1990: The lure of Nessun Dorma
Pavarotti had us all in a whirl before a ball had even been kicked. Music, emotion, football, Italy – then the epicentre for glamorous football – what more could one possibly want from life? The added wonder of Italia 90, not that we really knew it then, was that it was the last of the old-style tournaments, a voyage of footballing discovery. Many players and teams and formations were barely known outside each home country, before football’s globalisation and monetisation really began to soar.
Italia 90 was the last tournament that was easily accessible to the ordinary fan – not overpriced and not over-organised or sponsored to within an inch of its life. So it was possible to watch Cameroon beat Argentina in the opening game on telly, make an instant decision to go, and wake up the following morning in Turin on the day of Brazil v Sweden. Brazil being Brazil, those tickets came with a price hike but Scotland v Costa Rica, a day later, was easy. Word of mouth took us to a bar selling at face value. Bingo.
This may not necessarily be a match worthy of the pantheon of classics but symbolically it represented a rite of glorious passage: simply going to the World Cup. Scotland’s fans were pink and joyous in the heat. Their team were ponderous, though, and Costa Rica beat them thanks to a slick passing move embellished with a brilliant backheel when Juan “The Kid” Cayasso scored their first ever World Cup goal.
1998:
The Edmundo team-sheet
The old maxim about the Netherlands being the best team never to have won the World Cup might mostly refer to the 1970s but one could also make a case for 1998. They took part in a couple of stellar knockout games while the heat beat into Marseille’s then-roofless Vélodrome. The Dennis Bergkamp goal to defeat Argentina was an instant classic, mixing all the coolness of refined one-touch technique with the madness of the dramatic last-minute punch. Then came a riveting semi-final against Brazil. The Dutch shaded it but Brazil won it. After extra time. In a shootout.
Brazil were reigning champions, back in the final, with the best player in the world – Ronaldo – central to their status as favourites against the host nation. France’s tournament had grown as both a sporting and social movement, gaining momentum and gathering positivity along the way, but would home advantage be enough?
The final was shaped by an extraordinary episode. Ronaldo suffered an unexplained seizure. At the time the official team-sheets were handed out Ronaldo was out of the final with Edmundo selected in his place. But in a sudden flurry, an hour before kick-off, new team-sheets arrived with Ronaldo reinstated. He played as if in a semi‑daze on a night that would belong to France and their own icon, Zinedine Zidane.
2002: The South Korean miracle
The message “Again 1966” spelled out in giant letters behind the goal added to the sense of high theatre. South Korea had fallen in love with football during the summer of 2002 and the entire nation apparently stopped to see if its Red Devils could emulate the legend of the North Koreans, who scripted one of the World Cup’s unlikeliest upsets in the distant past, beating Italy 1-0 at Ayresome Park – when news of that feat was censored in the South. The poignancy shuddered through the stadium in Daejeon.
As World Cup co-hosts, South Koreans ventured out into the streets to watch games as a communal experience. Youngsters screamed if they saw the players. An estimated 98.3% of households who turned on their television sets on the night of South Korea v Italy tuned in for this game.
It did not start well. Ahn Jung-hwan squandered a penalty and Christian Vieri’s header gave Italy the lead. But then the pendulum swung. South Korea equalised, Francesco Totti was sent off and Damiano Tomassi saw a goal mysteriously disallowed. The stage was too perfect for Ahn, the penalty villain who had played in Serie A, to glance in a golden goal. “After scoring I couldn’t hear anything,” said Ahn. “I was dumbfounded.” Weren’t we all?
2006:
The master’s meltdown
In many ways I felt fortunate to be at the final in Berlin, mostly because a colleague from La Gazzetta dello Sport grabbed me round the neck and lost all self-control as he vigorously celebrated Fabio Grosso’s emphatic goal to tilt a brilliant semi-final against Germany. That was perhaps the game of the tournament, one of those where one wonders if the final can match the compelling energy of the semi.
Italy’s opponents were Zidane’s France. It was inevitable the spiritual leader of Les Bleus would be centre of attention. He had come back from international retirement alongside two other golden oldies, Lilian Thuram and Claude Makélélé, to help the team when France were in such a state they were about to flunk qualification. Zidane delivered masterclasses in the knock-out games. Watch his absolute supremacy against Spain. See him pirouette against Brazil. Then he scored the penalty to decide the semi-final against Portugal. The script for the final, his farewell, was perfect.
Enter Marco Materazzi, and a few choice words from the Italian defender. The twist in the tale lurched suddenly and brutally. Zidane’s red mist descended, his head steamed into Materazzi. The image as he walked past the trophy on the side of the pitch en route to the dressing room remains breathtaking.
2014: The match-winning tackle
The nature of the geography and scheduling of tournaments is that, while sometimes one can feel elated to be at the game of the day or the round, at other times one can find oneself undeniably at the wrong game. Come the semi-finals, there seemed nothing inherently wrong with Argentina v the Netherlands at the Maracanã – except, as it turned out, the other semi was one of the most surreal games in World Cup history. Everyone remembers where they were during Germany 7-1 Brazil and I was in a different city watching the game on telly.
The morning after the night before, the poor Brazilians who had to pass near the stretch of beach occupied by the thousands of Argentinians who had driven over for their semi-final had to endure the kind of teasing that requires more than one hand to tot up the scoreline.
Then Argentina and the Netherlands took their turn and slugged it out. It was not a memorable game but it was perhaps defined by a memorable moment that sums up how great teams need not only matchwinners but matchwinner-deniers.
In the 90th minute Arjen Robben hared towards goal and it took a monumental effort from Javier Mascherano, who had some catching-up to do on the chase against a faster player, to reach his opponent before dispossessing him with a clean, brilliantly timed, last-ditch tackle. Mascherano later admitted he injured a painful and personal part of his anatomy in doing so. Without putting his body on the line they would not have reached the final.
