Iniesta strikes a blow for...well, everyone except the Dutch

I love Andres Iniesta, and I want to have his babies.

Seriously, though, was there anyone out there who doesn't pronounce his "s" as "sh" (as in "yesh, they are shexy ladiesh") who didn't, by the end of the World Cup Final, want the Spanish to win? The Dutch gameplan (known, presumably, as Operation Van Bommel, since it was in his image), was little short of scandalous - based on gambling, correctly, that Howard Webb would not want to be the man to send off a player in the first half of the biggest match on the planet. In any country, even in the UK in recent times, Mark Van Bommel's scything tackle from behind on Iniesta might have warranted red, and certainly his chop on Xavi a few minutes later was worth a yellow card to anyone with a few brain cells. Meanwhile, Nigel De Jong did his level best to decapitate Xabi Alonso with a challenge that was too x-rated for The Karate Kid movie. I felt sorry for Webb, who had a thankless task out there...if he had flashed an early red card it would have potentially ruined the match, but instead the Dutch ruined it. Total football? It was total something, anyway.

But Iniesta kept going; it was hard to believe his fitness has limited him so much this season when, deep in extra time, he was still buzzing round like a bluebottle with his eye on jam. And he got the jam too, in the end. It is easy for everyone else to empathise with him in that moment when he was clean through - each and every one of us would have done what he did, which was basically to close his eyes and welly it as hard as he could.

Of course, the rest of us would have skied it, but Iniesta's normally delicate feet fizzed a shot which, had it hit the keeper, might have carried him into the net as well. It might have been a match more violent than your average boxing contest but justice, ultimately, was done. And my man-crush on Andres Iniesta grew just a little bit stronger.

L.