by Craig Buck

Created on: July 12, 2010   Last Updated: July 19, 2010

After one month and 63 matches, the World Cup 2010 Final was played on Sunday 11th July at the impressive Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg. 

The final was contested by Holland, looking to win the trophy at the third time of asking, and Spain, the current European champions but appearing in their first ever World Cup final.  On recent form, these two sides had earnt the rights to be in the final.  Holland were on a 25 match unbeaten run while Spain had only lost 2 of their previous 54 matches including the first match of this tournament.  A side plot the games was that both sides had a player who was still in with a chance of winning the Golden Boot for becoming the tournament's leading goalscorer.  Before the match, David Villa and Wesley Sneijder both had five goals along with Uruguay's Diego Forlan and Germany's Thomas Mueller, neither who could add to their total.

As the game kicked off, it was Spain who were in the ascendancy and the Dutch were struggling to get a foothold in the game.  The first real chance came when a free kick was whipped in from the right and Sergio Ramos got his head to the ball, only for keeper Maarten Steklenburg to parry the ball to safely.  Those in the crowd of almost 84,500 would have hoped this would be the que for end to end attacking football, sadly this failed to materialise during the first half as the game turned into a niggly, often dirty first half.  The closest the Dutch came to scoring was from an innocuous pass back to the Spanish keeper after a restart which took an unnatural bounce and almost went over his head for what would have been the most bizarre World Cup final goal of all time.

After the break, things improved somewhat with the game now starting to open up.  The Dutch should have taken the lead after 62 minutes when an inch perfect pass from Sneijder sent Arjen Robben free on goal.  Robben probably had too much time to decide what to do and although he sent Casillas in the Spanish goal the wrong way, the keeper made a great save with his trailing leg to send the ball wide of the post for a corner, leaving Robben to reflect on his miss.

This let off seemed to focus Spanish minds on the task in hand as they started to lay siege to the Dutch goal.  If Robben was the Dutch culprit for missing a guilt edged chance then Sergio Ramos was to be the Spanish version.  From a corner, Ramos found himself unmarked, just six yards from goal.  Inexplicably

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