Yeah, true. It almost goes without saying, but perhaps a lot of people had forgotten it nevertheless: even a player of Messi's stellar calibre can only really shine when he's got a solid team like Barça's around him. And Argentina was collectively quite average, really. More talented than all but a handful of other teams on the World Cup, sure, even if you ignore Messi, but many less talented teams compensated for that with good tactics and group spirit, and those didn't really seem there for Argentina...

I don't know to what extent it was his fault exactly, but yeah, a good trainer could've done more with that team, one would imagine.

The mystery of the German defense is that while Friedrich and Mertesacker really aren't that good, they somehow tend to get the job done. Lahm is by far my favourite player on the German team (with the possible exception of Ozil), and could play for pretty much any country - one of those rare wing defenders whose defensive performance doesn't really suffer from his offensive impulses. And you have to say Podolski is a gifted defender and absolutely crucial for Germany - he's been defending better than attacking, this World Cup, one might almost say. Khedira, too. Rarely anything too spectacular from him, but he's there in the defense and he's there in the build-up.

So yeah, collective defending doing the job for Germany, I guess. Whether that will be enough against Spain if they don't get lucky with an early goal... I somewhat doubt it.