Spain makes Germany pay for gamble

VIENNA, Switzerland -- In that one substitution Sunday night, you could understand Joachim Loew's impossible dilemma.

Down a goal to Spain in the final of the European Championship, his German team struggling desperately to create any kind of chance, he sent his original starting 11 out on the field to begin the second half.

But before the referee whistled play in, the fourth official raised his sign: No.2 on, No.16 off.

It's called choosing your poison.

No.16, Philipp Lahm, Germany's left back, is as gifted an offensive player as they have. In the semifinal match with Turkey, he set up one goal, then scored the game winner, a real beauty, as his team roared back to win.

But what he gives, Lahm can also take away because he struggles to defend, and in the 33rd minute Sunday night, he was faced with a battle he was never going to win.

Xavi Hernandez sent a ball down the right wing that started out as a 50-50 proposition between Lahm and Spain's Fernando Torres. By the time that confrontation had played out, Torres had outrun Lahm, outmuscled and outsmarted him, then flicked the ball past keeper Jens Lehmann, who was caught running into no man's land.

By yanking Lahm in favor of Marcell Jansen, a more straightforward but hardly impregnable defender, Loew was conceding what had become obvious -- his team was overmatched by Spain's offensive creativity. He had given up on the notion of fighting fire with fire.

Which left him, well, not much against a side that controlled possession beautifully through the midfield, that neutralized Germany's most consistent player in this tournament, Bastian Schweinsteiger, made Torsten Frings invisible, roughed up Michael Ballack, played skillfully, played tough, played a little bit dirty, and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the best team of Euro 2008.

"I think they deserved the victory," Loew quickly acknowledged afterward.

The game finished 1-0, but easily could have been 2-0 or 3-0, and but for a couple of really undeserved second-half chances to level the score, it was a one-sided, anticlimactic final to a magnificent tournament.

Not that anyone in Spain will be complaining.

If any other side had played as well during the qualifying round, the championship talk would have started early: a brilliant 4-1 win over Russia in the opener; 2-1 over Sweden to clinch a spot in the knockout round; 2-1 with a lineup filled with bench players over defending champion Greece.

But because Spain had such a long history of failure in big tournaments at this level, winning only the 1964 European Championship, nearly everyone was hedging his bet.

If the 44 years of futility were a bit much to process all at once, the memory of that dreadful 3-1 knockout loss to France in the 2006 World Cup under the same coach, Luis Aragones, and with much the same team, was fresh.

The difference this time was that the best talent was combined with a newfound ability to knuckle down when it mattered.

"The players are more mature," Aragones said.

The closest that they would come to losing was in a dreadful scoreless draw in the quarterfinals against an undermanned Italian team that had little choice but to play for that result from the start. When Iker Casillas outdueled Gianluigi Buffon in the penalty shootout, it should have been a harbinger. Then when Spain shut down and humiliated a confident young Russian team in the semifinals, most every question was answered.

The only one remaining was whether the Spanish could handle the Germans' trademark resilience, strength, size, fitness and precision. After an opening few minutes, in which Spain seemed to have trouble getting out of its own end, and a spirited passage in the second half, when the Germans briefly looked to have the fresher legs, Aragones's team dictated the pace and style of the match. The odd dive aside, there's no denying that the Spanish play the game beautifully. And, for a change, their confidence/arrogance about the Spanish way of soccer has been matched by a result.

"This is going to be good not just for Spain, but for football," Torres said. "Because the best team won, and that is not always so."

"I think that many people will look up at Spain because it has been a model for playing football," Aragones said.

No choice to look up, because right now Spain is on top of the mountain. Brazil is struggling in World Cup qualifying, Argentina can't seem to harness its full potential, Italy looks in need of retooling, France is in decline, the Dutch were spectacular here and then flamed out, Russia is young and raw and talented, but who knows where it'll be two years from now.

What we've seen over the past three-plus weeks is the new gold standard - the red, black and gold standard.

True in theory for the longest time, for now, it's true in fact.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)