player. It isn’t because he doused the final doubts about himself.

” ‘No, here’s the thing,’ Donovan says. ‘I proved something to myself. I proved to myself that I could play at a high level game after game. I couldn’t do that before. I always needed something outside myself. I used to be on the field and think, ‘Maybe I’ll hear a song that will remind me of my family or where I came from or my wife. Maybe the crowd will get really loud, and that will lift me up.’ I realized I don’t need that.’ “

• The Americans won a group stage for the first time since the first World Cup in 1930, but Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke wonders if the bar is being set too low for American expectations now. Ghana is 18 places below the U.S. in the current FIFA rankings, but Plaschke should know that FIFA rankings never amount to much. Still, it’s hard to fault this thought:

“I suspect that one reason U.S. soccer does not become a superpower is because, as fans, we don’t demand it. We don’t pressure a losing coach like a Southeastern Conference football crowd. We don’t push a struggling player like a New York baseball crowd. We blister an NBA coach for ripping a referee, yet we allow soccer players to fire away.

“We give soccer excuses it doesn’t need, then shower it with praise for a job it hasn’t finished. We treat American soccer like a precocious prodigy instead of a burgeoning powerhouse. The youth soccer movement in this country is at least 30 years old, Major League Soccer is 15 years old — isn’t it time for everyone to grow up?

• Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel has a terrific piece on U.S. coach Bob Bradley, who’s heard plenty of calls for his head since succeeding Bruce Arena after the 2006 World Cup. Bradley wasn’t the first choice to lead the Americans into South Africa, but he’s certainly looking like the best choice regardless of what happens Saturday.

• Congrats go out to a friend of mine, New York Daily News soccer correspondent Michael Lewis, who’s been in the business for 36 years, most of it covering the game he loves the most. And a conscientious, down-to-earth guy to boot.

• During a very busy week, I didn’t get a chance to watch any of the epic Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. But reading just a bit of a live blog on the match at The Guardian was exhausting enough. The folks at the All-England Club need to seriously think about putting some limits on how fifth sets should be settled. Stoppage time, perhaps?

• One more clip of Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria, a classic radio call by Andrés Cantor. Save your voice, my friend!

• Not surprisingly, my post yesterday at Blue Star Basketball about Title IX drew some heated response from the predictable quarters, although one critic did bother to respond directly in the comments section. So I thank him for that.

• And with World Cup euphoria reaching a fever pitch here in America (believe that!), I’ve come to love Stefan Fatsis’ dispatches from South Africa. At The Goal Post, he dazzles again, just like Landon Donovan, on the subject of the U.S. team’s success and political ideologies. To both he says: Pshawwwww! Bravo, Stefan!

“This is where soccer fearmongers on the right and worrywarts on the left are wrong. The  apparent concern among certain conservatives is that soccer equals socialism and our personal bogeyman, immigration. Lock your doors, suburban U8 players of America! Over at The Nation, meanwhile, Dave Zirin frets that the comments of a couple of unlisten-to-able D.C. sports-talk radio soccer troglodytes reflect a ‘nasty undercurrent’ embedded in all US victories in all international sports. So let me see if I have it straight: The right thinks soccer is un-American and the left thinks the right will use a soccer victory as cause for American triumphalism. Drop ball, people.

“Anyone with a dust speck of knowledge of US soccer’s place in the world understands that the euphoria surrounding Donovan’s goal and the prospect for the US in this World Cup have nothing whatsoever to do with reinforcing American cultural might and everything to do with celebrating a long-time-coming (and still-not-there) American ascendancy in the rare place it hasn’t existed. Those chants of ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ aren’t an expression of American superiority. They’re a foam finger in the world’s eyeball from a historically and justifiably overlooked, disrespected, disregarded second-rate soccer country. It’s all about redemption on the field, not politics off of it.”

• My latest piece at Blue Star Basketball is entitled “Why It’s Time To Get Beyond Title IX,” but I haven’t had a chance to respond to readers, etc. as I was at an all-day website workshop. Not trying to blog and run, but I couldn’t avoid the schedule conflict.

• And I missed today’s World Cup action. Given the nail-biting way in which the U.S. defeated Algeria to advance, perhaps it  was a good thing. These Yanks are going to give me a heart attack before this thing is over. Call them The Unforgettables. Americans not familiar with the suspense and the torment of the World Cup are finding out just how excruciating this is to the rest of the world.

They won’t have much time to get ready for a hell of a weekend as the knockout stage begins. The epic stuff is only going to get better, I believe. Bring it on, Ghana.

• Also can’t wait for another England vs. Germany matchup in the second round. The Fleet Street tabloids will be littered with World War caricatures of “Jerry” and all the torment he has caused, especially on the pitch.

God am I loving this!

• After finishing the main draft of my post on the 38th anniversary of Title IX, I traipsed around my Twitterverse and discovered some disbelief that there’s actually a federal lawsuit underway that may decide whether cheerleading is a sport.

• Their combatants at the College Sports Council have exploited publicity about the World Cup to point out sagging opportunities in men’s college soccer due to Title IX. CSC spokesman Eric McErlain Tweeted along this study to me, and it has some good data that reflects some terrible disparities.

But there aren’t many devoted to male soccer development in America who will say that the college game is an integral part of the process. Because of the way the rest of the world develops players, it’s more of a hindrance, with limited playing and practice time and the typical thicket of NCAA regulations.

McErlain replied that his group isn’t interested in player development, and the CSC doesn’t directly make a connection to the progress of the U.S. men’s team. But the timing of the release of the study does make a subtle suggestion, at the very least.

• Following some revisions and editing tonight, I’ll post my Title IX thoughts at Blue Star Basketball early Wednesday morning. I’m off to all-day website business workshop after that, so if I don’t reply to Tweets and other communications during the day, I’ll try to catch up with them Wednesday evening.

• As France’s fractured and hapless team was dispatched from South Africa Tuesday, Le Monde deluged readers with coverage of “La Défaite” that’s sure to leave a sour taste for years. “The World Cup has lost its jesters,” the newspaper wrote, working in a reference to Sartre, among other devices. In Dublin, outrage over Thierry Henry’s uncalled handball during World Cup qualifying was replaced by some modest rejoicing. A small consolation, but worth noting:

• An excellent post today by Jason Fry at the National Sports Journalism Center encourages sports journalists to think business not only in their approach to work, but also in the content they produce. Some good advice here from CNBC sports business correspondent Darren Rovell:

“Move without the ball. Do things are that not directly related to the story. Call people when you don’t necessarily have a story to talk with them about. . . Some of my biggest stories have come from asking people, ‘Is there anything going on?’ “

• A Title IX trial related to the Quinnipiac College athletics program is underway in Connecticut, and the activists seem to be rather piqued about the issue of whether cheerleading is a sport. While I think the school is doomed to lose because of the ludicrous way the law is being enforced, part of me likes the way the absurdities of the proportionality argument are rankling those for whom this numbers game has become life and death.

• Ah, maybe I just need to relax and take it easy. Perhaps it’s the increasing tension of the World Cup, and I’m not even playing. In England, the natives are more than restless that their overhyped, underachieving lads may come home early. Two days before the critical match against Slovenia, however, England coach Fabio Capello is sticking by his absolute no-sex, no-booze ban. For a team (and a nation) that may really need a good shag, there’s probably not much in the way of release coming until after Wednesday:

“For the English, though, abstinence is and will continue to be the gameplan. Capello has even installed cameras in his players’ rooms to ensure that nobody gets any. And to cut deeper, alcohol has also been banned, though this is mainly to avoid a repeat of the team’s publicized drunken antics of during the 2006 World Cup that many say cost them the Cup.”

• Today is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemipshere (and ditto for the winter in the South, if you didn’t see the parkas worn by World Cup spectators in South Africa). This is the longest day of the year anywhere, and for me this Monday has gone on longer than usual, for reasons I’ll refrain from explaining here. You don’t want to hear my minor complaints. But this very fitting song of the season has made it a little shorter. Enjoy:

I’m absolutely exhausted from watching both the U.S. and England matches at the World Cup today. Unbelievable drama, emotion, anxiety and suspense is gripping casual American soccer fans flabbergasted by the lack of transparency from FIFA in explaining a controversial decision to wave off what would have been the winning goal from Maurice Edu of the U.S. in the 87th minute.

Not only is this America’s “Hand of God” soccer moment — embittered feelings, forever — it’s also another lesson for the U.S. sports public in the murky, unaccountable world of FIFA, the international soccer governing body that runs the World Cup. Not only is the International Olympic Committee more accountable when it comes to disclosure, but the Lords of FIFA often brandish their ability to get away with outrageous behavior.

My education in this regard came on the eve of the 2002 World Cup, which I was assigned to cover for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There was a major scandal over FIFA finances that led the organization’s second-in-command, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, to make the issue public. His superior, FIFA boss and Swiss native Sepp Blatter, was up for re-election, and the claims were rather serious.

But not surprisingly, Blatter found a way to rid himself of the problem — and his pesky sidekick — as the FIFA executive committee gathered in Tokyo. As I sat in the media workroom in Seoul,  hearing Blatter’s victory speech, I was stunned by his referral to the unnamed Zen-Ruffinen:

“Vee haff svept avay Meestah Kleen!”

A British journalist sitting near me chuckled. This is old hat for the likes of him, but for me, American naïf, this was jaw-dropping stuff.

• At the excellent Run of Play site, Ryan O’Hanlon points out that not everyone’s able to watch because of work, etc. So what about them?