World Cup Final, 2010 Spain vs Netherlands

Spain wins the World Cup, finally claiming a place among the elite of world soccer after beating the Netherlands by a single goal deep in extra-time to lift a first World Cup trophy to go with their European Championship trophy of two years ago.

The victory confirms them as the best team in the world in recent times, but in truth, they rarely touched the heights this month and today there was no repeat of the second half charge against Germany in the semifinal. The passing was not as slick and there was little of the authority that we have become accustomed to with Spain.

They become the lowest scoring champions in the competition's history following four 1-0 victories during their progress through a tournament that only flickered into life and fell far short of what the football hype machine promised.

The man who won it for them was the best player on the field, Barcelona's Andres Iniesta. He more than anyone else constantly sought the ball and, amid the rush, had the presence of mind to take up intelligent positions in space.

The GCP event was set for a 143 minute period beginning at 20:30 local time. There were 2 extra minutes in the first half and 3 extra minutes in the second half. Halftime was 15 mins. The match went into Extra Time, of 30 minutes, and there were a total of 3 extra minutes added to that. The winning and only score came 4 minutes before the end. The result is Chisquare 8563.594 on 8580 df, for p = 0.548 and Z = -0.120.

World Cup 2010
Begins, RSA vs Mexico

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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