Was I watching a different match? I really enjoyed it. Fine game, I thought.

At every World Cup expectations of the final are high. Frequently it disappoints – but this was a real battle; hard fought, passionate, tactically excellent, maybe a bit rough at times.

OK, so there was only one goal but there was great goalkeeping. Appreciating football requires an attention span greater than that of a bluebottle – that’s why most Americans don’t get it. Most Latino Americans do.

Both Spain and Holland had proved themselves good sides – not just at this tournament but over many matches before getting to South Africa. In the end the better side playing the better football won, and did so with a moment of supreme skill. Those who say the teams under performed miss the point. Each team played as well as the other allowed them to. Spain were tremendous on the ball and pretty good without it. Holland were excellent when they didn’t have the ball – but when you have to play like that it saps the energy. In the end possession told; Spain, with 56% to Holland’s 44% during normal time, found themselves playing extra time against a team running on empty. At the World Cup it is ALWAYS about how well you keep the ball.

Sensible refereeing made the final all the better. Howard Webb missed a few – most absurdly Holland’s ‘should have had corner’, but he resisted the urge to ruin the game by reaching for red until he had no real choice. Anyway, football is a physical contest. Pompous BBC pundits who’ve been know to make some pretty fierce challenges in their time whining on about how cynical the Dutch were is all a little hypocritical. In any case, Spain were hardly holding back themselves and were also lucky to have 11 on the pitch though there was an awful lot of rolling around from both sides.

Which recent final was any better? You have to go back 24 years for a really decent contest. Since Maradona beat West Germany in Mexico City we’ve had four negative matches and two mismatches – the best being France’s dismantling of the out-of-sorts Brazil.

But however many times they do this, and whatever had happened on the pitch, FIFA always make a hash of the presentation. This one appeared to be going pretty well with a jovial bunch of not at all  pompous Euro-Royals congratulating, commiserating and generally entering into the spirit of things. Until it comes to the presentation of the trophy when the unbearable Sepp Blatter, FIFA President, barely allows Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, to touch the trophy he is meant to be presenting. He’s the President of the host nation for goodness sake, give the lad his moment! I bet he wouldn’t have done that to Nelson Mandela.

Zuma seemed to take Blatter’s egomania with good grace. Maybe because he knows that South Africa has a lot to be proud of. The stadia were completed, the infrastructure seemed to work, the predictions of doom, disorganisation, violence, security problems, death, pestilence and general mayhem predicted, largely, by white European journalists turned out to be so much nonsense. Had they cared to notice that South Africa had previously hosted a rather successful rugby union world cup, regularly hosts visiting cricket tours (and their travelling support) without mass murder, or even any murder at all seemed to have escaped the notice of these scribbling Casandras. It would be wrong to say this was just racism – but it was mostly racism. Other places with no track record of hosting major football tournaments that also had unfortunate crime rates, no go areas and a history of racial intolerance have staged the World Cup – like the USA. At least the South Africans actually LIKE football – pity they didn’t have a better team.

Even so, despite a hard fought final, excellent semis and some half-decent games in the last eight, the World Cup wasn’t the greatest entertainment throughout. But then it rarely is. Our collective memories blot out the poor matches from past competitions – we remember the good stuff. This time the group stages were slow to get going – entirely normal. The group stages passed and the majority of sports journalists and TV pundits droned on and on about how good the South Americans were only to see them bomb out in the quarter finals undone by the wrong tactics and inexperienced coaches. This time we’ll remember Germany thrashing Argentina, Holland overturning Brazil, the climax of Uruguay v Ghana as well as Spain’s sublime passing. And what odds would you have got on the only unbeaten side in the tournament being New Zealand?

TV coverage? What was the point of James Corden? And how can they explain Alan Shearer’s dress sense. When will somebody take the lad to the shops – Mrs Shearer, Trinny, Suzanna, Gok – OK, well maybe not Gok, but surely someone can help him. Shirts that are too tight, collars that don’t fit, sleeves that don’t match the rest of the shirt, black trousers with brown shoes. It’s worse than Everton’s new away kit!

Finally, a word about England. I care little about England when there are no Geordies involved and I just can’t buy into all that collective self-delusion. This time, like last time, not to mention the shambles that was failed qualification for Euro 2008, England performed poorly and made a whimpering exit (though of course it could have been different had Lampard’s goal stood – no, really, it could have). No complaints, though when it turned out that Germany were actually rather good dumping out Argentina and narrowly losing to the imperious Spanish, everyone could feel a little better about it. And after all, we did better than the French and the Italians, and didn’t we “sacrifice the national team to have the best league in the world”. But can we really make the case that the Premier League is a better competition than La Liga, Serie A or even the Bundesliga? The Premier League produces some exciting football, but so does Division 3 (or whatever it’s called this week). Serie A provided more players in the later stages of this World Cup than the Premier League. It’s another bit of English the superiority complex where the evidence struggles to stand up the assertion.

Now it’s all over we English won’t miss it. We can get back to club football – we know that’s better anyway not least because when it comes to picking a team money beats nationality any day. And we can  get back to kidding ourselves that our club football is the best in the world, kidding ourselves that 4-4-2 is an effective system in international football, kidding ourselves that keeping the ball doesn’t really matter and kidding ourselves that next time will be different.