Yo soy español! A patriotic media celebrates the Cup

In Madrid’s wide boulevards and enormous squares fans carried Eskys, clambered over the city’s fountains in the suffocating heat, and posed for photos with stuffed octopuses, crying: “I am Spanish — yo soy español!”

In the Puerta del Sol the crowd sprayed a white car with the colours of the Spanish flag. “Not a single car dares to enter the heart of Madrid,” twittered one journalist from the newspaper El Mundo. “Any driver who tries is subjected to the attack of the red zombies.”

“Is anyone seriously going to work today?” twittered another. From the starting siren, more than 220 people were treated in emergency departments in the capital’s hospitals for minor injuries.

Guillermo Daniel Olmo of the daily pro-monarchy newspaper ABC blogged about being infected with cup fever as he stood in Colon Square, crushed back to sweaty back against a drunk Australian  (good to see we get around):

“What do you want me to say? I never thought I’d see Spain win the cup. And if I pinch myself, it’s real. Spain has won the goddamn cup. And no, they haven’t given me a pay rise … and no, nor have many of the inebriated women I’ve come across around Madrid thrown themselves at me. But for some reason, I’m happy.”

Sports paper As pronounced Spain the “champion of clean play”: “The Spanish selection today conquered its first world football title, demonstrating too the most sportsmanship of any team throughout the entire tournament.”

Tennis champ Rafa Nadal told TV’s Canal Plus Liga he thought the celebrations should last an entire year.

In El Mundo, the good the bad and the ugly, Julián Ruiz writes:

“Terrible refereeing from the Brit who looks like Shrek. He’s the ugly one. And a pathetic game from a Holland that believed it lived for the beauty of football but which has nonetheless betrayed itself.”

Politics is never far from sport in Spain: according to El Pais, some fans in Barcelona burned Catalan nationalist flags. And the left-leaning daily El Pais — which often fancies itself as a bit of a Le Monde and can be just an impenetrable — ran this front-page lead from Jose Samano, in Johannesburg:

“An ode to felicity, without demagoguery … a goal from Iniesta for all eternity, a ‘do’ was sung throughout the nation, a high ‘c’ sung from the breast. An ode to happiness, one that awakens in the victor that pagan mass that is football, that game that leads the streets to be deserted, puts certain hardships in suspended animation, and leads routine to oblivion.”