Mexico 1, Bulgaria 1
Bulgaria win 3–1 on penalties
Washington
Spain 3, Switzerland 0
Dallas
Sweden 3, Saudi Arabia 1
Quarter-finals
Boston
Italy 2, Spain 1
Dallas
Brazil 3, Holland 2
New York
Bulgaria 2, Germany 1
San Francisco
Sweden 2, Romania 2
Sweden win 5–4 on penalties
Semi-finals
New York
Italy 2, Bulgaria 1
Los Angeles
Brazil 1, Sweden 0
Third-place match
Los Angeles
Sweden 4 Bulgaria 0
Ravelli; R. Nilsson, Mikhailov; (Nikorov),
P. Andersson, Ivanov (Kremenliev),
Bjorklund, Kamark; Zvetanov, Houbtchev;
Schwarz, Larsson Yankov, Letchkov,
(Limpar), Ingesson, Kiriakov, Strakov
Mild; Brolin, K. (Yordanov);
Andersson. Kostadinov,
Stoichkov.
SCORERS
Brolin, Mild, Larsson, K. Andersson for Sweden.
HT (4–0)
Final
Los Angeles
Brazil 0 Italy 0
Taffarel; Jorginho Pagliuca; Mussi
(Cafu), Aldair, (Apolloni), Baresi,
Marcio Santos, Maldini, Benarrivo;
Branco; Mazzinho, Berti, Albertini,
Mauro Silva, Dunga, D. Baggio (Evani),
Zinho (Viola); Donadoni;
Romario, Bebeto. R. Baggio, Massaro.
Brazil win 3–2 on penalties
FRANCE
1998
For the third time in succession the World Cup Final was an anticlimax, though by no means as sterile as it had been on the previous two occasions. France, it might be said, won by default, though it was good to see the joy of their fans, who had been slow to come to life in the competition. Joy which, by and large, was untouched by the violence of their English counterparts, who disgraced themselves yet again in Marseille, the hooligan ‘minority’ proving as hard to deter or restrain, despite enormous policing efforts, as ever. Worse still were the brutal, nihilistic German right-wing thugs who almost killed a gendarme in Lens. And of course there was the usual scandal over match tickets. Thousands from Tokyo to London who thought they’d bought them found they were without them, vast numbers found their way on to the black market, the customary ‘missing’ tickets would prove to have been surreptitiously purloined. The inevitable consequence, some felt, of giving the host country such a massive allocation.
The disappointing quality of so many games, the inadequacy of several competitors, could be put down to the ultimate grandiose scheme of the FIFA President, João Havelange, who stood down at last just before the tournament after 24 controversial years in charge, only to give way to the FIFA Secretary, Sepp Blatter, the man of whom a German journalist once said, ‘Sepp Blatter has fifty new ideas every day; and fifty-one of them are bad!’
Among his doubtful or disastrous ideas was the restoration of the kick-in for the throw-in after more than a century of disuse, the forbidding of kicked passes back to the goalkeeper and the insistence that from now onwards any foul tackle from behind be punished with sending off. This last, of course, had been tried and failed in America four years earlier, and despite Blatter’s dictatorial outbursts early in the competition it was no more successful in 1998. It was plain that most referees’ sheer common sense restrained them from sending players off in such doubtful circumstances, but the unfortunate result of Blatter’s ukases was that the rule was applied so inconsistently—when it was applied at all.
Blatter’s elevation to the Presidency was itself nothing if not controversial. It had seemed done and dusted in favour of the Swedish President of UEFA, Lennart Johansson, but when push came to shove his lead melted mysteriously away, so much so that, hurt and puzzled, he withdrew before the second ballot. How had this happened? We may never know. Accusations were made, but Blatter angrily brushed them all aside.
Meanwhile his authoritarian predecessor had decreed that the competition be enlarged yet again—this time to 32 teams. At least the number, by comparison with the previous 24, had a kind of mathematical logic, but it meant that the quality of the entrants was seriously diluted, while far too many games had to be played.
Over the Final itself, in the huge new Stade de France at Saint-Denis on the fringe of Paris, hung and still hangs the mystery of Ronaldo. No one has yet satisfactorily explained just what happened to him a few hours before the game. That it was some kind of seizure is clear enough. That he was in extreme torment and pain is equally clear. Roberto Carlos, the Brazilian left-back with whom Ronaldo shared his room, rushed for help, yet later, bizarrely, would accuse Ronaldo of lack of moral fibre. The 21-year-old centre-forward was taken post-haste to hospital but neither there nor in subsequent examinations in France and Brazil was anything found physically wrong with him. The clear inference was that his troubles were psychosomatic, brought on by the immense pressure which he’d had to endure, the more so as at no point in the tournament was he fully fit, strained thigh muscles severely inhibiting his lateral movement.
Yet to declare that there was ‘nothing’ wrong with him, as Brazilian apologists subsequently did, was ludicrous. Equally ludicrous seemed the decision of Brazil’s veteran team manager Mario Lobo Zagallo not only to play Ronaldo but to keep him, despite his evident troubles, on the field throughout. Yet Zagallo continued to insist, even when back in Brazil, that he had taken the right decision. The Brazilians brushed aside accusations that the team’s sponsors, Nike, who had certainly been responsible for the side taking on previously such a heavy programme, had insisted that Ronaldo play.
Voted the world’s finest player in the latest FIFA poll, bought by Internazionale of Milan for a king’s ransom the previous year from Barcelona—who themselves had paid a huge sum to PSV Eindhoven—Ronaldo’s talents were beyond dispute. No more than a non-playing reserve in the 1994 World Cup, he has since eclipsed even Romario—ruled out, to his anger, by Zagallo on the grounds of his physical condition. Ronaldo had strength, superb ball control, exceptional pace. He could make goals out of nothing, or make them for his colleagues. But his background was one of wretched poverty. The son of a Rio drug addict, he wasn’t even able to afford the bus fare to go for a trial with his favourite club, Flamengo, and found his way to lesser São Cristavão, moving thence to Cruzeiro of Belo Horizonte. He’d found it hard at first to settle down with Inter and had been publicly and insensitively criticised by the club’s President, Massimo Moratti.
At the turn of the year Zagallo had had hard words for him in the first stages of that wholly superfluous, Havelange-inspired tournament, the so-called Confederations Cup in Riyadh, though later Ronaldo had struck form. The loss of Romario was a costly one for him. Bebeto, Romario’s partner in the USA, couldn’t give him the same support, though in the left-footed Rivaldo there was a better, more creative mid-field player than any Brazil had had in 1994. The young Denilson had emerged as an attacking player with a left foot compared by Zagallo to that of the formidable Rivelino, but there were problems in central defence, while Claudio Taffarel, who at one stage had seemed likely to retire, was back, faute de mieux, in goal. For all that, Brazil seemed favourites to win again.
Perhaps they would have done, had Zagallo stuck to his original plan to leave out Ronaldo and deploy Edmundo, alias ‘The Animal’, the immensely talented but notoriously violent striker whom he’d brought back after banishment. (Edmundo had punched a Bolivian opponent in the previous year’s Copa America in La Paz, but somehow Edmundo, eternally in trouble on and off the field, not least with his new club Fiorentina, was always pardoned.) Shortly before the Final began, journalists were astounded to receive team sheets with Ronaldo absent, Edmundo in his place.
The following year, an exhaust
ive reportage in the São Paolo magazine Placar at last shed at least some light on the mystery. Ronaldo, it said, at just after 2 o’clock on the afternoon of the Final had had a ‘convulsion’ in his room at the Château de Grande Romaine hotel, to the horror and alarm of his room mate, Roberto Carlos. The left-back rushed to summon Edmundo; he and others entered the room. Cesar Sampaio prised open the mouth of the rigid Ronaldo to make sure he didn’t swallow his tongue. After about a minute and three-quarters Ronaldo came round, but then fell into a deep sleep.
Quickly the players called Dr Lidio Toledo, an orthopaedic specialist, who cleared the room and in turn summoned his colleague, the clinician Dr Joaquim da Mata. Zico, the assistant manager and ex-international star, heard what had happened. Zagallo still didn’t know; Toledo didn’t want to disturb him, as he was resting. Ronaldo meanwhile regained consciousness, and at 5 o’clock the doctors took him for examination to the Lilas clinic, where he was examined for over an hour and a half. Nothing was found to be wrong.
Arriving at the stadium at 8.10, Ronaldo insisted he felt fine and begged Zagallo, who’d not seen him since his ‘convulsion’, to let him play. The two doctors confirmed that he could. ‘Imagine my situation,’ Toledo would later say. ‘Ronaldo says he is fine, and the doctor vetoes it. And the team loses.’
The charge against Zagallo then is not so much that he started Ronaldo, but that when it should surely have been clear that the player was in no fit state to take part he kept him on. Was Ronaldo given a ‘blue pill’, probably Valium, before the game? This hasn’t been established, but if he was, Brazilian specialists who were later consulted said that this could have increased the possibility that he might fall ill, or even die, during the game.
There was one highly significant moment in the game when the French keeper, Barthez, came out to gather a ball which was clearly his, assuming that the advancing Ronaldo would pull up. He didn’t.
Professor Acary Souza Bulle Oliveira, a neurologist at the São Paolo School of Medicine, would later state that he was certain Ronaldo had had a convulsion—something denied by Internazionale’s own doctor Piero Volpi—and that it was one of the easiest to diagnose. Another Brazilian neurologist, Professor Alex Caetano de Barros, engaged by Inter to examine Ronaldo in Rio, declared unequivocally that making Ronaldo play only seven hours after his fit was ‘an absolute error, since the 24 hours after a convulsion are those when a recurrence is most likely. Ronaldo could have had another convulsion, in front of billions of spectators.’
Brazil’s opponents in the Final seemed at the outset of the tournament to have little more than home advantage to recommend them. Until the Finals of Euro 96 in England their team, under the aegis of Aimé Jacquet, had gone through a remarkably long run of unbeaten games. Dropping from his team two of the outstanding French attackers, Eric Cantona, because, said Jacquet, though he respected him, he didn’t fit in with his tactics, and David Ginola, because he—already blamed for giving away to Bulgaria the goal that eliminated France from the 1994 World Cup—was a disruptive influence, all was optimism. But in England the French team sadly fell away, and in the interim years Jacquet had been at daggers drawn with France’s principal sports paper, L’Équipe, on whom, immediately after winning the Final, he launched an embittered attack.
Germany, with their remarkable World Cup record, were initially viewed with a respect they hardly, in the event, deserved. It was evident that the loss through injury of their red-headed sweeper and European Footballer of the Year, Matthias Sammer, would cost them dear. Bringing back that contentious veteran Lothar Matthaus hardly seemed a good augury. Nor had Berti Vogts, though he and his team had won Euro 96, gained the love and trust of the German public. But Oliver Bierhoff, the centre-forward who had risen from the obscurity of struggling Ascoli to score twice in the Euro 96 Final and come top of the Italian Championship scorers in 1997/8 with modest Udinese, was still a force. The worrying thing was, as Vogts stressed, that so few youngsters were coming through.
Italy, having rid themselves of Arrigo Sacchi in midstream, were under the command of the 66-year-old Cesare Maldini. Father of Paolo Maldini, Italy’s captain and outstanding defender, Cesare had for years been in charge of the successful under-21 side, sticking firmly to catenaccio (the door bolt) defending while Sacchi favoured four in line defence, even though at one point it look likely to cost him his job. Ding, dong the witch is dead seemed the refrain of Italian football when Maldini took over. Catenacciaro he might be but the career would at last be open again to talents, the unorthodox, the so-called fantasisti, such as Roberto Baggio—who had suffered under Sacchi at AC Milan as well as in the national team—and Chelsea’s Gianfranco Zola.
And so it was for a time. In what was only his second match, Maldini scored a notable triumph at Wembley where a goal magisterially taken by little Zola—abetted by defensive errors—gave the Italians victory in the qualifier against Glenn Hoddle’s England. But as time went by the dead hand of catenaccio strangled the Italian team, results degenerated, and eventually a well-organised England came to Rome, got a goalless draw and won the group.
In France, things continued to go wrong. Only a shocking refereeing decision, the concession of a late penalty in Bordeaux against a Chilean team which well deserved to win the game, saved the Italians. Despite the fine form of Roberto Baggio, Maldini perversely insisted on making Alessandro Del Piero his first choice even though the Juventus man was plainly out of form, never more obviously so than when he missed chance after chance against the Norwegians in Marseille. Zola was left out of the squad, to his bitter dismay. So vanished his chance to make up for the frustrations of 1994 when he was so unjustly treated by a poor referee.
Spain were again under the charge of little Javier Clemente, but his loyalty to past glories would cost him and them dear. There was plenty of new young talent to call on, such as the Real Madrid attacker Raoul, while Luis Enrique, long since recovered from that brutal assault in Chicago, was playing better and with more versatility than ever. But Clemente’s obstinate attachment to the veteran keeper Andoni Zubizarreta would lose them the opening match against Nigeria and set Spain on a decline which could not be compensated even by the six-goal flourish of their last match in Lens against Bulgaria.
England? They and their new manager Glenn Hoddle, of blessed memory as so elegant an inside-forward, had rallied after the Italian fiasco, when he had rashly thrown in the maverick Matthew Le Tissier, Southampton’s gifted striker, with no time to integrate him, and picked a vulnerable goalkeeper in Tottenham’s Ian Walker. Hoddle’s 3-5-2 formation with its wing-backs didn’t please everybody, notably the defiant centre-half Tony Adams, rehabilitated from his drinking problem, but there was a good win in Georgia where Italy could only draw, a resilient performance in Poland where Italy were lucky not to lose, and finally that draw in Rome.
That was the game after which Mrs Eileen Drewery, the spiritual healer to whom Hoddle had turned as a teenager, announced that she had had a ‘one to one with God’ and had invoked Him to see that Ian Wright, late in the game, had hit the post rather than scoring, for fear of the mayhem which might have resulted. She didn’t tell us whether she and the Almighty were responsible for the blatant headed miss by Christian Vieri at the other end which immediately followed.
Of Mrs Drewery’s healing capacities there seemed small doubt. That she should have been foisted on the whole England party, producing inevitable divisions, seemed seriously unwise.
That other gifted maverick, Paul Gascoigne, perpetually in and out of trouble on and off the pitch, had an impressive game in Rome, which seemed to augur well for the trials to come. By the time it came to the pre-World Cup training camp, alas, Gazza was in anything but an ideal state. Yet on the Friday, a day before he was due to announce his final squad, Hoddle went on television to say that Gascoigne’s physical condition was most satisfactory. Gazza, like the rest of us, could be forgiven for feeling that this meant a place in the World Cup squad.
&n
bsp; It didn’t. The following day Gazza, drunk on the golf course, was summoned to Hoddle’s hotel room and told he was not among the elect. In his ill-judged and often crass autobiography, so surprisingly and contentiously ghosted by Hoddle’s public relations aide David Davies, the England coach relentlessly revealed all. Gascoigne, he wrote, had smashed a lamp, kicked the furniture and looked as if he might attack him. Hardly surprising when the player had been treated like a Pavlovian dog.
Then there was Hoddle’s bizarre attitude to Liverpool’s 18-year-old prodigy Michael Owen, which led one to suspect that the England coach must have been feeling the hot breath of the gift horse on his face. The son of a professional footballer, Owen, though small and slight, had been a prolific goal scorer at every level since joining Liverpool as a boy. His debut at Selhurst Park against Wimbledon as a 17-year-old substitute, who promptly scored a goal will be treasured by all of us who were there. Yet Hoddle publicly announced that Owen was not a natural goal scorer, had much to learn—who hasn’t, at any age?—and must improve his behaviour. Hoddle compounded such fatuities by preferring, in England’s second match against Romania in Toulouse, the pedestrian Teddy Sheringham, who had in fact incurred his manager’s ire with his louche behaviour in a Portuguese night club when the squad had been given a few days off.
When Owen eventually replaced Sheringham he galvanised the English attack, scored a dramatic goal and might have saved the game had not Graeme Le Saux clumsily let in his Chelsea team mate, Dan Petrescu, to score a strange winning goal. It was a defeat—prefaced in Marseille by the traditional violence of England’s complement of hooligan fans—which condemned England to an eventual meeting with the powerful Argentine team, just what they had been hoping to avoid.
The Story of the World Cup Page 44
