That depressing, often squalid hour and a half in the Olympic Stadium was calculated to nourish every prejudice ever raised against football. Already it is providing heavy ammunition for the large body of Americans who are vehemently opposed to what they regard as a conspiracy - led by a few blazered eccentrics in their midst - to foist the World Cup on an unsuspecting populace four years from now.
That abysmal spectacle in Rome, and much of the earlier action in World Cup finals that were pitifully short of quality, left no doubt that the game has worries enough without trying to force itself on races who don’t care for it. Perhaps little, short of outright ostracism, can be done to cope with the nauseating values brought onto the field by the Argentines.
Being tactically so negative as to make it plain that they were prepared from the kick-off to settle for a penalty shoot-out was a condemnation in itself. But their willingness to reinforce sickening negativity with a wide repertoire of cynical ploys and occasional lurches in dangerous violence betrayed an attitude of mind so distasteful that it was no shock to find some of their number closing like a lynch mob on the referee at the end. Then to have the president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, attempting to justify it all was the final sordid absurdity.
Obviously the Germans performed miserably last Sunday but it should be appreciated that they were plagued by the fear, however exaggerated, that one blunder might open the door to the least deserved victory ever recorded in a World Cup Final.
Edited extract from an article by Hugh McIlvanney published in the Observer on 15 July 1990
