Our View: World Cup final: the beautiful game turns ugly

In the end, the eagerly awaited World Cup final, between two footballing powers, turned out to be a very disappointing spectacle thanks to Argentina’s unrelenting negativity and spoiling tactics. It was a display of anti-football, an example of how the beautiful game could turn ugly, with the defending champions’ sole objective being to prevent Spain from playing, in the hope they could take the match to a penalty shoot-out. All neutrals, dejected by the unrelenting gamesmanship, would have...