Brazil-Croatia and Heat-Spurs Were Great Fun No Matter What You Say

Yesterday blasted an unimpeachable morass of skill and will across the upturned, expectant faces of the world's fans of sports. There was also a Brewers/Mets game (5-1, Not The Mets, for those of you scoring at home). Between the second straight spectacular show put on by the San Antonio Spurs at the expense of the Miami Heat, and the thrilling, occasionally terrifying Croatia/Brazil match, the watchers among us were treated to more or less everything a day in front of the TV can offer. Brazil gave us a somehow-languid explosion, with unpredictable tides of offense both breaking on and breaking Croatia's spiky defense, and the refs gave us a reason to be angry, or contemptuous, or yet again convinced that sports are all just a giant charade, with the fix always already in, and the big devouring the small. Depending on your politics.

What was cooler than that, though, if you like to or have to read about sports, was the way yesterday completely annihilated any dumb fake stories anybody might want to tell about talent or skill as opposed to will, when it comes to winning. While morons abound (e.g.), nobody could reasonably conclude that the Croatian side was overmatched talent-wise—their speed alone would seem to put paid to that notion—nor does it seem arguable that Brazil somehow lacked any determination, even early on as Croatia broke in again and again. In Miami, LeBron was as iron-willed and steely as ever, and for all the good it did him, he might as well have been a single farmer trying to fistfight capitalism itself.

To explain what went down yesterday requires more than dumb narratives or silly crypto-racist ideologies about the nature of achievement in sports comma also life: it requires actual attention to the details of the sport, and to the games. What happened last night in Miami, as Zach Lowe demonstrated at length, was that one team's offensive scheme was perfectly tuned to get good shots against another team's defense, which has lost a step. Also, that offense has been converting those good shots at an unsustainable clip for the past two games, which is fun as shit to watch and probably screamingly annoying to play against. What happened yesterday in Brazil was that human error happened (on the part of the refereeing and on the part of Croatia's keeper) helped along by Croatia's occasional over-deployment of a defensive scheme best identified as "everybody fall back to the goal line and pray for a miracle." And it—all of it—was fucking awesome. Especially without having to pretend any of it was a referendum on anything else.