Like I said a lot of Spanish players were great, but I wouldn't put them ahead of guys that had to shoulder more of the load for their respective teams. CR, Pirlo, Ozil IMO all were important to their teams. If I made an all Euros team half of them would probably be Spanish, but the pressure was never on one player from their team like it is others mentioned. CR knew if he had a bad day his team would lose. To a lesser extent Pirlo and Ozil as well. I only gave a nod to Pirlo over CR because he made the finals, but re-thinking it I'd give the edge to CR.. I shouldn't punish him for having to face Spain a round earlier than Pirlo did. Those two are a bit ahead of the rest of the field though, neck in neck with one another IMO. I'm not going to discredit Pirlo for playing England; he didn't choose the draw and he played a great game. He had the game of the tourney in the upset of the year against the team that up to that point had looked better than anyone. If his amazing performance had come in the group stage that's one thing, but in my book it counts a lot more when you put on the best performance of any player in the tourney in the semi-finals against the team he did it against. So for Pirlo you have: game 1 against Spain he played well, made the play to produce Italy's only goal. The other two games were an off match against Croatia and a good performance against Ireland. Then in the next two games he was undoubtedly the best player in the tourney over the quarter/semi-final stages. And a bad offensive showing against Spain, but let's face it, if he had played out of his mind it wouldn't have produced an Italy victory. They were just second best that day, which is no embarrassing result against one of the 2 or 3 best teams of all time.
