guardian 25 world Cup moments

[Zatman]

they say he was greatest dribbler of all time and could do tricks you still cant see today. also a womanizer and alcoholic so was a bit of a character as well.

 

was reading the 1958 brazil psychologist recommended dropping Pele and Garrincha

[Wainy316]

Was it Garrincha who had the weird bow legs?

[Zatman]

yeah that was him

[Wainy316]

I remember reading an article on the first edition of the Blizzard about him.  Seemed like a right character.

Edited March 26, 2014 by Wainy316

[PaulC]

 

I think the most interesting world cup player was the Brazillian Garrincha, the king of dribbling, who is often overshadowed by Pele but he won two world cups in 58 and 62 and in 62 Pele was injured and he won it on his own. 

 

Sorry this has nothing to do with the title of the thread but he might figure in one of them.

 

yeah im one of i guess many who had never heard of him before unlocking him on pro evo and seeing that he had crazy stats

 

theres a good documentary about him but i cant remember what its called, i can remember the scenes at his funeral with thousands lining the road, might be this one, if its not then i might watch this one tonight anyway...

 

 

 

 

Thats the documentary I watched. Very good, well worth watching. Pele was the clean living perfect role Model and Garincha was like a George Best. 

Edited March 26, 2014 by PaulC

[coda]

Didn't Garrincha **** a goat?

[PaulC]

Didn't Garrincha **** a goat?

 

They did say he would **** anything that moved so who knows....

[Wainy316]

Woohoo it's Tuesday!

 

 

World Cup: 25 stunning moments … No8: Mussolini's blackshirts' 1938 win

In 1938 Italy went to France and shrugged off protests and wild unpopularity to successfully defend their World Cup crown

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• theguardian.com,  Tuesday 1 April 2014 10.01 BST
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The Italian team, in all-black, give the fascist salute before their quarter-final against France at the 1938 World Cup. Photograph: Schirner Sportfoto/dpa/Corbis

 

The critical moment was … when our players raised their hands to give the fascist salute … I entered the stadium with our players, lined-up military style, and stood on the right. At the salute we predictably met with a solemn and deafening barrage of whistles, insults and remarks. It seemed like we were in 

Italy

 so much did the expressions resound of our idioms and dialects. How long that rumpus lasted I couldn't say. I was rigid, with an arm outstretched horizontally I couldn't check the time. The German referee and Norwegian players looked at us worriedly. At a certain point the hullabaloo began to die down and then ceased … We had just put our hands down and the violent demonstration started again. Straight away: "Team be ready. Salute." And we raised our hands again, to confirm we had no fear … Having won the battle of intimidation, we played.

 

The recollection of Italy's 1938 World Cup first-round match with Norway by the national team coach Vittorio Pozzo encapsulated fascism's single-minded, uncompromising approach to retaining the trophy it had won at home four years earlier.

Aware of the game's cross-national appeal and powers of propaganda, the fascist regime invested hugely into rationalising and regenerating the Italian game. Slow to industrialise, Italy was a latecomer to football with the game's boom coming either side of the first world war. Winning the war but losing the peace brought widespread disaffection which, combined with the threat of communism, fuelled the rapid rise to power of Mussolini and the fascist regime.

Having established dictatorship Il Duce turned his attention to trying to mobilise the nation behind the regime. Sport was fundamental in this and despite his initial lack of enthusiasm and unquestionable deficit in talent, football, or calcio as fascism's linguistic nationalism demanded, became its keystone. The 1926 Viareggio Charter turned calcio into a fascist game. Led by the head of Bolognese Fascism Leandro Arpinati, the Federation set about revolutionising the game. Most notable was the formation of a national league, Serie A. The intent was twofold: firstly, to forge a sense of national identity and, secondly, to create a stronger, more competitive structure that would result in a national team capable of rivalling the best.

The fruits of the investment began to emerge in the early 1930s as Italian club teams challenged those of central Europe and Britain for supremacy. The generation bloomed in 1934 as Italy hosted and won the World Cup. But there were two nagging doubts that undermined Italian claims to supremacy: the absence of the English team and the rumours of corruption and the buying of referees. There is little concrete evidence to support the latter, but England remained a thorn in calcio's side with Italy unable to secure a victory in three highly-charged matches in the 1930s.

While England remained in isolation, France 1938 was an opportunity for Italy to retain the trophy in a foreign land and scotch those rumours. But by the time the tournament came around there was good reason to dislike what many in France, in particular, were coming to realise was a particularly nasty regime.

Vittorio Pozzo holds the Jules Rimet Trophy after Italy's 4-2 victory over Hungary in the 1938 World Cup final. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Carlo Rosselli, one of Europe's most charismatic and influential anti-fascist intellectuals who had been living since 1929 in exile in France, was rumoured to have schemed a variety of plots to assassinate Mussolini. His support for the expansion of the Spanish Civil War into a European anti-fascist war made him one of the regime's most dangerous enemies and placed him high on its wanted list. Along with his brother Nello, a noted historian, he was killed on a country road in Normandy, on 9 June 1937. Both were stabbed, Nello finished off with a pistol. As many as 200,000 people are said to have attended their funerals in Paris.

While the Italian press tried to link their assassinations with anti-fascist communists and anarchists, the responsibility actually rested with a secret French extreme right-wing group, Cagoule, which had connections to the French secret services. While there was no smoking gun directly connected to Mussolini, the Italian secret police had been watching Carlo Rosselli in his hotel. Two days after their assassination Leon Blum submitted his resignation as prime minister of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition.

Franco-Italian relations weren't helped by Mussolini's anti-French/pro-Franco statements on 14 May 1938. Declaring his support for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, his contemporaneous announcement of a political accord with England threatened the encirclement of France. This was the political context to the Italian's team's arrival in 1938, where anti-fascist protests became that tournament's Mexican wave. Arriving with the squad in Marseille, where there was a significant presence of exiled Italians, Ugo Locatelli later recalled some 3,000 or more French and Italian protestors being controlled by baton-wielding mounted police. His account contrasted with the Italian press' record of a courteous reception at the station by a number of dignitaries and over-enthusiasm from local and Italian supporters.

In 2001 I interviewed Piero Rava, the only surviving member of that team. He was unable to remember the alleged protest. Whether his memory had been reduced by the years or was deliberately selective I was never able to ascertain, but given such incidents continued throughout the competition Locatelli's recollections still seemed on the money. Less doubt surrounds the intended recipient of the protests: the team. As the representative of the regime rather than the nation, it reaped what Fascism had sowed 12 years earlier with its politicisation of football.

Understandably unpopular, the Italian team's warm 'welcome' wasn't the sort of thing to trouble Vittorio Pozzo, journalist and unpaid Supreme Commander or Commissario Unico of the national team, who instilled a strong sense of militarism into his and Mussolini's boys. Settling potentially divisive inter-club rivalries by forcing antagonistic players to room together, the ambience of his training camps was more akin to the armed forces. Closely connected to the fascist hierarchy, Pozzo incarcerated his squad in ritiro (retreat) and marches through the woods became the order of the day. His motivational tactics were often decidedly nationalistic, with an away trip to Hungary in 1930 including a detour to the monumental first world war cemetery of Redipuglia where, among the war dead, the players were reminded of their responsibilities and the sacrifices of their forefathers.

The Azzurri's opening match in Marseille saw them up against Norway on the field and an estimated 10,000 Italian political exiles in the terraces, even if the Corriere della Sera's journalist Emilio De Martino claimed the crowd's strong Scandinavian leanings was more a reflection of its pleasure at its earlier unexpected elimination of Germany. Pozzo, however, recalled:

 

… a background of political-polemic. Unjustly. Because our players never even dreamed of making it something political. They represented their country and they naturally wore its colours and symbol.

 

The problem was, this symbol was the Fascio Littorio, a bundle of sticks and an axe. Carried by the Romans as a sign of law and order, it had been appropriated by the fascist regime for similar reasons. Fascism's anthem Giovinezza (Youth), also played as the team entered the stadium, but it was Italy's Roman salute that most angered the crowd, especially when Pozzo ordered its repetition.

Italy's Alfredo Foni, left, launches himself at the ball during the 1938 World Cup final against Hungary. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

The under-pressure Azzurri were less than impressive in snatching a 2-1 victory in extra-time. "Vittoria ma non basta" (Victory but not enough) summed up the press' general disappointment. The fascist militia general and football federation head Giorgio Vaccaro was also unhappy with the presence in defence of the ageing Eraldo Monzeglio instead of Alfredo Foni. Pozzo claimed pressure from Villa Torlonia, Mussolini's Roman residence where Monzeglio was often to be found coaching football and playing tennis with Il Duce and his sons. Vaccaro's intervention ended Monzeglio's international career and illustrated the political interference in team selection that Pozzo claimed had forced him to pick only players that were party members in 1934.

The tremors from Marseille were felt in Paris, where Italy met France in the quarter-final. If the anti-fascist protests had shaken the Azzurri's confidence in Marseille, from the "theatre of hostility" that was the Colombes stadium the team drew inspiration. In his detailed account of the Italy's two World Cup wins and Olympic football gold medal in 1936, Pozzo glossed over this match, just as the regime liked to do with all unpleasant news.

With both countries normally playing in blue, lots were drawn to decide who should change. Italy lost and rather than wear its traditional change colour of white, the team was ordered to play in all-black. Still smarting from the poor reception in Marseille, the decision is often cited as having emanated directly from Mussolini. While the maglia nera (black shirt) had been worn by Italy's victorious team of students in Berlin this was the only time it ever appeared in a full international. Displaying a far from subtleFascio Littorio on the left breast, it was a direct representation of the regime and an unmistakable two fingers to all anti-fascist protestors.

The "manifestly hostile" crowd was silenced by a comfortable 3-1 Italian win. As the fascist daily Il Popolo d'Italia recorded, the squad pulled out its best performance of the tournament: "It is Italy – the blue shirt with the Savoy shield and the Fascio Littorio on its chest – that has won the right to contest the final in Paris."

The importance of victory for the fascist regime was obvious. But beyond the Darwinistic kudos that associated the achievement with Fascism's apparent regeneration of the Italian race, there were those rumours of corruption during the 1934 tournament that needed scotching. Such was its desperation, a legend-cum-urban-myth developed regarding a telegram apparently sent to the team by Mussolini, prior to the final, with the simple instruction: "Win or Die". Not surprisingly it wasn't archived among government foreign despatches and neither did Rava give it credence when I met him. "No, no, no, that's not true. He sent a telegram wishing us well, but no never 'win or die'." Sometimes truth gets in the way of good story.

With the final against Hungary tied at 1-1, Italy showed its class with 20 minutes of widely acclaimed football in which they scored two goals, secured the title and apparently won over the crowd. "In those 20 minutes of spectacular play they forgot their political and ethnic prejudices," said Rava. I wonder?

Benito Mussolini, centre, in white, poses with the Italian team at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome following their success at the 1938 World Cup. Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images

The game ended 4-2. For their efforts each squad member was rewarded with an 8,000 Lire win bonus (about three months' salary) and a fascist Gold Medal, which was presented by Mussolini during a 15-minute reception with the team in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Interestingly enough, given his megalomania and enthusiasm for global domination, Italy's "No1 sportsman" never raised the trophy himself.

Fascism already had its eyes on a third consecutive trophy in 1942, but the outbreak of the second world war put paid to that. After the regime fell in 1943 and Italy was liberated 18 months later, Pozzo made the seamless transition from the dictatorship to democratic Republic. He remained Italian coach until 1948 and carried on writing for La Stampa up until his death 20 years later.

But for all of Italy's unquestionable talent and unprecedented success, the political gestures of a black shirt and a double-Roman salute that encapsulated Italian football's rise under fascism were extraordinary, especially in the context of France at the time and what was to come. Fascism may have won the battle of intimidation on the field, as Pozzo had said, but it would soon lose the war and the black shirt and Roman salute be consigned to one of the World Cup's and Fifa's least edifying but overtly political moments.

 

 

[Zatman]

 

High noon, one blistering Sunday in Mexico City, and a quarter-final shootout between two arch rivals who hadn't met in a World Cup for 20 years and had grievance on their minds. Rattín's Revenge! Or, in the offices of various tabloid newspapers and the heads of the slow: Falklands II. Here are 10 things that happened during a first half everyone's long forgotten about:

1) Just before kick-off, instead of focusing on the players warming up in the oppressive sun, the Mexican television director chose to zoom in on a topless man necking the final third of a plastic cup of lager while sucking hard on a cheroot, having clearly been caught in two minds over which craving to sate first. A wonderful tableau of the relaxed atmosphere in the Azteca before kick-off, both sets of supporters in good humour, the Argentina team handing each England player their own personal pennant. A lovely touch, a small gesture of friendship, and to think everyone had been banging on about bad blood caused by the Malvinas conflict.

2) The referee and his two linesmen spent the minutes leading up to kick-off loitering in the spiral shadow covering the centre circle, wishing the woofers and tweeters in the stadium PA were a hundred times more powerful, large enough in fact to cast the entire pitch in shade. Still, keep cool while you can. Clever referee! Clever Ali Ben Nasser (Tunisia)! You'd need to get up a lot earlier than midday on a Sunday to catch Ali Ben Nasser (Tunisia) out!

3) On 13 minutes, perhaps the best snippet of individual skill in the entire 1986 tournament up to that point. Glenn Hoddle raked a long ball down the right channel for Peter Beardsley to pursue. The pass was too heavy, and out came Nery Pumpido, breezing across to gather. But the goalkeeper made the most basic of misjudgments, mistiming his run to meet the ball and slipping as he attempted to readjust. The ball clanked off his shin and out of the area. Beardsley, who had not given up the chase, was first to the loose ball. Pumpido scampered after him in hot pursuit, but was soon written out of the story as Beardo went burlesque: a sultry, slinky, bom-chicka shake of the hips, feinting left to send Pumpido skittering off towards the byline, then a smooth and sexy swish back through 180 degrees to the right, fashioning just enough time and space for a whipcracked shot towards the unguarded goal. Unluckily for England, the effort billowed the side-netting, inches away from a strike of the most stunning solo sass. You don't see that sort of skill every day. And certainly rarely more than once in a single match. Sorry for any challenging mental images we might have just left you with, by the way.

4) The game suffered a preposterous hold-up for two minutes towards the end of the half, when Diego Maradona shaped to take a corner on the right but found his path to the ball blocked by a row of corpulent photographers beached along the byline. Concluding that moving these fine gentlemen of the press would require the implementation of the biggest engineering project in Mexico City since the first shovel broke ground at the Azteca in 1961, Maradona instead whipped out the pole so he could attack the ball from another angle. Before he could take the corner, linesman-jobsworth Berny Ulloa Morera demanded he replace the pole. So Maradona replanted the pole. But the flag had fallen off the top, and Morera demanded that went back on too. Maradona balanced the material over the top of the pole – but even that wasn't good enough for Morera. So Maradona slowly and carefully resheathed the pole, in surprisingly good humour under the circumstances, given he was being pestered during the biggest match of his life by an official whose time might have been better spent ordering the photographers to move, rather than asking the greatest footballer in the world to perform several basic haberdashery tasks. In the end, Maradona got one of the snappers to shift out of the road, and with a grim inevitability, sent the set piece straight into Peter Shilton's hands. What an anticlimax. How many of the 114,580 crowd had paid to see Morera rather than Maradona was never ascertained.

5) Usherettes wandered through the stands carrying trays of up to 15 ready-poured lagers, dispensing them hither and yon. What service!

6) It wasn't a great 45 minutes for the BBC commentary team, Barry Davies and Jimmy Hill. Davies was always a world-class commentator, and Hill a clever and imaginative pundit until he became a parody of himself at some tricky-to-define point during the 1980s. But both men had an off-day here, spending a good proportion of the first half taking pops at the expansionist politicians of Fifa for having the nerve to appoint the referee Ali Ben Nasser (Tunisia) on the grounds that he came from Tunisia. According to Davies, Tunisia was an "emerging nation", which would have come as something of a surprise to, say, the residents of Tunis, a city founded in the fourth century BC. It has to be admitted that Ben Nasser wouldn't enjoy his best day at the office either, but his errors would have bugger all to do with his being Tunisian. (It should also be pointed out that the BBC never once questioned the appointment of a linesman from notorious footballing hotbed Azerbaijan during the 1966 World Cup, and look what happened there. But we digress.)

7) Mind you, Davies and Hill can be partially excused for much of their first-half jabbering, as the opening 45 minutes weren't up to much. Argentina had most of the ball but did very little with it, though Maradona looked dangerous when probing down the channels.

8) That hypnotic, hip-shaking cameo from Peter von Teese apart, England were worse than poor. There wasn't much to write home about. Terry Fenwick blootered one shot 40 yards into the blue. On 44 minutes, England's star man, Gary Lineker, touched the ball, toe-poking it out of play down the right. At one point, Steve Hodge, looking to hoof clear, sliced a high ball backwards into his own area. He'd have to stop that!

9) Fenwick in particular made a complete show of himself. He took Maradona out on nine minutes, earning a yellow card; was later sent scrabbling around on all fours as the same player zipped past him, making off with the ball and his dignity; and just before the break, crumped his left elbow in the little man's coupon, a vicious off-the-ball assault that deserved a straight red. It should have been an end to his afternoon. But it wasn't.

10) At half-time, news filtered through that Tele Santana, arch idealist, had resigned as coach of Brazil, who had lost a classic quarter-final to France 24 hours earlier. A symbolic moment, the last men fighting the good fight for the old-fashioned beautiful game, crushed by the wheels of modernity. Whither improvisational brilliance in international football now? We'll never see the like again, surely.

It could only get better

England's defence pay close attention to Diego Maradona. Not that it proves effective. Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images

Nil-nil at half-time, then, though the second half would deliver big style, thanks mainly to one man's absurd transgression of the laws of association football. Yep, we're talking about Fenwick again. Five minutes after the restart, Fenwick clumped Maradona on the head as the pair went up for a challenge in the centre circle. He again whacked the Argentinian's noggin on 66 minutes. And with five minutes to go, he upended the marauding Jorge Valdano with an absurd last-man slide tackle. Just in case you've lost count, and goodness knows we couldn't blame you, Fenwick could easily, on another day, have been sent off four times.

Four times!

Whether Maradona was that fussed about all this dubious attention is a moot point. For a start, if you accept that deliberate and systematic fouling of talent represents the mother of all unintended compliments – the ultimate, often quite literal, stamp of approval – then this gives Maradona No1 status among those in the pantheon. Consider the questionable treatment meted out to the other greats in World Cups: Pelé was shoed around Goodison Park in 1966; Johan Cruyff was the put-upon postman to Berti Vogts' pitbull-with-elastic-band-round-its-front-tail in the 1974 final; Ferenc Puskas was maimed by West Germany's Werner Liebrich's forensic strike in the 1954 groups. But Maradona has been famously worked over on the biggest stage of all not once but twice: first by Claudio Gentile in the 1982 second round, a calculating masterclass in crafty tugs, conniving pulls, cunning yanks and corrupt kicks, and then in this game four years later by the rather more remedial stylings of our man Fenwick.

Second – and with far more relevance to this particular battle – it put Maradona in the frame of mind to attempt a little rule-bending of his own. (And remember it's only over here where folk desperately try to convince themselves that a cheeky handball is somehow much more morally repugnant than a few hard belts in the mouth, upside the head, or below the belt.) Sadly for England, their Diego proved to be much more adept at the old black magic than our Tel, and the wee magician's sauce-ery was to tilt the balance in Argentina's favour, six minutes after the restart.

The helping hand

Diego Maradona played a key role in the buildup to his opening goal with a sublime dribble. Photograph: Allspot, UK/Allsport

So poor old Steve Hodge never did learn his lesson from the first half, and we all know what happened: the Aston Villa midfielder sliced a high, looping ball into the middle of his own area, it fell just in front of the penalty spot, and was met by Maradona, who with his left fist adroitly tickled the ball over the confused head of the sandbag-shoed Peter Shilton and into the empty net. Maradona raced off towards the right-hand corner flag to celebrate, stopping only a millisecond to take a quick peek back over his shoulder, just in case the referee was wise to the grift. Amid the carnage he left behind, Shilton could be seen waving his hands in the air in despair, while our old pal Fenwick was right up in the referee's grille, tinkling his pinkies in an arch mime, the pair a picture of impotent frustration.

Nobody came out of this affair looking good, not Maradona, not Shilton, not Hodge, not Fenwick. And certainly not referee Ali Ben Nasser (Tunisia), who had just presided over the biggest balls-up in World Cup history. But perhaps we should try to understand his mistake. It's very difficult now to view the footage of the goal as it unfolds in an objective manner: we know exactly what Maradona's about to do, and as such the larceny is as plain as day. Projecting our knowledge on to the canvas is almost unavoidable. But let's give it a go. And perhaps the most instructive tool to help us is the aforementioned BBC commentary that accompanied the heist live, and remains an honest historical document of first impressions.

"They're appealing for offside but the ball came back off the boot of Steve Hodge," said Barry Davies, unsure as to why Shilton, Fenwick and Terry Butcher were making like a Marcel Marceau tribute act, skittering after the referee while furiously slapping their own forearms. It took another 32 seconds and two television replays before the penny began to drop that something was seriously amiss. "Now at what point was he offside?" ummed-and-aahed Davies. "Or was it a use of the hand that England are complaining about?"

Now, as we mentioned earlier, Davies might not have enjoyed the greatest of first halves. (As well as questioning the referee's nationality, he also mocked an Argentinian drummer caught on camera enjoying some downtime – "He doesn't seem to have too much to say, does he?" – as though he was somehow bringing shame on his nation by failing to metronomically riff for 45 minutes in the style of Jaki Liebezeit.) But for all his occasional bombast, Davies was a journalist of the highest order, a class act, the Maradona of the microphone. And it was in response to this incident that his quality – as well as his humility and humanity – shone through.

Even after two replays, it wasn't 100% clear that Maradona had handled, and Davies wasn't about to make a definitive call on live television. (This might come as a shock to a generation used to media organisations announcing celebrity deaths without making a few calls first, just because someone's popped something up on the old Twitter, but hacks really did once act like this.) It was another two minutes before Davies reported that other members of the press box, sitting nearer to England's goal, were pretty damn sure that Maradona handled. "They have little doubt that it was a hand that put the ball past the England goalkeeper," Davies told the nation. All of which added up to more than 120 seconds of confusion which, if nothing else, laid bare the difficulties Ali Ben Nasser (Tunisia) faced in making a snap judgment.

But for all the rights and wrongs, the scoreline was the scoreline: Maradona 1-0 Fenwick. This is what happens when you try to kid a kidder.

The Argentina captain had, in the final analysis, been a cheeky get. This much was true. But one thing often forgotten about that goal is his stunning play in the buildup. Maradona cut inside from the left, picking up a pass from Julio Olarticoechea and danced down the channel, past Hoddle, then Peter Reid, then Fenwick. When he reached the edge of the D, he drew Butcher and Kenny Sansom towards him before flicking a pass out right to Valdano, who attempted to turn Hodge – at which point the world came crashing in on England.

'You have to say that's magnificent! Pure football genius'

Diego Maradona leaves Terry Butcher, left, and Terry Fenwick, second left, in his wake before scoring his stunning second goal. Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images

That burst of skill was one thing, but Maradona was about to take it to the next level. With England still reeling, the woefully misfiring Hoddle gave the ball away cheaply in the middle of the Argentina half. It was shuttled upfield to Maradona, who faced his own goal just to the right of the centre circle. Spinning around, he dismissed Beardsley and Reid, then made off down the right, prodding the ball forward with extreme prejudice. He teased Butcher, then nipped inside as the big defender lunged. Gathering speed, he made for the penalty area, slipping past the preposterous Fenwick, then goading Shilton off his line. The keeper spread himself well, but Maradona rounded him on the right, holding off Butcher, who had bravely come back for more, and slipped the ball into the right-hand side of the exposed net. A goal so good it instantly chalked off any moral debt, and secured his place in the pantheon at exactly the same time, just as international football needed a new improvisational hero in the bleak post-Santana landscape. Speaking of redemptions, Davies, by now thoroughly recovered from his slow start, delivered one of the greatest lines in commentary history, a magnanimous and thoroughly memorable cry of "You have to say that's magnificent! Pure football genius." Pure commentary genius. You have to say that's magnificent.

The rest of the game was a rather strange affair. Argentina took their foot off the gas, but England failed to respond. Hoddle, who had been dreadful for the first hour, raised his game a wee bit, creating a half-chance for Beardsley from the right wing with an impudent low cross – Beardsley prodded straight at Pumpido – but it was only when John Barnes came on for Trevor Steven that England finally threatened. The Watford winger's insouciant stride down the left set up a goal for Lineker with nine minutes to go and, after Carlos Tapia hit England's left post straight from the restart, the pair nearly combined again with 120 seconds left on the clock. For a split second it looked like Lineker had managed to fashion a foolish miss as he tried to bundle home Barnes's left-wing teaser, but again first impressions were deceptive: Olarticoechea rather brilliantly brushed his eyebrows on the cross with the striker lurking an inch from the line.

And that was it. Argentina saw the game out, a deserved victory on both a sporting and, yes, because it wasn't Maradona who instigated the game of silly buggers, moral level. Er, just about. England did start it, though.

So Argentina had regained their national pride in the wake of the Falklands, and taken revenge on the folk who had caused their erstwhile captain, Antonio Rattín, so much pain 20 years previously at the same stage of the same competition. With that famous 1966 stramash in mind, the 1986 version tied up the narrative in a delicious symmetry. After that glorious brouhaha at Wembley, Alf Ramsey had physically – infamously – stopped George Cohen from exchanging tops with Alberto González (who simply wandered off and got a souvenir off Ray Wilson instead). This time round, Hodge, who had teed up Maradona for his grand larceny, swapped shirts with England's tormentor-in-chief. It was, runs the old joke, the nearest Hodge got to Maradona all day. No cash prize on offer for guessing what ran through Sir Alf's mind upon witnessing that particular transaction.

 

wouldn't imagine its something many people have heard of

[Zatman]

FWIW I think Shilton gets away with murder in this goal. how can Maradona out jump a man a foot taller than him and his arm not even fully extended

[villa4europe]

someone should have took a yellow...

[Wainy316]

Hodge, named and shamed as a Villa player for his terrible mis kick

[Zatman]

Isnt he among the most hated Villa players of all time

[Wainy316]

Yep.  Before my time but he's hated on here.  Something to do with him thinking he was a big shot when he got an England call up and angling for a move.

[villaajax]

Yep.  Before my time but he's hated on here.  Something to do with him thinking he was a big shot when he got an England call up and angling for a move.

 

Sounds like every other Villa player to play for England.

[Pelle]

FWIW I think Shilton gets away with murder in this goal. how can Maradona out jump a man a foot taller than him and his arm not even fully extended

 

Because Shilton thought he'd be challenged by a midget using his head and so was always going to be first on the ball before Maradona decided to take a cheeky punt? There's no doubt Shilton would've got it had he known that Maradona would use his hand.

[Zatman]

of course he would have got it if Maradona didnt use his hand but even if he used his hand Shilton should have gathered the ball quite comfortably. Maradona jumping with his hand was probably just about the same height as Shilton

[Pelle]

Yeah, maybe he could've been ruthless instead of, as it seemed, just estimate what would be enough to get the ball away from the area. I minor mistake that I think Shilton regrets, but still not that big mistake. It would've been enough if it wasn't for cheating. A keeper like Schumacher would probably had done it a little different and got both the ball and Maradona away.

[Zatman]

Yeah, maybe he could've been ruthless instead of, as it seemed, just estimate what would be enough to get the ball away from the area. I minor mistake that I think Shilton regrets, but still not that big mistake. It would've been enough if it wasn't for cheating. A keeper like Schumacher would probably had done it a little different and got both the ball and Maradona away.

 

don't think Schumacher would have went for the ball either

[Wainy316]

World Cup: 25 stunning moments

… No10: Dennis Bergkamp's wonder goal

On 4 July 1998 the Dutch forward took three divine touches, scored the perfect goal and sent Holland into the semi-finals

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Dennis Bergkamp scores past Carlos Roa as Roberto Ayala looks on during the 1998 World Cup match between Holland and Argentina in Marseille. Photograph: Vi-Images/VI-Images via Getty Images

Bobby Moore never got a bathmat wet in his life. Mike Summerbee, who sometimes shared a room with Moore on England trips, said he was "the only man who could have a bath and get out dry". Moore would flick the water off one leg, dry that with a towel and then step out on to the dry leg, before continuing the process with the rest of his body. Moore's routine will come as no surprise to those who watched his immaculate, pristine defending. Nor will the fact that he brought such meticulousness to his wardrobe, where jumpers were hung up in order from dark to light. "It was," says his first wife Tina in Bobby Moore: By The Person Who Knew Him Best, "almost an aesthetic pleasure to open the wardrobe."

 

The fastidiousness demonstrated by Moore is one of the sub-genres of perfectionism within football. There's also the impossible, self-torturing expectations of perfectionist-winners such as Soren Lerby and Roy Keane, whose business face should be the subject of a modernist painting entitled simply: 'Standards'. Other significant manifestations include the perfection-making practice of forces of nurture like Peter Shilton or Cristiano Ronaldo, Spain's obsessive-compulsive tiki-taka and Pep Guardiola's need for control, and the artistic leanings of players like Eric Cantona and Dimitar Berbatov.

 

Holland fans celebrate with a cut-out figure of Bergkamp. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

If you put all those types of perfectionism on a Venn diagram, the man in the middle might be Dennis Bergkamp, the perfectionist's perfectionist. Thierry Henry said he loved "Every. Single. Thing" about Bergkamp, but the thing he loved the most was the way Bergkamp trained, because "everything had to be perfect". Bergkamp also had unrealistic expectations – of himself, if not necessarily others - and was a sucker for cleanliness. The Guardian's Amy Lawrence noticed how starched his socks were during an interview 10 years ago, a revelation that would not surprise Patrick Vieira. "To make his kind of passes you have to like things to be perfect," says Vieira in Stillness and Speed. "I wouldn't be surprised if his clothes are really well organised. I wouldn't be surprised at all." Finally there is perfection as aesthetic idealism, the thing with which Bergkamp is most associated and which informed so much of what he did on a football field.

 

Bergkamp's imagination was his gift and his curse. It elevated him above his peers, but it is also meant he was in danger of driving himself round the bend aiming for something that he could not explain and which might not even exist; he was almost striving for Godot. The life of a perfectionist is not easy. Or so we'd imagine. Most people are casual perfectionists at best, and confuse perfectionism with self-loathing, yet it's comforting to indulge that vague notion because the reality – that adulthood is what happens while you're busy making compromises on your youthful ideals – is too dispiriting to acknowledge. Yet every now and then you come across someone for whom perfectionism is a way of life, who has no choice but to embrace an existence in which anything less than the best is a felony.

 

Perfection is a recurring theme of Stillness and Speed, Bergkamp's excellent book. One chapter is called 'It Has To Be Perfect', which is both his mantra and an indication that his co-author David Winner wasn't a Fairground Attraction fan. "Well, you set yourself goals, targets," he says in this extract from the book. "And once you've got there you want to move on and go further. You keep raising the bar and therefore it's never good enough. You want perfection. It's never good enough but it's within your reach. You climb one mountain and see the higher one."

 

On 4 July 1998, Bergkamp climbed the highest mountain for 2.11 seconds – the time it took for him to produce the three divine touches and score the penultimate-minute winner against Argentina that putHolland into the World Cup semi-final. "Perfect" was Ruud Gullit's description on ITV that night. "You never play the perfect game," said Bergkamp later, "but the moment itself was, I think, perfect." Both stalled over the P-word, as if they would be sent straight to hell for sacrilege should they misuse it, before realising that, actually, yes, that was the only way to describe it. Given Dutch football's obsession with creative purity, you know something special has happened when a Dutch footballer describes something as perfect.

 

In One Moment In Time, her rhapsodic treatment of spiritual fulfilment, Whitney Houston beseeched: "Give me one moment in time, when I'm more than I thought I could be." For Bergkamp, this was it. "You're in that moment," said Bergkamp. "That's the feeling. After the first two touches … that moment! You give absolutely everything. It's like your life has led up to this moment."

Bergkamp flicks the ball past Roa. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images

 

The reprieve

 

One man never gets the thanks he deserves for his part in Bergkamp's goal. Not Frank de Boer – whose creation of the goal is regularly acknowledged – but José María García-Aranda. He was the Spanish referee who inexplicably declined to send Bergkamp off for stamping on Sinisa Mihajlovic during Holland's 2-1 win over Yugoslavia in the second round five days earlier. Bergkamp misplaced the plot, as was his occasional wont, and should have walked. "I haven't the faintest idea why I did that," he says. "I was startled by my own behaviour."

 

Bergkamp wheels away after scoring the winning goal. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

He was not alone in that. On the morning of the game, most papers focused not on the prospect of an immense quarter-final but on Arsène Wenger's criticism of Bergkamp, who had been the Player of the Year in Arsenal's domestic double that season. It may have been on Bergkamp's mind, because he was quiet for large parts of the game. Indeed apart from producing one of the World Cup's greatest goals and one of the most imaginative assists, he did the square root of bugger all.

 

Bergkamp argues that he did two great things that day, and he'll be thrilled to know that we agree with him. The first came in the 12th minute, an ingenious falling header to create the opening goal for Patrick Kluivert. The more you watch it, the better it gets. Bergkamp almost invents a new type of pass, the square through ball. He was always as much an architect and geometrician as he was a footballer – as a child he was obsessed with geometry – and was forever highlighting that a football pitch was so much bigger than it seemed as 20 men were magnetised towards the ball. Bergkamp could find acres of space and strip a defence naked with one pass, as shown in Jeroen Henneman's diagram ("One moment the pitch is crowded and narrow. Suddenly it is huge and wide … A miracle") in Winner's book Brilliant Orange.

 

In football it's often said that the run makes the pass. With Bergkamp, the pass regularly made the run – either by ushering a player like Nicolas Anelka into a certain area, or because those like Anelka and Kluivert know from experience what Bergkamp would explore. In this case, forewarned was dangerously forearmed.

 

Bergkamp was among that small, counter-instinctive group of players who seemed to get as much joy from an assist as from a goal. Thus in many ways this pass to Kluivert, rather than the goal, was truly representative of his career: the awareness and creation of space, the quick wit and, of course, the gentle touch. In a split-second, he worked out all the angles – in both senses – and utilised an extra-sensory perception in a way that evokes those breathless, deductive visual analyses so beloved of Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes every time he meets a stranger or finds a dead body.

 

Ronald de Boer's pass is flat and hard and waist high too high to control with my foot and too low for my chest so I have to fall to my left and squash my body so that I can cushion it with my head but where do I cushion it out of the corner of my eye I see Kluivert making a run off Chamot if I head it towards him between Sensini and Chamot the control will be too difficult at high speed besides there isn't much space there the space is between Sensini who has come towards me and Ayala who has gone out to meet de Boer so I need to play almost a square pass with my head the other side of Sensini into the angle of Kluivert's run I can't cushion it as gently with my head as with my foot but that's fine because the space is fairly big and if I head it too softly Roa will stay on his line and stay big so it's okay to put a fraction more on it to entice Roa from his line because if he comes out Kluivert has a much easier finish.

 

It's often said of more prosaic footballers that they are much better when they don't have time to think. Bergkamp was one of the most thoughtful footballers of all, yet the same rules applied to him. His greatest gift was his instinctive intelligence. When he had time to consider things he was often less effective – look at his penalty record for a start – and his best work was done when he had barely a split second to compute everything. When he was in that moment.

 

"It's like solving a puzzle," he said in FourFourTwo. "I always had a picture in my head of how things would look two or three seconds later. I could calculate it. There's a tremendous pleasure in doing something that someone else couldn't see."

 

The Dutch have always seen football through different eyes to the rest of the world. Yet for all the grandiose talk and pompous riddles of someone like Johan Cruyff, the way the Dutch play football has always been very simple and unpretentious. With the exception of that goal at Newcastle, not so much a blockbuster as a brainbuster, Bergkamp's work was always straightforward and accessible, which is not always the case with great footballers. Bergkamp was a reminder of the economy, minimalism and humility of most great sportsmen. He frequently played one-touch and there was scarcely any indulgence or attempt to show how clever he was. It's so much harder to make something complex look simple than the other way round. That was one of Bergkamp's greatest qualities. "I don't like tricks," he says. "My game is about first touch, control, passing. Art for art's sake isn't interesting."

 

If Bergkamp was accessible to the layman, that doesn't mean those who played alongside him didn't find an extra layer to appreciate. Bergkamp was very much a players' player, the subject of rare reverence from those he played against and particularly with. "I honestly didn't think a professional player could be that good," said Paul Merson. Ian Wright said he was "the greatest signing Arsenal will ever make" and Henry, whose list of team-mates includes Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi, says Bergkamp was the greatest he played alongside. Moments like the Kluivert assist explain why he was so revered.

 

After Holland took the lead Bergkamp began to drift out of the game. Claudio López equalised for Argentina in the 17th minute, nutmegging Edwin van der Sar in a manner so cocky as to remind us why the one-on-one is football's greatest masculinity-waving contest. Thereafter the game flowed beautifully, and has a strong case for being the best match in a World Cup full of excellent contests. It was the kind of classy, open game you only get when two teams are formidably comfortable both in their own skin, and with the ball at their feet.

 

It was also a match loaded with significance, the first competitive meeting between the sides since Argentina beat Holland in the 1978 World Cup final. That match was Bergkamp's first memory of football: he was eight years old, standing at his home at Amsterdam, watching with confused childish distress as Rob Rensenbrink hit the post in the last minute of normal time before Argentina went on to win in extra-time.

 

Twenty years later, Wim Jonk and Ariel Ortega rattled the post in the first half. In the second, Gabriel Batistuta staged an impromptu test of the quality of the craftsmanship of the official Fifa World Cup goalframe, walloping the post from 15 yards. The match seemed to swing Argentina's way in the 76th minute, when Arthur Numan was sent off for a second yellow card. Holland moved tactics expert Philip Cocu to left back and, although Argentina inevitably dominated possession thereafter, Holland were not unduly stretched – until the 87th minute, when a sensory overload of action changed everything.

 

Ortega, a strong contender for the player of the tournament at that stage, ran at Jaap Stam in the box and dived. The referee gave nothing – a brilliant decision that could easily have gone the other way, with the dive only really apparent in slow motion. As Van der Sar came to remonstrate, Ortega, bristling with the kind of righteousness that only the guilty can summon, rose from the floor to stick his head into the underside of Van der Sar's chin. What was going to be a yellow card for diving morphed into a red, and both sides had a couple of minutes to consider the changing circumstances before entering a 10-a-side golden goal period.

 

It didn't get that far. Fifty-three seconds after play restarted, Bergkamp produced his masterpiece. The quality of the goal is what is most spoken about now, but at the time the savageness of the swing was the most significant aspect of the overwhelming joy it created among the Dutch fans. One moment Holland had been hanging on with 10 men; the next they were 2-1 up and in the semi-final.

 

Bergkamp said it was like his life had been leading up to this moment. The game certainly hadn't. For much of the second half, and particularly in the buildup to the goal, Bergkamp was dreadful. This is not the playful hyperbole of which modern writers are regularly guilty but a legitimate appraisal of his performance. He looked like he'd won a competition to play in a World Cup quarter-final.

 

Between the red cards for Numan and Ortega, Bergkamp touched the ball only three times in 11 minutes. Once he conceded a throw-in with a tackle, twice he misplaced simple passes – the second, in a dangerous area in his own half, launched the attack in which Ortega had a penalty appeal and was sent off. Even after that, in the 53 seconds between the restart and the goal, Bergkamp had time for his worst touch of the match – he tried to play a simple short pass to Marc Overmars, kicked it against his standing foot and launched an Argentina break. When that attack broke down, Holland pottered about at the back for a few seconds before Frank de Boer spotted some movement up front …

 

Occasionally great goals come in the context of dismal personal performances. It's the great players' beautiful interpretation of "winning ugly" – demonstrating the ability to bend games not to their will but to their skill. Ryan Giggs against Arsenal in 1999 is another significant example. Perhaps playing so poorly creates a certain freedom, an "oh-bugger-it" attitude (as Matthew Engel, on these pages, memorably described England's cricket against South Africa during a famous victory in 1994). Or maybe, as with so much great sport, it just happened.

 

Frank de Boer got things going with a refresher course in the difference between a long ball and a long pass – "a stretch-limo of a pass," as Cris Freddi describes it in his definitive World Cup history. Indeed, needing only four touches as it did, this was that rarest of goals: the kind that could be appreciated equally by Johan Cruyff and Charles Hughes.

 

After the pass came the holiest of holy trinities, three perfect touches from Bergkamp. The first would have been a breathtaking piece of control even if that was the extent of the exercise. Bergkamp was so high in the air that it's almost a surprise his fear of flying didn't kick in. He was also running at full pelt, yet still managed to kill the ball with a telescopic leg and a right boot made of velvet and velcro. Even in that split-second, Bergkamp processed that he had to control it with his instep rather than the side of his foot. This interview gives an insight into the staggering amount of information a human being can process in just over two seconds: Bergkamp factored in everything from the wind to the line of the ball to the defender's movement to the angle of an eventual shot and consequent need to use his right rather than his left foot. It's easy to think Bergkamp is embellishing it but we have seen this so often; Diego Maradona, for example, showed startling total recall during a similarly career-defining goal against England in 1986.

 

Bergkamp is unusual in that most of his great goals – Argentina, Leicester, Newcastle, Spurs – are remembered more for the first touch than the finish. He loved making goals, and it's almost as if that was his way of supplying an assist for himself. If you wanted to go the full pseud, you could call it a pre-goal.

 

In this case, Bergkamp still had a serious amount to do even after the immaculate control. His game was all about the manipulation and creation of space – but usually that involved through balls into the spacious area behind defences. This time, with the sweeper Roberto Ayala roaring across full of misplaced determination, Bergkamp had a phonebox to work with at best. No matter; his second touch ushered Ayala off towards the wrong fire, and set him up for the shot.

 

"After the second touch I know this can't go wrong," he says. "No chance!" That's one way of looking at it. The other is that with each brilliant touch, the pressure to make it count becomes greater. Look at Rivaldo here after another long pass from Frank de Boer; Barcelona score, but he looks like a man who has just realised he's accidentally put the family chihuahua in the slow cooker. His face is a picture of repressed distress because he knows he missed the chance to score one of the greatest goals in history.

 

Bergkamp took the chance to do so. By then he was in that zone – "thatmoment" – and nothing could go wrong. With the outside of his right foot, he flicked the ball past Carlos Roa and into the top corner, an appropriately elegant finish. Confirmation of the rare quality of the goal came from the BBC commentary box. "Beautifully pulled down by Bergkamp – OH WHAT A GOAL! DENNIS BERGKAMP HAS WON IT FOR HOLLAND. That was absolutely brilliant." Barry Davies had not shouted as loud in the commentary for 27 years, since the "Leeds will go mad" game. "The sound supervisor only just managed to keep my voice in range," he said later. Davies is the greatest commentator there has ever been; when he cries wolf, you know the sheep are about to get eaten. The same with Martin Tyler's commentary at the height of Serie A's most dramatic game.

 

In Holland it was even better, with Jack Van Gelder repeatedly screaming"DENNIS BERGKAMP!" Van Gelder was not the only one who seemed on the cusp of tears. Bergkamp's face almost dissolved. If he was startled by his own behaviour against Yugoslavia, when he stood on Mihajlovic, he was overwhelmed by it here. He thrusted his hands straight over his face in shock. Whether subconscious or coincidental, it became a charming nod to Rinus Michels's similar reaction 10 years earlier when Marco van Basten scored his staggering volley in the European Championship final against the USSR. The Dutch have a football imagination like no other, yet sometimes they even shock themselves.

 

As Bergkamp collapsed on his back, the camera showed a sea of Holland shirts behind the goal on a gorgeously sunny day: brilliant orange in the stands, blindingly brilliant orange on the pitch. After the game, Bergkamp was coming to terms with what he had achieved. In his post-match interview, he was a picture of self-satisfaction – the good kind. He looked like the cat who first discovered cream.

 

Bergkamp has not watched the goal since 1998. "It's still in your mind," he says. "I don't really need to see it on television, I know exactly how it went."

 

The consummate footballer-artist

 

Dennis Bergkamp is rarely ranked among the 10 or 20 greatest players of all time. Last year, when World Soccer asked 73 journalists, managers and former players to select their all-time XI, Bergkamp did not get a single vote. He never won the Ballon d'Or (though he did finish second in 1993). Yet he will endure, and with good reason. It will be seen as a bit pseudish, but the fact is that to many people Bergkamp is the consummate footballer-artist. We all want to align ourselves with the beautiful people, and Bergkamp was inevitably the subject of a kind of aspirational admiration, as if "getting" him would somehow imbue the 5.24am train commute and the rest of your life with greater romance and meaning.

 

For all the brilliant things that footballers do, the pass and the first touch is the really good stuff, and Bergkamp specialised in those. His best moments represent football at its most profound. Bergkamp had a supernatural capacity for creation that hinted at a tantalising level of intelligence and technique we could appreciate even if we couldn't understand it. He specialised in moments – or rather, in moments – and Argentina was the pick of those. It was übergkamp.

 

"You play football with your head," says Cruyff, "and your legs are there to help you." If the brain is the most erogenous zone of all, then Bergkamp might be the sexiest football of the modern era. Yet all this would be try-hard horse pucky if it didn't amount to anything. Bergkamp practised what he preached when he said that "art for art's sake isn't interesting". And that's why the goal against Argentina meant so much to him, more than any other.

 

"Every boy has a dream: 'I want to score in the World Cup.' Score the winning goal in the final, of course. But in this way … to score a goal like that, in my style? The way I score a goal, on that stage, in a game thatreally means something, because that's important to me too. I love good football, nice football but it has to mean something."

 

It was deep and meaningful against Argentina. "I should be more of a killer," Bergkamp says in Brilliant Orange, "but it's just not a quality I have." He had it for those few seconds. He was creator and killer, everything he knew he could be and something he thought he couldn't. That context is why the goal is so special to us, too. It's the point at which the two schools of football – football as art and football as a results business – come together in harmony to create a unique moment, and a perfect goal.