Spain’s biggest street party

MADRID – Riotous celebrations spread across Spain yesterday after the national football team won their first World Cup when Andres Iniesta scored an extra-time goal in a 1-0 win over the Netherlands.An estimated 300 000 people forming a sea of red and yellow packed Madrid’s downtown Paseo de Recoletos Boulevard to watch the final from Johannesburg on giant TV screens and erupted at the final whistle as Spain became world and European champions.“It had to be [Andres] Iniesta, the field marshal of Spanish football,” said the 19-year-old Marcos Domenec.The celebrations were easily the biggest ever held in living memory in Spain.Fireworks lit up the city sky as people herded out onto the streets to celebrate. Television shots showed exuberant partying in jammed town squares across the country, from Zaragoza in the northeast to Seville in the southwest.Spain, long tagged as perennial underachievers before winning the 2008 European Championship to end a 44-year title drought, had never before gone past the quarter-finals. The team finished fourth at the 1950 World Cup when the play-off system was different.Deafening roarA deafening roar rose from Madrid, including the sound of blaring vuvuzuela horns imported from South Africa, when captain and goalkeeper Iker Casillas lifted the World Cup Trophy in Soccer City.Tens of thousands of people had put up with near 40-degree Celsius temperatures from early in the day to claim the best positions before the giant screens in major plazas in towns and cities.In Madrid, emergency ambulance services treated dozens of people who had fainted.A river of people swarmed down Recoletos Boulevard and swung up the Alcala and Gran Via streets making it impossible for cars to get by.Marta Seco, 22, was overcome with emotion.“This is the greatest sporting event in the history of the country,” she shouted with tears in her eyes.One banner amid the masses in downtown Madrid read Octopus Paul, Forever! with a crudely drawn picture of the octopus from Germany which had correctly forecast Spain’s victory.Traffic jams emerged spontaneously throughout the city as motorists took to the streets, blaring their horns and waving Spain’s yellow-and-red flag from windows. (AP)