The year of Spain and Barcelona (Yahoo)

This Monday, moreover that finally will be known, officially, the winner of the unified prize FIFA Golden Balloon as the best player in the world of the season, there will remain a sensation that 2010 was, without any doubt, the best year in the history of Spanish football because the maximum crack, the majority of integrates of ideal eleven and the best coach will come out from its League.

Even in the middle of a social crisis that has not been known in Spain since the eighties, with an unemployment of twenty percent and being in danger its situation in Euro zone, the League has always maintained out of these problems and generated world interest and is firm in the battle with the English Premier disputing to be the best in the world.

But if there is a team that has left a track, as we insist in our columns, it is the Barcelona, due to its spectacular game that generated fans all over the world, and it is not casual then, that the list to chose the best player comes from the three integrates of its group, formed in its quarry, what stresses its grandeur: Andrés Iniesta, Xavi Hernández and Lionel Messi. The two first, besides, world champions in the first trophy that Spain obtains in this condition, in the South African contest.


Xavi, with his habitual clarity to declare, same as he has to play (it does not seem to be a mere causality in someone that has such a vision in the game with the ball and manages a wonderful team with his magical waist and his millimetric touches), he said this week that the prize that now will unify the FIFA and the magazine France Football “is for the Barcelona and already this puts me glad. We have, all of us, to celebrate”.

And it is absolutely true. It is the first time that concerning an individual prize, the sensation is that the collective game is privileged, the return to the game as priority over the pragmatic, is therefore, in some point the same who will be the winner, in an environment of such comradeship.

So it is, that when the World Championship finished and with the excitation of having obtained some minutes before the Cup in their hands, Xavi declared in press conference that the best player of the planet is Messi, Argentine, and that he did not get to his same, what speaks of the grandeur of the midfielder spirit, meanwhile that in the moment of the goal most important in his life, in the final vs Holland, Iniesta raised his vest thus to show that he recalled his comrade and friend, the dead defender of the Espanyol Dani Jarque.

The three deserve the best prize. Perhaps, in our opinion, Xavi is on some step above Iniesta being a player of the whole field, the clear axis of the best team of the world and of the world champion group, though Messi is superior over both as it concerns the difference between big cracks and a genius of the football, that goes towards remaining in the Olympus as the greatest in the history
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But he great year of Spain does not finish there because the list to elect the best coach of the year goes through the one who occupied the bench as Champion of the World in South Africa, Vicente Del Bosque, and the two responsible of the teams that govern the League (though one of them exercised a notable superiority over the other in the last matches): Josep Guardiola (Barcelona) and José Mourinho (Real Madrid).

As to Guardiola, we have already extended a lot in our columns and there is left only to reiterate our admiration to maintain the coherence as to his ethical values and the defence of a brilliant game that is accentuating, meanwhile it is necessary to stress that Mourinho is on the list more for his job in the Inter up to the mid 2010, than for what came afterwards, though being it very good, still did not reach the summit as with the Italians.

Mourinho won with the Inter the League as well as the Cup of Italy and the Champions League, with the same solidity as he did last year with the Porto, or maintained the leadership with continuity in the Chelsea, and now is obtaining good results (discounting the terrible 5-0 vs against the Barcelona) with the Real Madrid.

Finally, and though it has not the same transcendence, it should be mentioned that also South America voted the best player 2010 in the Continent, in the traditional survey appeared in December in the Uruguayan newspaper “El País” with reporters of the whole Continent and it dropped on the hands of the Argentinean player, Andres D´alessandro, of a very good performance in the Inter of Porto Alegre, Brazil, specially in the Copa Libertadores.

At any rate, we think that in the Continent there were several players at the same level, among others, his own countryman Darío Conca, great figure of the Fluminense Champion of Brazil, or, though Diego Forlán appears as the best player taking into account the whole world.

Forlán performed a great World Championship in South Africa, where he was voted as the best player, meanwhile with the Atlético Madrid, he obtained the Supercup of Europe and the European League in the same season, when the redwhites had not won a contest since 1996.