The World Cup is over, herein begins that four year wait for the general population to care about football again. Even then, if someone who got sucked into the football vortex by the buzz around the biggest tournament in the world never goes ahead and watches club football, or any of the intermediary national team tournaments, I don't think that matters too much, they watched the beautiful game, that's what matters.

People tend to call football a fairly boring game, and it makes sense why to a casual viewer it may be. Football, particularly modern football, is a fairly slow and tactical game, it is a slow burner, but I believe here lies the beauty of the game. For however slow a play can be, appearing to be an endless number of passes through the midfield, it will always be explosive. The run towards the penalty box and consequent passes with intent to score a goal and the decisive shot, that always comes as the final explosion of action, as the ultimate result of a play sequence. Really, it is this contrast, between the slow burn and explosivity, that makes football so fascinating to me, at all times there is pressure, when either team has the ball, there is, even if slight, a chance for a goal, there is constant pressure on either side to keep moving, never is a match truly static.

Perhaps this is why I find Spanish football so fascinating, ever since they got obsessed with the idea of tiki-taka and monopolizing possession via short passes, their matches have been referred to as fairly boring, with very little appearing to happen for minutes at a time. But really, this is what makes such matches so fun to watch, just as in music there is a buildup which leads to the eventual drop, that patient sequence of passes in midfield, dancing around a defense's gaps awaiting the eventual overstepping of the mark, slowly building towards the drop, that explosion forward which exploits the spaces carved by the reaction of those passes. To the passing spectator, those passes may appear to be timewasting, but when one is immersed in a given match, it is simply building up to the drop.

To those who got immersed in the dozens of matches that this World Cup has given us this summer, even the most casual of viewers, whose knowledge of players ends at Messi and Ronaldo, these emotions aren't ones which they missed, but ones they won't repeat. For the 120 minutes of the Spain-Argentina final, Spain attempted twelve times to put the ball in the net, deprived of a goal eleven times. If they remained immersed in that — feeling that tension build up inside through midfield passes until Spain's forwards burst ahead from either wing for a new chance at a goal — they experienced this very same feeling, it doesn't really matter they won't go ahead and watch club football next season.