Whenever Spain lose a major international fixture, it is only natural for many to dedicate obituaries to the team’s possessional style of play, or what a number of folks have come to call the ‘tiki-taka’ methodology — much to the chagrin of one Pep Guardiola.

And so it was that when La Roja succumbed to a penalty shootout defeat to Russia at the 2018 World Cup, these declarations of death poured out, proclaiming the demise of a playing style where possession is king — something that has always been the case with this particular brand of football. In fact, to pinpoint when ‘possession is gone’ became an opinion as bluntly put as ‘they bottled it’, one might have to go back to April, 2010, when Josè Mourinho is said to have executed the undoing of a possession obsessed Barcelona in a UEFA Champions League semi-final with an approach that eventually began to be identified as ‘anti-football’ among the purist sections of the sport.

However, three months later in Johannesburg, South Africa, Spain lifted their maiden World Cup trophy with the same kind of football that was defiled after Barcelona’s loss to Mourinho’s Inter Milan side. The ‘purists’ rejoiced alongside the Spaniards, while others put on their ‘sour are the grapes’ attire and labelled the competition as a boring one. In May, 2013 the pattern was repeated with Barcelona once again responsible for highlighting the futility of possession as the Catalans were beaten 7-0 on aggregate in yet another Champions League semi-final. An year later, Joachim Löw’s German side won the World Cup with a dosage of ball possession gulped in with lukewarm counter-striking, while Spain — the proponents of the style — had a painfully short trip to Brazil, saying their goodbyes at the group stage. Since then, La Roja haven’t gotten anywhere near to international glory and the anti-possession lobby has grown more confident in its dismissals of the approach.

A few romantics, on the other hand, try to turn a blind eye to the outbreak of lamentation, themselves constructing arguments to have a reason to say that the Spanish way of playing is yet far from an abysmal end; or as John Keats put it: the poetry of earth is never dead. I daresay, one may want to differ at this point, but the aficionados belonging to the latter category of people somehow seem to know what they are talking about; and they will, if they must, go out of their way to convince you that had Keats been alive to watch Spain play a game of football, the bard would have readily agreed that poetry and sport are indeed the same thing.