Dear Friends:Well, Argentina won its first game! (Glad they did or it'd be a very dark several days here in BA.) Reminds me of living in Brazil, where after every goal and every victory you'd hear fireworks and yells. Here it's a variety of horns and singing. But I have to say, with all the soccer I've been watching, the most impressive team I've seen thus far is Germany. Excellent ball handling, passing precision, and play execution. Very tidy and efficient w/o being boring, at least not yet. A highly structured, well-executed game. The Argentines, on the other hand, wasted a lot of energy and weren't especially efficient or pretty and could very easily have ended up in a tie with the Ivory Coast. Hard to tell sometimes whether they were executing plays at all. Where victory seemed to be the result of strategy and team practice/play on the part of the Germans against Costa Rica, I was a little worried about the Argentines who seemed to wing it entirely too much. What's that they say about national stereotypes?
Come to think of it, a Brazil/Germany final would be grand. The ability to improvise and genuine excellence of Brazil up against the German machine; the Samba vs. Beethoven. Why not? That's a showdown I'd pay to see.
B.
(photo from today's La Nacion)
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