Made more effective by the arrival of their substitutes, especially the lively Kurt Weltzl in attack, Austria took the lead in the grinding heat through the other substitute, Hintermaier, driving in a free kick pushed to him by Herbert Prohaska. But another header by the resilient Billy Hamilton, looking anything but the Third Division footballer he’d been the previous season, gave the Irish the draw which was the least they deserved.
Since Austria had lost their match against France to a superb free kick driven home by the slender Genghini, they were out. And so alas were the Irish, after France, with Michel Platini at last in his most commanding form, beat them 4–1 at the Calderon.
France still lacked a decent goalkeeper, but Marius Trésor, at sweeper, had come emphatically back into commanding form, and there was so much talent in the midfield that it was second only to Brazil’s. The black Tigana had been brought in with Genghini to give it greater drive and elegance, while Platini was able to float dangerously and gracefully between midfield and attack where Dominique Rocheteau, now more centre-forward than winger, and either Soler or Six, were able to capitalise on many chances made.
Giresse and Platini showed that each could be either executioner or prompter when, after thirty-three minutes, Platini got to the by-line and pulled the ball back for the stocky little Giresse to score. The Irish might have ridden the punch but, just after half-time, a bad error by McCreery let Rocheteau through on the left, and the 37-year-old Pat Jennings compounded it by letting Rocheteau’s far from irresistible low shot fly between him and his right-hand post.
A sinuous run and a clever cross by Tigana, a flying header by Rocheteau, brought yet a third French goal. The splendid young Whiteside, shrugging off the possibility of an easy, laid off ball from the left, taking on and beating his opponents, crossed to confuse Ettori and give Armstrong the Irish goal; but Giresse headed, untypically, a fourth to France. Ireland were out, just as in 1958, exhausted but honoured.
Italy’s first game in Barcelona, at the smaller Español Stadium where the fates had whimsically decreed that they play, while far less popular games took place in massive Nou Camp, was against Argentina. To the general surprise, they won it in style, with one major proviso: the appalling excesses of Claudio Gentile, set to mark—in every sense of the word, it seemed—Maradona, were a blemish on the match, the tournament and Italy’s eventual success.
The curious blind spot which led Enzo Bearzot to indulge the brutalities of Romeo Benetti in Argentina, now led him to be similarly indulgent to those of Gentile who, clobbering, holding, hacking and impeding Maradona out of the game, may be said to have won Italy the match. The accessory after the fact was the atrocious Rumanian referee, Nicolae Rainea, who emulated the three wise monkeys.
After a terrible first half, in which there was but one shot of note, executed by Ramon Diaz, turned over the bar by Dino Zoff, Italy at last came out to play in the second half. Rossi was still out of form, still to explode. Indeed, on the occasion of the second Italian goal, he would miss the simplest opportunity. But those around him, encouraged by the eclipse of the ill-treated Maradona, dominated the second half.
Bruno Conti, the fast, resilient little winger from Nettuno, on the Mediterranean coast, was in lively form. He it was who began the movement for the first goal. Giancarlo Antognoni produced one of his jewelled passes and Marco Tardelli, even more effective than he had been four years earlier in Argentina, struck the ball home.
The big, inelegant but always willing Graziani started the move for the second goal. He put Rossi clean through, Rossi surprisingly failed to beat Fillol, but when his shot rebounded Conti retrieved it on the left to pull the ball back and enable the attacking full-back Cabrini to score.
A goal six minutes from time by Passarella, a dubious one from a free kick when the Italians were still organising their wall, was all Argentina got from the game. It may well have been a bad mistake for Menotti to send Maradona—who once grazed the post from a free kick—so far upfield and into Gentile’s clutches, but he was entitled to expect protection which was never forthcoming from Rainea.
Brazil, in turn, then beat Argentina in another World Cup meeting between these implacable rivals. Though they scored after only eleven minutes, when Eder’s insidious free kick came down from the underside of the bar and Zico thumped the ball in, it was an hour or so before Brazil became truly dominant. Argentina had their best period early in the second half, when they seemed likely to get an equaliser.
Gradually, the superb Brazilian midfield took over the game. One of Zico’s killing passes set the excellent Falcao free on the right. The black Serginho rose to the cross and headed in, thus briefly giving the lie to the Brazilian critic who had said, ‘When Serginho plays, the ball is square.’ There was still a third Brazilian goal to come, scored by the rampant fullback Junior, exploiting a still more dazzling pass by Zico.
A wild, disgraceful foul by Maradona on Batista, the foul of a spoiled, frustrated boy, had Maradona sent off five minutes from the end. Passarella should have gone earlier for an equally spiteful, painful foul on Zico, whom Batista replaced. A minute from the end, Ramon Diaz gave Argentina back a little dignity with a goal, but it was small consolation.
Now, it seemed sure, Brazil would sweep Italy aside and qualify for the Final, where the Cup would be theirs for the taking. It did not happen. This was where Paolo Rossi came suddenly and sensationally to life; this was the game which ‘should’ have been the World Cup Final. The game in which Brazil’s glorious midfield, put finally to the test, could not make up for the deficiencies behind and in front of it.
It took only five minutes for Rossi to score, and put Brazil on the ropes. The Italians, indeed, resumed where they had left off. As in the second half of their match against Argentina, they were untypically but exuberantly committed to attack, and they scored through Rossi after only five minutes. Valdir Peres, the Brazilian keeper, had cause to reflect how prescient he had been when he said before the match that his chief fear was lest Rossi should suddenly come to life.
The goal was simple in execution, but showed Rossi’s amazing ability to scent a chance no one else would have imagined, to take on (almost) protective colouring; and to put the chance away. This, significantly, was the first of his several headed goals, although he is only a small fellow. But these headed goals were not those of a Hrubesch, a Kocsis, a Dean or a Lawton. They were tucked neatly away because Rossi had timed his run so perfectly that the defence was caught unawares.
On this occasion, Rossi, who only the previous minute had failed to control a ball in the penalty box, glided in Cabrini’s immaculate cross from the left, after the full-back had been sent away by Conti from the right.
Only six minutes later, however, the Brazilians were level. Zico, whose fate it was to be delivered to Gentile’s tender mercies, and to have his shirt ripped off him for his pains, eluded him this time and, with one of his beautifully angled passes, released Socrates. The shot, with so narrow an angle, was remarkable; a bullet between Zoff and the post.
Despite Gentile’s presence and a certain lack of response around him, with the very notable exception of Falcao, Zico was shining. After twenty-four minutes, however, a further lapse in Brazil’s defence brought another goal: for Rossi. A careless pass under no pressure at all by Toninho Cerezo to Junior was intercepted and exploited by a grateful Rossi. 2–1 for Italy.
Once again the Brazilians, who needed only a draw to get through, seemed to have got it. Twenty-three minutes into the second half, after Rossi had wasted a chance for Italy, Junior found Falcao, who dribbled across the penalty area, saw a gap, shot, and beat Zoff. 2–2: a magnificent left-footed shot which set the seal on Falcao’s remarkable performance.
Brazil took Serginho off and brought on the right-winger Paulo Isidoro—‘Now the ball is round again,’ said a Brazilian critic—but Zoff ’s fine goalkeeping denied them. Abraham Klein, the Israeli referee, kept the game admirably under control, but should really have
given a penalty at either end. Zico had faded, but Giancarlo Antognoni was in admirable form in the Italian midfield, once giving Cabrini a solid opportunity which he spurned.
After seventy-four minutes, Zoff almost lost a ball from Cerezo, but recovered to snatch it away from Paulo Isidoro. In the very next minute, Italy had won the game. Again, it was Rossi’s electric opportunism which did the trick. Brazil could only half clear a corner, Tardelli drove the ball back, it broke to Rossi, and into the net it inevitably went. A final, splendid save by Zoff, flinging himself at a header by Cerezo, and Brazil were out. Falcao was so distressed that he wanted to give up the game, and certainly had no will at all to resume playing for Roma, whom in fact he would help to win their Championship.
Poland qualified in the other Barcelona group, which was of a far lower standard, immeasurably less dramatic. The Russians went badly off the boil, not least their famous blond Ukrainian striker, Oleg Blokhin, once European Footballer of the Year, who was accused by his manager of talking rather than playing.
In the opening game, the Poles, with Boniek in magnificent form playing as an out and out striker, beat Belgium 3–0, all the goals coming from Boniek himself. Everything he did all evening seemed to succeed, whether it be a shot, a header or a pass, while he was well abetted by the durable Lato, a midfielder in Belgium by now, though a hero, as right-winger, of 1974.
Vandenbergh did once volley against the bar, but in general Belgium gave the heavy Polish defence surprisingly little trouble. Lato made a superb goal for Boniek after only four minutes: a run, a pulled-back cross, an immaculate first-time shot into the roof of the net.
Certainly the Belgians seriously missed the commitment, drive and exuberant overlapping of their bearded right-back, Gerets, who had suffered a bad head injury in their third game. But something else seemed radically to have gone amiss with the side which had done so well two years earlier in Italy, reaching the Final of the Nations Cup. Van Moer did play against Poland but he was, perhaps inevitably, no longer the fine force he been in 1980 and François Van Der Elst took his place after half-time.
‘My first goal after three minutes killed the Belgians,’ said Boniek afterwards, ‘and they just lost control of the game. They made incredible mistakes, leaving wide gaps in defence as they concentrated on attacks down our crowded middle.’
Boniek got his excellent second goal after twenty-six minutes when Buncol headed Kupcewicz’s cross back to him, and he himself headed skilfully into the goal. His hat trick was achieved after eight minutes of the second half, Lato enabling him to beat the famous Belgian offside trap and score with some ease. A bad, bleak night for Belgium, who next lost to the Russians.
This time, fielding a much changed team, however, they did a great deal better than in the first game. Indeed, but for two very bad misses by the usually prolific Vandenbergh in the second half, they would have had a deserved win. Russia’s nervousness and uncertainty were personified by the usually adept Shengelia, for whom little would go right. Even their winning goal, three minutes after half-time, was a freakish affair. Yuri Gavrilov got to the by-line and pulled the ball back. The Armenian, Oganesyan, snatched at his volley but the ball went home.
This meant that the old, deadly rivals, Poland and Russia, contested the semi-final place. There could have been no finer, more depressingly apt commentary on the stupid organisation of the tournament than the moment when, late in the second half, Poland’s Smolarek received a good through pass, but instead of racing for goal dribbled deliberately into a corner, where he hung on to the ball to waste time. Poland needed only a draw and a draw, to the infinite boredom of all who watched the game, was what they got.
In the first half, Poland pulled forwards back into the midfield and battened down hatches to resist the Russian offensive. Having succeeded, they themselves began to throw men forward and occasionally threaten goals, but the fine, careless rapture of the Peruvian and Belgian successes was, perhaps not surprisingly, no longer to be found. Blokhin winged his way through the match, the Georgian full-back Sulakvelidze struck a good chance over the bar, Oganesyan missed another, to the manifest disgust of Blokhin. Dassaev, the talented young Russian goalkeeper, made a couple of capable saves from Matysik and Boniek, and the game petered out as a draw. Alas for Poland and Boniek, he had foolishly got himself cautioned a second time, which put him out of the semi-final against Italy at Nou Camp.
Perhaps he would have had another frozen game, overawed by the presence of his future Juventus colleagues, but the fact was that without him, Poland were little threat to an Italian team now playing immeasurably better than they had in the initial game at Vigo. Above all Rossi, anonymous that day, was now in formidable form. He would cleverly score both the Italian goals.
With Gentile, like Boniek, suspended, Italy boldly kept in the team the 18-year-old Internazionale defender Bergomi, who had been thrown in at the deep end against Brazil and performed with remarkable coolness. Here, not for the first time, was proof that the much maligned Enzo Bearzot was indeed prepared to give youth its fling; just as he had in Argentina, where he picked Rossi and Cabrini for the tournament.
Bergomi was very much the protégé of his captain, the veteran keeper Dino Zoff, whom he idolised. Capped for the first time at only seventeen, in April 1981 against East Germany in Leipzig, it was still an ordeal for Bergomi to step on to the field in so vital a World Cup match, against Brazil. Another of his idols, curiously enough, was Gianni Rivera, from whom he now took the record of being the youngest Italian to play in a World Cup; as a boy, he had supported Milan, rather than Inter.
‘I can’t do it any more,’ he complained helplessly to Zoff, soon after he had come on the field in Barcelona. ‘I can’t breathe, my legs are trembling.’ Zoff reassured him; and Bergomi returned, encouraged, to the task of marking the huge black Brazilian centre-forward Serginho; one he accomplished so well that, as we know, Serginho was eventually substituted.
Now, against the Poles, he was first assigned to the quick, evasive little inside-forward, Buncol, then to Lato, who, in the absence of Boniek, was used as a striker. This might have been an excellent idea eight years earlier when he and Gadocha caused such havoc in opposing defences and Lato himself finished as top scorer of the German tournament, but those days were long gone.
Lato’s forte now was lurking in the midfield with intent, away from the close marking, making chances for his strikers, and occasionally breaking forward into the action himself. Once picked up, there was little he could do.
But if the Poles couldn’t create and couldn’t attack, there was one thing they could abundantly do; and that was kick. On this occasion at least, the biter was bit. Without Gentile, and with little facing them in attack, the Italian defence seldom transgressed. The Poles, by contrast, took no prisoners, and one of their victims was the unfortunate Giancarlo Antognoni, whose injured foot would cause him to miss the Final at the very time when, after so many controversial years in the Italian national team, he seemed truly to be running into form, to be reaping the full fruits of his fine technique and quick, strategic mind.
Only twice in the game, at a distance of fully half an hour, did the Poles carry any threat to the Italian goal. After thirty-four minutes, a free kick by Kupcewicz scraped the outside of a post. After sixty-four, Buncol got in a header which Zoff took with no trouble at all. The Poles failed utterly to free Smolarek, their one real hope of goals in the absence of Boniek. Their midfield players tended to hold the ball too long, thus denying Smolarek, well marked by the Italian stopper Collovati of Milan, the chance to burst into his dangerous, incisive runs. Gentile simply wasn’t needed, though Gaetano Scirea, playing more cautiously than was his wont at sweeper, hung back to make quite sure nothing went wrong rather than breaking upfield as was his usual style.
The first Italian goal arrived after twenty-two minutes. Antognoni drove a free kick into a mass of bodies in the penalty area from the right. Rossi it was who got to the ball with the inside
of his right foot—almost, indeed, with his heel—deflecting it neatly past Mlynarczyk.
His second goal was a great deal more spectacular. It came after seventy-three minutes and was begun by the long, lanky Internazionale centre-forward Altobelli, nicknamed Spillone, the Big Pin. Having come on only four minutes earlier as substitute for the injured Graziani, Altobelli cleverly sent Bruno Conti away on the left: each, by an odd chance, had once played with the little southern Third Division club of Latina.
Conti, perfectly at home on either wing, sped away and launched a long, perfect centre. Paolo Rossi, who had once again rendered himself invisible to the defence, ran in from the right, met the ball on the far post and headed inexorably home. By comparison with the two previous, hectic, dramatic games against the South Americans, it had been a peaceful passage for Italy.
Peaceful was the last word you could use about the remarkable semi- final between France and West Germany in Seville. The French were clearly now in form. It was odd to reflect how very nearly they had gone out of the World Cup in Valladolid in their last game of the first round against the Czechs, who had played poorly throughout and had been reduced to ten men when, in a match ineptly refereed by the Italian, Casarin, Vizek was sent off for a stupid foul on Soler. Equally stupid was the foul by Bossis which gave the Czechs and Panenka an equaliser from the penalty spot five minutes from time when they should long since have been dead and buried. But there was still time for Nehoda to get in a header which the little right-back Amoros, shrewd enough to pop up on the left-hand post, headed off the line.
Platini that day had been, but for one fine run, unrecognisably poor. Now, despite trouble with an injury, he was in fine fettle; the midfield was flourishing, and as an attacking force the French team looked substantially better than West Germany, badly hampered by Hansi Muller’s knee injury and Rummenigge’s pulled muscle, not to mention the absence of Bernd Schuster.
The Story of the World Cup Page 30
