Tiki Taka as a footballing philosophy: Tragedy or not?

Spain’s players look on during their defeat against the Netherlands

After the flickering embers of the night finally died down in the Maracana, that spiritual home of football, all that remained of Spain was a legacy. Xavi Hernandez, the hitherto undroppable Xavi, donning what to him must have been an unfamiliar purple bib, looked on bemused. Eyes downcast, Andres Iniesta knew the writing was on the wall. Spain were out. In the group stage. Without a point to show. Oh, the ignominy of it all.

Football, like life, moves in cycles. That maddening carousel weaved by Xavi and Iniesta, that left Rooney and co. dizzy in 2009, and again in 2011, had come full circle to bite its very architects. It was the end of an era. Arguably the most invincible team of all time had been brought rudely and unceremoniously back to earth.

Perhaps it was only to be expected. Bayern Munich blew Barcelona, the great Barcelona, away over two legs almost two years ago. Tata Martino’s version, by their own exalted standards, was an omnishambles. An almost adolescent Brazil, on the back of a raucous Rio de Janeiro crowd took Spain apart last year.

If one thinks about it, for quite some time now, tiki-taka has seemed no longer invincible. No more so maddeningly, incomprehensibly perfect. Have teams found an answer to this unrelenting, almost geometric style of football? Or is it merely that so demanding a style of play is not in the same sure footed grasp as it once was, as age catches up with it’s at times mythical torchbearers, its executors supreme?

The truth perhaps lies somewhere in the middle. Xavi no longer has the legs he used to. Deprived of his great comrade’s unwavering, unrelenting excellence, Iniesta seems less perfect. Even the great Iniesta. As the fulcrum jades, so does the see-saw. Add to this the increasingly hound like defences of the Mourinho breed, that machine like swiftness of counter attack demonstrated by the Robbens and van Persies, and you have an almost ‘told you so’ sort of conclusion.

The writing was, perhaps, on the walls of the Maracana before Spain even got onto their plane in Madrid. All that remains is an almost aching sense of poignancy. Critics would have you believe it was cold and mathematical at the best of times, sterile and stale at its worst. What about the slow, pointless sideways passing, the naysayers blare. The endless string of 1-0s.

The truth, however, remains that at their peak, tiki-taka’s great conductors created symphonies so compelling that critics’ drone seemed very distant indeed. They created a machine that was in the truest sense, greater than the sum of its parts. A relentless, pounding, precise behemoth that seemed to induce a reverential awe in all that beheld it.

So do we really, as lovers of the beautiful game, celebrate the downfall of this great generation and its patented style of play? Are we not being unpardonably irreverent? The most well oiled of machines eventually rust. As they do, there is always undesirable white noise. In the end the machine is no more.

Surely, flippant is he who pronounces the machine tedious and cries good riddance once the white noise finally peters out. What of its glorious heyday, when it was inimitable, inconcquerable? Let us then remember this great generation for its long reign of genius rather than its inevitable ageing, jading and unraveling. It is the least we owe them.