Switzerland, the only team in the 2010 World Cup to not only stifle Spain but beat them. Can anybody argue that they are not the best team in the world right now? Well okay maybe not, but the fact is Spain wouldn’t be world cup winners if it wasn’t for the help of one Englishman.

Howard Webb, what a man. The stern looks, the strict yellow card, arm straight up, no fuss. He even looks like the sort of lad that joined the police force because he was bullied at school and wanted to get his own back

Before I go off on a rant I’d like to make it clear that I wasn’t supporting anybody in the World Cup final. In my opinion Holland had got there playing some of the worst football in the whole tournament. They had German’ed their way to the final, nothing against them (or Germany) it’s a very successful way of playing tournament football, just ask Switzerland.

On the other side of the coin was a Spanish team that play football at a pace that would have Sloth’s screaming at their TVs. Obviously they are very good with the ball but for my personal tastes I prefer the pacier more direct passing of Argentina and Brazil. So as you can see I really wasn’t fussed who won, the ONLY thing I wanted more than anything was that the team with the least divers winning (They did, Robben does enough for the whole Dutch team!). One of my stand out memories from the 2010 World Cup has been the amount of diving so it would have been great if justice could at least be done in that regard in the final.

Watching a football match where you aren’t favouring one team over another is an enlightening experience. It’s really easy to see what is right and wrong in the modern game. It also allows you to view the referee in a new light, in the case of Howard Webb it wasn’t a good light. I know he’s got a lot of plaudits since the final but that seems to be mainly because he tried to keep players on the pitch. THAT ISN’T HIS FUCKING JOB NOR RESPONSIBILITY. His job is to make the the correct decisions. And he didn’t, time after time he got it wrong.

Holland should have been down to 9, possibly 8 players by half time. That’s not Webb’s fault, that is the Dutch players faults. They weren’t being brutal, chuck em on a rugby pitch and see how “brutal” they are. What they were doing was cheating, over and over again. But Howard Webb in some misplaced sense of responsibility was letting the cheats prosper. I think he knew he was too because come the second half there was a marked change in approach.

Almost from the first whistle the Dutch players now found themselves being penalised and booked for little. All sense of 50/50 had left the game with players from both sides getting more and more wound up by the inconsistency. However even this wasn’t enough to redress the balance for a Spain team that should have been playing 9 men or less. When Holland broke through and Robben (a player I despise by the way) was clearly pulled back by Puyol Mr Webb decided to ignore it and play on. Still not enough to equalise a shocking first half reffing display? Who knows but the next 2 decisions decided the fate of the world cup. First of all a Dutch freekick clearly deflected behind for a corner, we are talking about a 25% deviation here, is given as a goalkick. Then just to rub salt in the wound Elia is brought down on the edge of the Spanish box, he’s shoulder charged by 2 players at once and even though he falls like a girl it IS a freekick. It has been for years, it has been in every game this tournament and even in this game shoulder charges had been penalised. Not this time though, Spain break and Iniesta scores a brilliant goal. Justice is done, trouble is it’s not for the referee to decide who gets to win a football game, he’s there to pass judgement on individual decisions. It happens all the time in the Premier League, ref makes one bad decision so equals it up with another in favour of the other team. It shouldn’t be allowed to work like that.

The BBC pundits will have you believe that the best team won the world cup, that “justice was done” and that “football was the winner”. That’s a load of bollocks. The best team are the team that win on a level playing field. I’m not saying that the field was in either teams favour because it wasn’t, it was more like one of those tilt tables where it could go either way depending on the mood of the person doing the tilting. It just happened to be tilting heavily towards the Dutch goal when Spain scored.