Possession lost on the World Cup stage as defences learn to adapt | Jonathan Wilson

Tactical postmortems must also factor in those things which cannot be planned for, as Spain and Germany can attestNo side, perhaps, is ever so much itself as when it is going out of the World Cup. When teams – or at least those with aspirations to the title – fail, they tend to fail in their own way, and become too much of themselves: self-parody is a perennial danger. And so Spain and Germany went out of the World Cup after anaemic performances in which they seemed to fetishise poss