Xavi Named Euro 2008 Player of the Tournament

Well, this is embarrassing. I did a quick rundown of Euro 2008 Player of the Tournament candidates last night, and there was one name I forgot: Xavi Hernández.

And guess who UEFA has named as player of the tournament this morning? That’s right: Xavi Hernández.

I’m pretty sure UEFA did this just to make me look bad. And it seems a slightly odd choice, perhaps influenced by being chosen so soon after the final?

But in a lot of ways Xavi makes perfect sense. There really wasn’t one outstanding, dominant player at Euro 2008. But there was some top notch teamwork, especially in Spain’s midfield.

Instead of trying to pick the player who stood out the most, as I did last night, seems UEFA have given their Player of the Tournament award to a man who symbolizes all that teamwork.

So as the man who made Spain’s midfield tick, Xavi deserves the prize. Lots of smart short passing that made Spain’s possession game possible, and some inch perfect through balls, like the one for Fernando Torres’ winner last night. “It was him who gave the team its tempo,” said Uefa technical director Andy Roxburgh. I’m not going to argue with him.

Well, maybe a little. I still stand by my original choice of Iker Casillas. Yes, Xavi had a good tournament, but there was at least one occasion (against Italy in the quarter-finals comes to mind) where he was replaced by Cesc Fabregas, and Cesc looked a lot more effective.

Meanwhile Casillas pulled out all kinds of great saves, and made zero blunders. There was never any danger of him being replaced by Pepe Reina for the final 30 minutes.

But as a representative of the kind of football that won the tournament, Xavi makes sense. So congratulations to him and to the whole Spanish squad for a great team performance.

UEFA also named a 23 man squad of the tournament, like so:

Gianluigi Buffon (Italy), Iker Casillas (Spain), Edwin van der Sar (Holland); Jose Bosingwa (Portugal), Philipp Lahm (Germany), Carlos Marchena (Spain), Pepe (Portugal), Carles Puyol (Spain), Yuri Zhirkov (Russia); Hamit Altintop (Turkey), Luka Modric (Croatia), Marcos Senna (Spain), Xavi (Spain), Konstantin Zyryanov (Russia), Michael Ballack (Germany), Cesc Fabregas (Spain), Andres Iniesta (Spain), Lukas Podolski (Germany), Wesley Sneijder (Holland); Andrei Arshavin (Russia), Roman Pavlyuchenko (Russia), Fernando Torres (Spain), David Villa (Spain)