It feels like something has gone missing from Brazil in the past week. After an opening group stage that had been almost universally praised as the best-played and most entertaining World Cup in decades, the recent round of sixteen was a little more ordinary. Fouls are up and offense has slowed down, with the celebrated statistic of 2.83 scores per game in the group stage dropping by more than half a goal in the second round. Yes, it’s still the knockout stage of the World Cup, but it has sometimes felt uninspired—prosaic play clothed by the tension of high-stakes games with close final scores, extra-time finishes, and penalty shots.

The second round was soccer’s version of the summer blockbuster: big, highlight-ready moments with little consideration given to the plot that connects them. Its drama was found in individual moments of creativity or ignominy that punctuated longer languid stretches: Arjen Robben’s runs at the Mexico goal, and the resulting debate over the penalty kick that he may or may not have coerced from the referee to win the game for the Netherlands; Brazil’s edgy shoot-out win over Chile; and the American goaltender Tim Howard’s string of impressive saves against Belgium. These were all memorable fragments of play, but, as the U.S. learned on Tuesday, sadly, those fragments can’t always be stitched into a viable strategy.

Part of the second-round slowdown could simply be teams getting mired in fatigue from games contested in hot, humid weather. After Italy’s group-stage game against England in the rain-forest city of Manaus, the Italian midfielder Claudio Marchisio said that, at times, he seemed to be hallucinating. The Dutch manager, Louis van Gaal, also sounded a warning about hallucinations in arguing for water breaks during his team’s second-round game against Mexico, played in Fortaleza. The threat was credible because of the undeniably unkind conditions, but some of it could also have been gamesmanship—the Netherlands took full advantage of the pauses in play to adjust tactics.

Another reason for the sudden stylistic downshift could be the unexpected advancement out of the group stage of a number of teams employing too-similar tactics. To compensate for his young Dutch team, inexperienced and especially limited in defense, van Gaal made a pragmatic decision, eschewing possession, and, with it, the Dutch tradition of fluid, “total football,” for a combination of pressing defensive play and skilled counterattacking. It’s worked brilliantly: the Netherlands, considered a dysfunctional dark horse before the tournament, is undefeated in World Cup play and is scheduled to meet another astutely well-organized, well-drilled counterattacking team, Costa Rica, in the quarterfinals, on Saturday.

But if both teams in a matchup are more comfortable in either pressing or withdrawing, then countering, rather than possessing the ball, the game contains within it an existential threat to entertaining soccer: a game of defending and nothingness. It’s not that a style built on possession, employed to famously ill-fated ends in this tournament by Spain’s tiki-taka men, and flirtatiously engaged, then unceremoniously dumped, by Cesare Prandelli’s Italian team, is any more entertaining or offense-minded. The counterattacking Dutch scored the same number of goals in the first two games of this World Cup, eight, that Spain did in all seven games of the last one. And, for all the possession that Italy enjoyed in its opening game against England, including the best statistical passing performance in a World Cup game in nearly a half century, it still only managed two goals—its lone two of the tournament.

It was the particular contrast in styles that made for some of the most exciting early-round games. Simon Kuper, the sage soccer journalist and co-author of “Soccernomics,” has written that soccer “is best understood as a dance for space. The team that can open spaces when it attacks, and close down spaces when it defends, generally wins.” In the first round, that dance was often a thrilling fusion number, with dangerously high defensive lines and purposefully muddled midfields set out by teams like the Netherlands, Algeria, Costa Rica, and Chile, seeking to outstep opponents that relied on possession, control, and passing. The teams in those games asked questions of each other, and of the viewer: Could the Spanish attack slip behind the high Dutch defense? Or would the Dutch convert high-tempo defensive pressing into offensive chances? How would Italy and, days later, England try to overcome Costa Rica’s combination of pressure and a finely tuned offside trap?

For whatever reason—maybe the aforementioned weather or, perhaps, an evolution in tactics—the results have favored pressure over possession much more than had been expected. And it’s the thoroughness of that victory that has imposed a stylistic homogeny on some of the games in the round of sixteen. Brazil and Chile nearly pressed each other’s attacks out of existence, producing lots of poor passes, played quickly. And, in Sunday’s contest between Greece and Costa Rica, neither team seemed entirely willing to try to develop an attack before the sending-off of the Ticos’ Oscar Duarte.

The long-term verdict on possession-based play is incomplete, but there are still a few standard-bearers left on the field for the quarterfinals. Germany, a recent convert, entered the World Cup with only one true striker amid an abundance of artful attacking midfielders. Despite sloppy passing against Algeria’s pressing game on Monday, the team remains a favorite. Colombia’s fullbacks make aggressive, overlapping runs that would please the original role-swapping practitioners of Dutch “total football,” and their star of the tournament, James Rodriguez, has drawn early comparisons to on-field artists like Pelé and Lionel Messi. Meanwhile, back on the continent, vanquished Spain is soul-searching as it contemplates the aging of its golden generation out of the international game, and Italy, whose coach resigned last week, seems perhaps willing to revert to its erstwhile belief that, if you can just defend well enough, scoring goals is only incidental to success.

The quarterfinals, set to begin on Friday, could jump-start the World Cup. Brazil, obliging hosts who seem ever more willing to accommodate their opponents by defending and tackling and placing all their offensive hope at the gifted feet of their star Neymar, will have to do more than that to advance against Colombia. France and Germany should provide tactical grist for each other’s mills. And, sooner or later, the rest of Argentina’s offense will need to connect with the mesmerizingly talented Lionel Messi. That, at least, is the hope. Otherwise, at a certain point, too much tension, without some creative on-field release, just becomes exhausting.

Photograph by Ian Walton/Getty.

[#image: /photos/59095114ebe912338a3726ac]See more of The New Yorker’s coverage of the 2014 World Cup.

*Owing to an editing error, an earlier version of this post stated that Arjen Robben had received a free kick rather than a penalty kick.