World Cup 2006

  • Sunday 9 July 2006

  • We saw him, and he spoke. About England, no less. Before the quarter-final against Portugal, Franz Beckenbauer said that England 'had played excellently'. He did not say that about every team.

    He was as unimpressed by the Brazilians ('talent itself is not enough, you also have to work') as by the Spanish fans who booed the French national anthem in their last-16 match. He criticised Valentin Ivanov, the referee who set a World Cup record in the Holland-Portugal game for the number of cards shown. 'He showed a yellow card to everyone he met.' He loved the idea of the 'Green Goal', the environmentally friendly World Cup, and he was just as keen on Fifa's anti-racism initiatives.

    He had opinions on dozens of other themes and voiced those, too. Not that he always wanted to bring them out into the open, but he was constantly asked. Among other questions, he was asked what his role was.

    'My role is to be here,' he said.

    Beckenbauer was here at the World Cup like no one else. A sponsor put a helicopter at his disposal so Beckenbauer became the ultimate ground-hopper. The final will be his forty-sixth game of the 64-match competition.

    Before the helicopter took off or just after Beckenbauer got out of it, a television camera team would be there and he would be asked yet another question. Sometimes there were other greats of world football in a TV studio somewhere and he would be linked to them too. Beckenbauer would send his kindest regards to Pele and fly off again.

    'I love football,' he said early on, 'but then it all blurs into one and you forget who played who. But being in the stadiums is a question of politeness.'

    Because of this, most Germans have seen the blurry Beckenbauer more in the last four weeks than some members of their own family. 'The Kaiser' took on an almost royal air when he flew around the country, seeming to watch over his people as much as his World Cup.

    Incredibly, it never became tiring listening to him. Beckenbauer, 61, has long mastered the art of sounding like a diplomat, but he still has his own way of behaving, as is often apparent from the way he says things, rather than what he says. Thus he praised the Germany team and their manager, Jürgen Klinsmann, after their exit, but more important than the result of that match was that Germany had reached the last four, meaning they would be playing on the final weekend and there would be a good atmosphere around the country right to the end of the tournament. After the quarter-final win against Argentina he had spontaneously embraced a rather taken-aback Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, but when Germany were knocked out in the semi-final by Italy, Beckenbauer gave the impression that defeat was fine by him.

    From the first presentation in the bidding process right through to today's final in Berlin, Beckenbauer has worked nine years on this project. In that time he has added one more face to his many different guises.

    In the 1960s he became something like the first pop star of German football. In 1968, after an imperious display for Bayern Munich, he was named 'The Kaiser' by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the name stuck. He was the first German professional with an agent. He was the first who regularly did adverts. And he made records. Bayern fans still find it funny to sing one of his old hits, 'True friends can't be separated.'

    In the 1970s, Beckenbauer became the first world star of German football, because he was the most important player in the team that won the 1972 European Championship and 1974 World Cup. He led Bayern to three consecutive European Cups between 1974 and 1976.

    In the 1980s, as a novice manager, The Kaiser renovated the national team and in 1986, with a horrible defensive style of football, they reached the World Cup final. In 1990 they won it, having played a few attractive games.

    As manager of Olympique Marseille he got to the final of the European Cup and later he managed Bayern (successfully, of course). He succeeded in everything he did. In a long-running football show on German television, the guests have to shoot into two holes in a wall the size of a goal. One year, in the drunken post-season party for Bayern, the new Bundesliga champions, Beckenbauer managed it, after the ball had been placed on top of a glass of wheat beer.

    Throughout the 1990s, however, Beckenbauer cut a strange figure. That was during his first phase of ubiquity, which was not quite so endearing. He appeared determined to let loose his views on everything. They were so often contradictory that they just sounded funny. Sometimes he seemed not to hear what he was saying. Beckenbauer was, with others, a pundit on the channel showing the Champions League. When he called the Norwegian club Rosenborg Trondheim 'Rosenheim Trondberg or whatever they're called' it became a running joke.

    It seemed that Beckenbauer, later than most, was suffering the fate of a successful sportsman at the end of his career. The best times are behind you, you feel your fame begin to wither and you become the manager of your memories.

    It was good timing for him when, nine years ago, he found something he could really get his teeth into. The always elegant Beckenbauer can also be a fighter. So, during the phase when Germany were trying to become hosts for this World Cup he travelled the world. After Germany was chosen he did it again, several more times. Not even his closest colleagues can say how often he has circled the globe.

    During this time, Beckenbauer has met so many of the world's most important people that now he is not impressed, no matter which country's leader he sits next to. At times it seems they are more impressed meeting him. He has met kings and popes, UN general secretaries and world stars of all kinds and, as the chief executive of the organising committee of the 2006 World Cup, quite a few politicians. Has a footballer ever climbed so high?

    During his nine years, the world has seen Beckenbauer on his best form, for the most part. Beckenbauer is happiest when he is having fun, when he can follow his instincts and can let his charm take effect. Six years ago, when Germany presented their case, that was exactly what happened. He had a script but spoke without it and went over the time limit, but everyone was completely taken by him. The next day, Bild, Germany's most popular newspaper and long-time ally of Beckenbauer, had as its headline: 'Franz, we will build a statue of you'. Lower on the page was their photo mock-up of it.

    There were interviews in which Beckenbauer explained that he was interested in Buddhism and might be reincarnated as a woman ('then I could have children'). He also had the idea that he wanted to die in pain, so as to really experience death. And, when asked about his own fame, he talked about the size of the solar system. You might suppose that this is the sort of semi-esoteric stuff that celebrities talk about, but that is not the case for Beckenbauer. He always talks as if he doesn't care what people think.

    How else could he have dreamt up the idea of getting married during the World Cup? The day before the last-16 matches started, the helicopter flew not to yet another reception for state guests but back to Kitzbühel, where Beckenbauer lives. There, out of the blue and unannounced, he married his girlfriend Heidi Burmester. Beckenbauer did not say why it was all done in such a hurry - maybe it was proof of his love, maybe in memory of his deceased mother, as they were married on her birthday. Only their children and two witnesses were at the ceremony. Not even Margret, Beckenbauer's new mother-in-law, knew about it. She is two years younger than her new son-in-law and, with her husband, runs a farm in Lower Saxony. She said she could not have gone to the wedding anyway because she had to harvest the strawberries.

    The older of their two children is five but, officially, Franz Beckenbauer and his third wife have been together for only four years. They met at a Bayern Munich Christmas party. Some time later the story got out, but there was nothing untoward about it. In the meantime Beckenbauer had separated from his second wife and now he was in love with another woman. What would have been a scandal for other celebrities was, for him, a love story.

    As for his friends, Beckenbauer has always surrounded himself with father figures. That is easy to explain because his own father was a weak man. These people in the background drive him on and are tough negotiators. Beckenbauer has become commercially successful and with it quite promiscuous. Successively, he has advertised for five different makes of car. He signed a contract with a mobile-phone company who were competitors of Bayern's main sponsor - at the time he was chairman of the club. His adviser Fedor Radmann had to give up his job as Beckenbauer's representative on the organising committee because he had given advertising work to a company that he co-owned. But who's interested in that now?

    When, in a couple of years, people here think back to this World Cup, they will not remember much about the games because the football was not all that exciting. They will remember the pictures of the fans who partied together. And they will remember Franz Beckenbauer, who was always there.

    After the final he will be part of the handing-over ceremony of the World Cup trophy. It is the one that replaced the original Jules Rimet trophy, which Brazil were allowed to keep in 1970 after winning it for the third time. In 1974 Beckenbauer was the first captain to lift the new version and 16 years later he did it as a manager. This summer there is the feeling he has won the World Cup for the third time.

    He should be allowed to keep it.

  • They call it Tardelli's scream. It is the most beautiful image in the history of Italian football, the enduring reference point. Marco Tardelli screamed for 60 million compatriots after he scored the defining goal in the 1982 World Cup final. And it was not just any old scream. It was so Italian, as if it had been formed by the docks of Naples and polished at La Scala.

    Last week, Fabio Grosso and Alessandro Del Piero revived the spirit of Tardelli's scream as their goals transformed the spectacle of Italy's semi-final against Germany into a rampaging triumph. Such moments of extreme emotion do not come along that often, even during a successful career. 'I was stupefied. In 20 years I never felt like that after a goal,' said Del Piero. Grosso struggled to believe that it was real. 'I didn't sleep that night. Well, how do you after something like that?'

    Does Zinédine Zidane, so inscrutable with his emotions during his extraordinary World Cup journey, share the sentiment? Has his electric charge kept him up at night? What must he be thinking this morning as he wakes up to prepare for a football match for the last time?

    Zidane has not spoken in public since the eve of the World Cup finals a month ago. 'I understand why he is keeping quiet,' said Raymond Domenech, France's coach. 'Like all the players his objective is not to explain what he is doing, but to do it.' It was ever thus. Zidane's sorcery is not easily explained. It is better just to sit back and enjoy it.

    A fairy-tale goal against Spain, a master-class against Brazil and a dramatically charged penalty against Portugal have revived football's love affair with Zidane, but he looked tired as the semi-final drew to a close. He dragged his feet across the grass. Languid. Thoughtful. Perhaps he was conserving some strength for one last exhibition.

    Zidane is France's indisputable icon. While the cameras will track every nuance of his grand farewell, do not forget that France are also bidding adieu to other heroes. Lilian Thuram, with 120 caps, is what the French call their 'recordman'. He is also enshrined in their football culture as the protagonist of their Tardelli moment.

    A fabulous defender and intelligent, soulful man, the player who most vocally resists the anti-Bleus sentiment propagated by Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen scored two goals to tip the topsy-turvy semi-final against Croatia in 1998. They arrived like a miracle - he has not scored for France before or since. 'What I loved most was Thuram's face when he scored his second goal,' recalls Marcel Desailly. 'It is the type of thing that makes me love my job. It is what gives me my passion for football.

    'It's the World Cup, he's just got his team into the final, he turns around and takes a few steps towards his team-mates, looks out into the crowd and realises what has just happened to him. He lost consciousness. It's not like he passed out, but he was unconscious with his eyes open. He just didn't know where he was.'

    The World Cup final, the occasion so stirring it inspires Tardelli screams and the thought of which put Thuram in a daze, is an extraordinary curtain call. For others, it is a mind-blowing opportunity. Italy, who have absorbed shattering disappointments in recent tournaments, feel it is their turn for a happy ending.

    The way both teams have, in four weeks, established new momentum, new character, makes them worthy finalists. Worthier than Germany and Portugal, the losing semi-finalists who were not sophisticated enough to go further. Worthier than Brazil, who failed to live up to the adverts. Worthier than Argentina, who peaked too soon. Worthier, certainly, than England, whose physical and strategic preparation fell alarmingly short of the standards set by the last men standing.

    Although France and Italy always had the capability, before the tournament began there was little inkling that Zidane would seduce the football world all over again, that France would stop being so frustrating, that old heads and new legs would find harmony. There was little enthusiasm for an Italy squad caught up in a scandal so rotten that most of the players have no idea where they will be playing next season. For 90 minutes or so in Berlin's Olympiastadion, now is all that matters. Not before or after.

    The difference tonight, according to Italy's cunning coach Marcello Lippi, will be desire. 'We will see who has the most hunger,' he said. 'They have won a World Cup and a European Championship, while this generation of Italian players have only got close to that. We know what is on the table. We have the fork in our hands.'

    The Italians are quietly hoping that, as well as being hungrier, they are fresher. They have fewer golden oldies and have rotated much more frequently during the competition. The Azzurri have used 21 of their squad of 23 - only the two reserve goalkeepers are yet to play - and it is not as if they have had the luxury of calling in reserves to give key players a breather. Every substitution has been necessary. And every substitute has delivered.

    Lippi has managed his squad exceptionally. Italy's defensive power is well documented (and how resiliently they responded to injuries), but where he was particularly shrewd was in selecting six attackers for the squad. Lippi knows that he does not have a modern-day Paolo Rossi, so he gave himself options. All six have scored.

    It has been such a tremendous team effort that the Italians are still looking for a pin-up hero - a Rossi or Roberto Baggio. Gianluigi Buffon is closing in on a tournament record of minutes without conceding a goal. Fabio Cannavaro has been immense leading the defence and will win his hundredth cap. Gennaro Gattuso is loved for his indefatigable battling. Andrea Pirlo is a serious rival to Zidane in the playmaker stakes. But even if Italy triumph, this will not necessarily be remembered as Buffon's World Cup, or Cannavaro's, or Gattuso's, or Pirlo's. It will be Lippi's World Cup.

    He has had to improvise constantly. He has employed five formations and six starting line-ups. No disruption, no injury, no suspension has fazed him.

    When he was named national coach two years ago, half Italy's fans were disappointed. Perceived as a yes man of Juventus, the club who are worshipped by some and despised by the rest, the anti-Juve collective were unhappy with the appointment. In the past month everything has changed. There is absolute unity and support. Lippi has become the coach of all Italians.

    Now they wait, anxiously, to see if he can end his run of losing finals. Lippi fell at the last in four out of five European finals with Juventus.

    Not surprising, then, to hear fighting talk as his team arrived in Berlin. 'I absolutely refute this attitude of "however it goes, it will be a great occasion" and all the rest,' Lippi rapped. 'How many times in your life do you get to win the World Cup? We will be furious if we lose.'

    Lippi may have had his furies in the past, but he is also the man who has won almost everything - five Italian league titles and one Champions League top an imposing CV. Raymond Domenech, however, has won nothing. Does the France coach envy the way Lippi has absolute control over his players? Despite the glowing references of Willy Sagnol, there remains ambivalence about Domenech's command.

    Is he leading the players or are the players leading him? Although he has been credited with bonding a divided squad, it was interesting to observe how the senior players reacted to the problems caused by Luis Figo and Cristiano Ronaldo as their semi-final got under way. Zidane, Thuram and Patrick Vieira talked to each other and redirected the team, to find a solution. Not once did they look to Domenech on the bench for advice on tactical adjustments.

    Arsène Wenger, who has watched all his country's displays in Germany, salutes the experienced men. 'This team now, they have gone with three different coaches to three major finals. Domenech has done a good job, but I believe this group of players is exceptional.'

    Those who know him well argue that Domenech is very smart (he used to act professionally so perhaps all is not as it seems) and perhaps his cleverest move has been to let this team do the job on the pitch, while taking care of the talking and organisation off it.

    It has taken him a while to feel at ease in this job. As a player he was a renowned hard man - on his debut for Strasbourg he claimed to have broken an opponent's leg even though one of his team-mates had been the offender, because he thought it would give him an instant reputation.

    He then coached the French federation's junior teams for a decade but turned up for interview when the senior-team position became vacant in 2002 wearing a T-shirt. By 2004, suitably advised by his mentor, Aime Jacquet, he had smartened up his act and arrived in collar and tie.

    During the early stages of this World Cup it seemed that Domenech was having a Lemerre - the pressure visibly gnawing away at his composure and bonhomie as it had with Roger Lemerre in 2002. What is clear is that Domenech was disliked by the senior players, the press and the public until midway through this campaign. After France set out with uninspiring draws against Switzerland and South Korea, a quarter of a million fans replied to a poll in the newspaper L'Equipe on the subject of whether France would reach the final - 88 per cent answered 'Non'. After the resurrection of the team against Spain, there was such a dramatic swing that 90 per cent now said 'Oui'. It is amazing what winning matches can do.

    And that is why France and Italy arrive in Berlin as such compelling stories. Both flirted with catastrophe but found the strength to pursue happiness. Now the France players think Domenech has balls. They respect him. The fact is, France have not lost a competitive match under him.

    Despite receiving scant credit for taking his team to a World Cup final in his first job of any major significance, Domenech claims not to care. 'I understand there are people who don't understand me, but it doesn't bother me. My job is to put a team together that has a road map. The players are on a roll, on the crest of a wave.'

    This match has the air of immovable object versus immovable object. Italy have yet to concede a goal scored by a foreign body (only Cristian Zaccardo's slice passed Buffon against the United States). France are only marginally more yielding.

    Do Italy's attacking options give them the edge? 'Italy have more variation going forward than any team we have played, even more than Brazil,' says Wenger. 'During the game they have a lot of weapons. They can change the game.' One surprise weapon could be the return of Daniele De Rossi after serving a four-match suspension for a viciously jabbed elbow in the draw with the United States. He may play a part because he is particularly strong in the air. It has not gone unnoticed that France won their past two knockout games with a set piece.

    Italy will find it difficult to suppress the impulse of revenge, considering how France have made them suffer in recent meetings. The European Championship final in 2000 remains one of their most abject memories. Del Piero should have killed off a game in which Italy excelled before France had time to recover. Not to be.

    The goal Italy did score that day, incidentally, was made by a well-crafted cross from Gianluca Pessotto. Today Pessotto is recovering in hospital after a fall from a top floor of Juventus's offices. His plight, added to the Serie A investigation, has put the Azzurri under tremendous strain.

    For Italy, this final offers redemption from the sadness, the fear and loathing, back home. A sport riddled with corruption means the players have been tarred with the brush that has swept so many crooked administrators from positions of power. This is the only way for calcio to save face and save faith. It is their last chance, against Zidane's last dance.

    Amy Lawrence is an Observer football writer

  • They say no one ever remembers the third-fourth play-off at the World Cup. Jürgen Klinsmann will never forget it and not just because his much changed Germany team found their best form in the second half to give Portugal a pasting.

    The manager who might not stay on, who will return to his California home before deciding on the next step in his career, was cheered all afternoon and all night inside and outside the ground.

    This is Klinsmann's patch. He played as a junior at nearby Geislingen and started his professional career in Stuttgart, first for Kickers, then for the city's bigger club, VfB, before moving on to greater things. He trained as a baker before becoming a full-time footballer and his family still run a bakery in Botnang, in Stuttgart's suburbs.

    It was party time long before kick-off, with an estimated 70,000 fans swarming into the city, many of them chanting: 'Klinsmann must stay!' Even the police joined in, with several officers sporting painted flags on their faces and many more joining in the Klinsmann chants. There were no arrests.

    Klinsmann has become far more than a local hero over the course of a tournament in which Germany exceeded expectations by reaching the last four. As another German sporting 'great', Michael Schumacher, looked on from the posh seats, it was fitting that the hosts should finish their tournament in such swaggering style.

    Bastian Schweinsteiger, the young Bayern Munich midfielder, scored two stunning goals and celebrated the other one as though it was his, too. It was not - his free-kick was directed into his own net by defender Armando Petit - so unless something truly remarkable happens in tonight's final this will be the first World Cup to finish without a hat-trick.

    Schweinsteiger's first goal was a spectacular swerving long shot in the 56th minute and his second, after the own goal, was even better. A minute after scoring it he went off to huge cheers as another Stuttgart man, VfB midfielder Thomas Hitzlsperger, came on to take his place.

    While most of the attention was focused on Klinsmann and Schweinsteiger, others will remember the night warmly. Oliver Kahn, who has sat by and watched as his great rival Jens Lehmann performed so outstandingly throughout the competition, was finally called into action, before retiring from international football after the match. Kahn, 36, was given the captain's armband and he showed he had lost none of his sharpness by making three excellent saves, the best of them in the first half.

    That proved crucial. Simao put Pauleta clear in the penalty area and he found himself in an almost identical position to that from which Alessandro Del Piero scored the second of Italy's goals in Tuesday's classic semi-final. Pauleta's finish lacked Del Piero's precision, but would still have been good enough if not for Kahn's reflexes.

    It was the first of many disappointments for Pauleta who, not for the first time, looked out of his depth with the ball at his feet in the area. Who knows what 'Big Phil' Scolari's team might have done had they been able to call upon a better striker than the Paris Saint-Germain man, who was replaced in the 77th minute?

    Scolari made three changes, the most significant of which was leaving Luis Figo on the bench - he came on late in the second half and provided the cross from which Nuno Gomes headed Portugal's late goal - but fielded a strong starting line-up.

    Michael Ballack, who had a minor knee injury, was Germany's most notable absentee. His Chelsea clubmate Robert Huth was in line for his second World Cup appearance, but injured himself in the pre-match warm-up. The Leverkusen veteran Bernd Schneider took his place.

    There were a couple of dodgy dives from the reviled Portugal winger Cristiano Ronaldo, neither of which fooled the referee, and the worst foul of the evening was a cynical off-the-ball trip by Costinha, for which he was booked. Portugal played well enough in the first half, but were swept aside in the second.

    There was one bit of bad news for Germany - if you take note of such things. Every winner of the third-place match since 1982 has been European and none has qualified for the next European Championship. The roll of dishonour is Poland (82), France (86), Italy (90), Sweden (94), Croatia (98) and Turkey (02). If Klinsmann stays, surely Germany will end that sequence and take their place in Austria/Switzerland 2008 as one of the favourites.

  • Very few people ever agree on what constitutes a great World Cup and even fewer are prepared to accept that anything post-Pele counts for much, anyway. But rarely has a tournament divided opinion like this one. Some think it has been the best, most open and most attractive World Cup for at least 20 years, while others will tell you it has been the worst of all time. The odd thing is that both these positions are tenable. It has been the best and the worst of World Cups. It just depends on which statistics you use and, more specifically, the value you put on goals.

    If a World Cup can be judged entirely by the number of goals, then this has indeed been a poor one. If early fears of a defence-dominated, low-scoring tournament seemed to evaporate after six goals were scored in the opening game, they proved well-founded once the group stage was over. Only 24 goals have been scored in the knockout stages so far (not counting penalty shootouts) and it will take three goals in this evening's final for this set of games to avoid going down as the lowest-scoring since the last-16 format was introduced 20 years ago.

    For purposes of comparison it is easier and more meaningful to concentrate on the knockout stages (not including the third-fourth play-off), when the leading teams play each other in a do-or-die situation - and the most free-scoring World Cup in the past two decades has been USA 94 with 44 goals in 15 games. The lowest-scoring was the last one, in South Korea and Japan, with 26 goals - an aberration blamed on the heat, the referees, the co-hosting experiment and the fact that 'minor' teams such as South Korea and Turkey did well.

    This tournament is threatening to break that record. To put the current figure into perspective, 42 goals were scored in France 98's knockout stages and the same number in Mexico 86, while Italia 90, widely and rightly derided as the most negative, cynical and overly defensive World Cup of all, yielded 30. So unless France and Italy manage seven goals between them in Berlin, a most unlikely prospect given the excellence of their defending so far, this tournament is not even going to match the one that was so bad it made Fifa change the rules.

    Yet are goals the only measure? This has not been a defensive tournament, nor has it been a cynical one. There has been some outstanding defending and goals have been hard to come by, but plenty of people like their football that way. The entire population of Italy, for example. The legacy of Pele means that when people think of the player of the tournament they normally envision a goalscorer, or at least an attacking player. In Germany it is hard not to argue that Fabio Cannavaro has been head and shoulders above everyone else. Even though he stands at only 5ft 9in, the Italy captain, who wins his hundredth cap in today's final, has been a giant.

    Not far behind him has been Lilian Thuram, Juventus team-mate and leader of the equally well-organised France defence. The romantics will be trying to make a case for the retiring Zinédine Zidane, but unless he wins the final for France singlehanded it will not be true.

    The two strongest defences in the competition are the reason France and Italy face each other tonight and the only slight worry about what should be a compelling final is how a goal is going to be scored. Italy have conceded only one all tournament and that was an own goal. France have let in just two, one a penalty and the other something of a freak goal by South Korea. It was the France defence that saw off Brazil, while the impossibility of scoring against Italy exasperated teams like Australia (facing 10 men) and Germany.

    So why not celebrate the art of defending for a change? France and Italy are not boring, flair-free teams who have been grinding out results. France have flair and elegance running through their side, while Italy have been one of the most enterprising and attacking teams of the tournament. Find that hard to believe?

    Look a little bit closer at what Marcello Lippi has been doing. First, he brought six forwards. Yes, Sven, six. Second, he has used them all. Third, they have all scored. And Italy have not been involved in any meaningless group games; they have needed to win every match.

    Every Italy player bar the two substitute goalkeepers has played a part in this World Cup, which is something for Theo Walcott, Jermaine Jenas and Wayne Bridge to think about. Perhaps most impressively of all, when Italy needed goals in extra time to avoid a shootout against Germany's penalty experts, Lippi made three attacking substitutions and produced a result like a rabbit from a hat. Italy will always send teams of expert defenders to World Cups, but it would be a mistake to define this one by defence alone. It seems to me that Italy have both the defence and the firepower to prevail this evening, though I tipped England to reach the semi-finals, so what do I know?

    Only that, if the above prediction is wrong and France gain a second star to stitch on their shirts, England's grotesque shambles of a World Cup will appear even worse. Fancy getting all excited about 40 years of hurt and wheeling out the boys of '66 like Chelsea Pensioners at a parade when our dearly beloved near neighbours, with a team half full of familiar names from the Premiership, are on the verge of winning their second World Cup in eight years. England could cope much more easily with Italy winning a fourth time. They are a bona fide World Cup team, a force of nature, just as much as Brazil or Argentina, with their own unique playing style, an enviable tournament record and a squad of players who play in Italy. France winning the thing, with players such as Jean-Alain Boumsong, Mikael Silvestre and Pascal Chimbonda on the squad list, would only make England feel more inadequate.

    England were inadequate in this World Cup, their abject performances making a complete mockery of all the pride, preening and misplaced confidence that went before, but let's leave that sore point for another four years or so. Whatever this World Cup has been about, it has not been England. Graham Poll and Wayne Rooney's studs apart, their impact on this World Cup was barely discernible.

    What this World Cup has been about, even more than impressive defences, is fans and fair play. If that reads like a slogan, it is not a mere platitude. By virtue of geography, Germany is an excellent venue for a European World Cup and the Germans have been excellent hosts. The only possible gripe supporters could have is that some of the hotel price-hikes have been shocking, but in every other respect fans - even those without tickets - have been looked after, treated courteously and made to feel a welcome part of the tournament.

    There has been no trouble to speak of and even Germany v Poland in Dortmund passed off with only a few skirmishes. The past three European World Cups have been increasingly supporter-friendly events and it has been noticeable that fans are becoming ever more sociable.

    At least to an English observer it is apparent that the nature of supporters has changed. Perhaps it is more to do with the high cost of watching World Cup football than the screening of hooligans by the authorities, but the people who have been out at this tournament are not the same ones who fought in the streets in Marseille or wrecked parts of Rimini. Back then, England supporters in particular tended to be young single males with a pack mentality. Now you see many more wives, girlfriends and families with children. This is not a behaviour change, it is a change of faces.

    This World Cup is being watched by different people, as opposed to past tournaments, so much so that the atmosphere at games, while always noisy and vibrant, has often lacked the hard edge that big international crunch games ought to have. It has been a bit like Manchester United and the prawn-sandwich brigade writ large. But gentrification is hardly a new issue in football. Fifa are perfectly happy to have a more affluent and less rowdy audience and if the only choice is a return to hooliganism then there is no choice to be made.

    Fifa do have a choice over the fair play issue. Referees, cautions and player suspensions have been far too prevalent in Germany. No one wants a return to cheating and cynicism, but no one wants to see good players miss big games for pettifogging reasons, either. There is a balance to be struck and in four years' time one would like to see either more sympathetic refereeing, perhaps a second amnesty after the quarter-final stage, or some sort of meaningful appeal process. This has not been a dirty World Cup by any stretch of the imagination, yet the number of cards has been ridiculous, as have been some of the 'offences' for which players have been cautioned. The thought of South Africa 2010 producing even more cards, which is where the game seems to be going, does not bear thinking about. Fifa should call a halt now. The improvements brought about after Italia 90 have been a great success, but the process should not be allowed to continue to the nth degree, even if referees appear quite content for it to do so. Some safeguards are now needed to protect referees from themselves and ensure there is still a game worth watching out there.

    That will do very well as an epitaph for this World Cup. Not the best of all time perhaps, but a very good one all the same, and a quite magnificent, truly global event. Germany gave us a game worth watching.

    Paul Wilson is the Observer's chief football writer

  • So the Premiership is to blame for England's non-performance in the World Cup, we now hear. Not Sven-Goran Eriksson, not metatarsal fractures, but our own over-hyped, overrated and vastly over-rewarded domestic league. Continue reading...

  • I have known Marcello Lippi for many years, going back to when we were both players and, of course, we have seen each other a lot since then as managers. He has always been as he is now - a very precise, hard-working, intelligent, astute and tenacious man. Continue reading...

  • Saturday 8 July 2006

  • France need to find a way tomorrow of stopping Italy from gaining midfield superiority and getting Gianluca Zambrotta and Fabio Grosso on rampaging forward runs. Those full-backs can cause big problems when they break into the final third and I think the key for France will be for Franck Ribéry and Florent Malouda to drop infield when the ball is lost.

    Zambrotta and Grosso will have the time and confidence to spring forward only if Italy retain good possession, as they did against Germany, so France must overload in central midfield to break up their opponents' play and stop the supply. If Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso, Simone Perrotta and Francesco Totti have space on the ball they will create trouble.

    Ribéry and Malouda need to come inside and get tight to make sure Italy cannot build any rhythm. Claude Makelele will have the task of being close enough to Totti to look after him but he must also help Patrick Vieira and Zinédine Zidane contain Italy's younger midfield and stop the passing. I wonder whether Vieira and Zidane have the legs to carry them, so Ribéry and Malouda need to give their assistance.

    As the two youngest players in the team they have great energy. They have done well from wide when attacking, particularly in Ribéry's case, and have done their share of defending too. It is not a problem for France to get them to run hard, especially as Sylvain Wiltord and Sidney Govou will be ready as replacements when their energy wanes.

    France do not want to end up with Ribéry and Malouda constantly chasing back towards their own penalty area to track Zambrotta and Grosso. Germany had a similar problem against Italy, with Bernd Schneider and Tim Borowski forced to work far harder defensively than they would have liked, and as a result the German supply lines from wide to their strikers were weakened. It will be easier for Ribéry and Malouda to spring into dangerous attacking areas if they are higher up the pitch.

    When Fabio Cannavaro or Marco Materazzi (a potential weakness) play passes into midfield, France must try to effect possession early. If Italy monopolise the ball, Zambrotta or Grosso will begin to move forward, putting extra pressure on the France full-backs Willy Sagnol and Eric Abidal.

    With Ribéry and Malouda dropping in, France will have a ring of five completed by Makelele, Vieira and Zidane to regain the ball. They particularly want to make sure Zambrotta does not raid down the right. With Mauro Camoranesi lively on that side, it already promises to be a night of defending for young Abidal, who shows occasional nerves.

    I am sure the most important issue will be how France cope with Italy, assuming Marcello Lippi continues the attacking philosophy of the semi-final, in which Pirlo was an exquisite provider. I hope the final does show the world there is still a beautiful game when defending in depth, deception and fear are outweighed by vibrant attacking play and decency. A Zidane-inspired France rocked Brazil and the question is whether the sorcerer can finish with his greatest trick - another World Cup win. He will need Ribéry and Malouda to be switched on to stand a chance.

  • A football match can be a headstrong child. Despite all the nurturing by managers and the urgings of supporters, it frequently turns out to have a sullen mind of its own. Even so, the World Cup final is crammed with promise that could easily be fulfilled. The reputation of the 2006 tournament is far from the thoughts of the players but Italy's encounter with France tomorrow will determine how the whole event is remembered. Continue reading...

  • This time when it happened I vowed to divorce myself from emotion, to untether the fortunes of our hapless nation from my heart. The macabre ritual we endure, the cyclical cruelty of the narrative. When Portugal celebrated in ecstatic Latin exuberance I tried to steel myself in static indifference but silently urged the camera to stray from their carnival. But where could it linger, the suddenly intrusive eye? On the maudlin, slumped, stringless marionettes stripped of platitudes cloaked only in failure? It seems to me in this tableau we witnessed the actualisation of the innate qualities of two nations, that this gloomy defeat was ever England's destiny, that Portugal had been raised to conquer. Continue reading...

  • France's journey to the World Cup final shows just why we love football: it is a tale of the unexpected. After winning Euro 2000 France failed to live up to expectations in the last World Cup and Euro 2004. The same players travelled to Germany and we feared the same would happen again. Continue reading...

  • I don't think there were many people who expected Italy to do so well in this World Cup. Not even in Italy did many people truly think they could go so far. Continue reading...

  • When Italy's favourite sons came out to play this week, inviting Italian immigrants living in this Ruhr steel town to bring their children to watch a late-afternoon training session, the first chant that went up from the flag-waving throng celebrated the presence of Gennaro Gattuso. And outside the Trattoria Da Bruno, the most upmarket of the town's many Italian restaurants, a blackboard advertises their speciality of the month: a Pizza Gattuso.

    Italy's football fans usually idolise players who ooze style and class. This time, however, their choice is not Francesco Totti or Alessandro Del Piero, the golden boys, or even Fabio Cannavaro, the universally admired captain and linchpin of a defence that has conceded only a single goal in Germany. Their affections have been engaged by the bearded Gattuso, the hard man of the midfield, the terrier, the spoiler, the warrior who embodies the success of Marcello Lippi's squad in overcoming a series of recent events that could have destroyed their will to compete before they had even kicked a ball in the tournament.

    Gattuso incarnates the quality known to Italians as grinta, or fighting spirit. As well as acting as a bodyguard to Andrea Pirlo, whose suave passes direct the flow of Italy's play, Gattuso is charged with disrupting the opposition's attacks at source. When Marco Materazzi was asked this week how Italy would cope with the threat of Zinédine Zidane tomorrow, he had no hesitation in announcing their strategy. "Zidane won't be a problem," he said. "We've got Gattuso. He'll stop him."

    Yesterday the recipient of the compliment was not so sure. "That's all right for Materazzi," Gattuso replied with a wry smile. "Maybe he thinks he solved his problem. Now I have to cope with it."

    He was asked if he would like to swap identities with Zidane, a player at the opposite end of the midfield spectrum. "I like Zidane very much," he replied, "but I accept what God gave me. I don't have as much creativity, but perhaps I can do one or two little things. He's played a lot of matches and he's not so young. Maybe he'll get tired."

    If he does, Gattuso won't. The 28-year-old from Calabria runs on an apparently endless supply of energy and an inexhaustible appetite for combat. Italian football has always needed such players, men like Claudio Gentile and Romeo Benetti, who buy the time and space in which the artists can play. Gattuso, whose career includes a spell at Ibrox, is the latest of the line, and his aggression is setting an example to a besieged squad.

    Lippi's players arrived in Germany under the cloud of allegations that Juventus, Milan (Gattuso's club), Lazio and Fiorentina had been exerting influence over Serie A's pool of referees. They knew that the clubs were threatened with enforced relegation, and that their personal futures might be affected. Within days came the news that Gianluca Pessotto, a former Juventus player recently appointed the club's general manager, had thrown himself off the office roof and was in a critical condition.

    The five Juventus players in the squad were badly affected, and some of them flew to the bedside of the 35-year-old Pessotto. At the end of their next match, a victory over the Czech Republic, the whole team posed for the cameras behind a banner expressing support for their friend. Pessotto is still in a Turin hospital, his condition gradually improving, but the Azzurri seem to have banded together in an attempt to rescue Italian football from intensive care.

    To Liam Brady, the great Irish midfielder who played for Juventus in the 1980s, the whole affair has powerful echoes of the 1982 World Cup. That summer Italy arrived in the wake of a match-fixing scandal, received massive amounts of criticism for their early performances, drew strength from adversity and went on to win the final under their shrewd manager, Enzo Bearzot.

    "There are a lot of similarities," Brady said yesterday. "After the first round in 1982, the press told the team they were a disgrace to their country and they ought to go straight home. If you play that card right, like Bearzot did, it can be a great thing for team spirit. I would have thought that because the players had nothing to do with the scandal, and were totally blameless in all this, it would have been a great motivation for them. I think Lippi was quick to recognise that and to turn it into a weapon."

    This week Lippi said he had not spoken to the squad about the scandal since their departure from Italy. "I don't know whether they've talked about it among themselves," he said. "I've just been talking to them about the games and their opponents. But certainly since the start of this tournament the scandal has provoked a reaction. It's made us stronger. Before we left I warned them that we might face a bad atmosphere, but that's not how it has been and we have shown the world that Italian football is alive and beautiful, even on the moral plane."

    Gattuso is one of those who, should his club be relegated, will be the subject of transfer speculation. Juventus may lose an entire cast of top names, including Cannavaro, Gianluca Zambrotta and Gianluigi Buffon, who has recently been questioned about his alleged involvement in an illegal betting operation. Messages are already coming from Fabio Capello, who left Juventus this week, that several of his old players would be welcome to help him rebuild Real Madrid.

    "We'll talk about these things after the World Cup," Buffon said yesterday. "We're not affected by what's going on in Italy. I think Juventus's directors should be proud of having so many players in the World Cup final."

    To Gattuso, the request by the Italian state prosecutor Stefano Palazzi for Juventus to be demoted to Serie C and for the other three clubs to go down to Serie B was "very, very heavy. Maybe the requests are one thing and the sentences will be another". The transfer market, he said, will have to wait. "I'm just concentrating on the most important match of my life. That's all I want to think about."

    Gattuso was prominent among the players who disagreed with the call made by Maurizio Paniz, an MP of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing Forza Italia party, for a dismissal of all charges if Italy win the World Cup tomorrow. "There shouldn't be an amnesty," Gattuso said. "Those who have committed crimes ought to be punished."

    The new commissioner of the Italian Football Association backed him up. "Sporting justice must be done," Guido Rossi wrote in a message acclaiming the semi-final victory over Germany, "and Italy must change."

    As they await the tribunal's verdicts, many of Italy's players are wondering what shirts they will be wearing next season. The relief of making it to Berlin, however, appears to have allowed a certain mordant humour to emerge. Before Gattuso went off to yesterday's final training session in Duisburg, he was asked if he had placed a bet on the outcome of the final. "Please," he replied. "I don't want to get a call from Mr Rossi." Not that kind of a call, anyway.

  • If ever a World Cup deserved a decent finale it is this one. After a month of generally pleasing football, full of false trails and cunning sub-plots with not everything quite what it seemed at the time, an anticlimax would be hard to swallow. Continue reading...

  • Spain's sporting press has always worn its power like a badge of honour but even by its standards this was something else - this was playing God. Marca, the country's bestselling newspaper, had not so much awakened a sleeping giant as resurrected a deceased one. And, while the consequences for their own national team were disastrous, they had presented football with the greatest of gifts - the return, however fleeting, of Zinédine Zidane.

    With Spain preparing to face France in the second round, and amid a collective sense of euphoria, Marca roared: "We're going to retire Zidane!" The very impudence guaranteed they would be wrong: balding and ageing he may be but the Frenchman is a single game from a second World Cup medal and a queue of admirers and bandwagon-jumpers are pleading with him not to leave football behind forever in Berlin tomorrow night.

    "Tell me, maestro Zidane, what can I do to persuade you not to go? Anything to keep you from leaving us. Request the moon if you wish: we football lovers will bring it down for you if that's what it takes," implored one columnist, while Roberto Carlos requested that he carry on for "two more years at least". Zidane must now wish he had kept his mouth shut, his first assist to Thierry Henry in the quarter-final sending those thunderous thighs scurrying back to Brazil.

    It is too late: Zidane's mind is made up and the feeling lingers that pleas for him to reconsider are more opportunistic than heartfelt. Publicly Real Madrid's new president Ramón Calderón agreed that it would be "wonderful" if Zidane reconsidered; privately he must dread the prospect. The reality is that Zidane's retirement is overdue, so too Madrid's rejuvenation. And, proud as he is intelligent, the Frenchman is well aware of that. He has also shown little willingness to indulge the sudden adulation.

    "It would be lovely to dedicate the title to all those who have supported us," he says. "By which I mean the people who've supported us from the start." Yet the very fact that they're pleading with Zidane at all is telling. After all, three games ago there was no bandwagon upon which to jump. Three games ago they wanted Zidane out and, having picked up two yellow cards, he duly marked his 34th birthday by spectating against Togo.

    France won at last and the taboo was broken, L'Humanité describing Zidane as an "obstacle" to success. "Can Zidane's legs last?" asked Le Figaro, answering: "His performances so far would suggest not." Without him, Les Bleus had been given an "injection of youth, which made everything easier," claimed Libération as a poll showed two-thirds of French fans thought he should start on the bench against Spain. Then along came Marca.

    Provoked by the lack of respect, Zidane took his revenge; suddenly he was up and running. "I'll retire when I want to retire," he said pointedly, "not when Marca tells me to." Spain were out, Zidane was back - and it was thanks to the press. Even Luis Aragonés, ignoring his own role in the country's downfall, admitted as much.

    Marca journalists defended themselves, insisting they had simply hoped Spain would go through. Anyway Zidane has just ended a second successive poor season, one where occasional flashes of brilliance did little to disguise an evident decline. Age had caught up with him, injury too. A deep respect meant few attacked him directly but everyone accepted with a heavy heart that it was time to say au revoir

    For the past two seasons his average ratings pitched him as the 40th and 42nd best player in La Liga. His assists plummeted and so did his appearances. With Madrid faltering and a young, hungry Barcelona flying, the contrast was cruel. After Barça beat Madrid one reporter remarked: "Watching Xavi is like watching the Matrix, watching Zidane is like watching Pathé News." The galácticos, inevitably nicknamed the geriátricos, continued to fail but were so engulfed by their own glamour as to not notice. "It's like Sunset Boulevard," wrote Juanma Trueba. "Madrid are living in the past and can't see their own decline. There's a scene where someone recognises the aging, former star Norma Desmond. 'You were huge,' he says. 'No', says Norma, 'I still am; it's the pictures that got small'. Madrid are the same."

    Unlike his Real team-mates Zidane was no Norma Desmond - which made failure harder still to take. When he announced his retirement this summer, he admitted: "For two years I have not played as I wanted to. Maybe if things had been different at Madrid, I'd carry on."

    Headlines, injury and age apart, that is the key. Zidane may have contributed to Madrid's decline but he is also a casualty of it, a disillusioned victim of a club bloated on self-importance and riddled with divisions, where the sporting principles he holds dear have been subverted. Zidane calls himself a "competitor" whereas Madrid have been anything but. Real's former president Florentino Peréz claims the World Cup has proved him right. In fact, it has highlighted the utter bankruptcy of his project. As one former coach said privately: "Madrid became so bad they made a poor player of Zidane. That's far from easy."

    France is another matter entirely, so too the World Cup and Zidane knew it. With the guidance of the team's physical trainer Robert Duverge, he knew he could get through seven more games. Others may not have been convinced but Zidane was. Privately he talked of "destiny".

    "I am not going to the World Cup to play the clown," he told friends. Instead he has gone as the ringmaster. Zidane's relationship with Raymond Domenech is fraught with difficulties but, when he returned - encouraged back by the bitter boredom of training alone in Madrid during international week - he did so on his terms: with the captaincy, reclaimed from Patrick Vieira, with Lilian Thuram and with Claude Makelele - the man whose departure ushered in three trophyless seasons for Real. "[Makelele's role] is the most important in the team and he's the best," says Zidane.

    Protected by Makelele and Vieira - the real star of France's march to the final - Zidane is a different player with the national team. He is no longer the suffering midfielder who, by his own admission, "ran too much" at Madrid. "I've always played better with freedom," he adds. At Madrid that freedom was denied him; now he is liberated - indeed more than that, dedicated, fuelled by a dream. He has a motivation that had been totally undermined at Madrid. Now he has a reason to fight, a date with destiny.

    For Zidane the national team is everything - now, more than ever. "At this World Cup every game is his last and you can tell," says Pele. Against Spain he refused to retire. Tomorrow night, at last, he will. And what better stage to take his final bow?

  • Friday 7 July 2006

  • "The World Cup has nothing to do with football," César Luis Menotti, the man who managed Argentina to its first World Cup victory in 1978, once told me. It was early 1994 and we were discussing whether the USA was an apt host nation for the forthcoming WC. After all, it's not really a footballing nation.

    But what is a footballing nation? What is football anyway? Menotti meant that the USA as host nation would not have any adverse impact on the game since the World Cup is no more than "a big business venture orchestrated by Fifa". Hard to argue with that. The USA was as good a stage as any in that respect - some might say, better than most.

    Menotti's view of football is a romantic notion of the "beautiful game", a form of artistic expression meant to delight and entertain performers and consumers. Others believe it to be a zero sum competition whose value is quantified by results - a discussion which has cropped up a lot on this blog in recent weeks.

    Both views are valid. The problem with the World Cup is that it attracts a much broader audience than regular leagues. Clearly, some long-suffering fans who have put the hours in come rain or shine, who have learnt formations and memorised scorelines, who have experienced the range of emotions dealt by the cruel hand of fate and followed the ball since time began find the notion of fairweather fans enjoying the show only once every four years somehow offensive.

    The World Cup has become so successful a business venture that, in the words of Julio Grondona, an eminent active member of Fifa for the better part of 50 years, "when it happens it focuses the attention of most people in the world to the detriment of other events".

    Like most of the world I have watched the World Cup on TV, but I did go to the stadium a couple of times. Last week I went to Berlin's Olympiastadion, an eerie construction that blends modernism with history, much in the way the whole city does. On my way to the game I saw a man with a rather cool T-shirt bearing the legend: "Der Ball ist rund" and a picture of a leather ball. Beautiful, strong leather with coarse stitching, not a sportswear brand in sight. I recognised the phrase but wasn't sure from where.

    At the stadium I met a well-dressed German man with a VIP accreditation. He was furious with gate attendants who sent us off on a 10 to 15-minute walk past many other possible points of entry where we were repeatedly denied access. We chatted, in the way fans do, and walked around a stadium surrounded by uniformed officials, much in the way one would at any ground. During our peregrination he told me he was a film-maker. I immediately thought of German cinema, of Fitzcarraldo and Run Lola Run. Then I remembered: Der Ball ist rund.

    Perhaps this is in part what Menotti feels makes the World Cup removed from football: the tunnels up to the terraces are crammed with filmmakers and celebrities. The tickets are prohibitively expensive. There is no smell of rancid urine. The surrounding areas, instead of offering hats, flags and headbands or hotdogs and sugary coffee - or whatever stadiums round the world sell, these are just the ones I'm familiar with - are lined with white tents in which marketing companies host "hospitality events". You've a good chance of bumping into an Argentinian rock star, Baddiel and Skinner, or a corporate lawyer. But a true fan? A regular bloke who has been there every home game since his dad took him there as an eight-year-old? Unlikely at a World Cup stadium.

    Maybe controversially, I don't think this makes the World Cup less about football. For me, going to the stadium in Germany put me in touch with a slice of German footballing history and a slice of German contemporary culture - football is part of all that. Of course it's clouded in marketing strategies and we have to perform sacrilegious actions such as the Mexican Wave, or buy a Valderrama wig (thankfully a fad that seems to be dying down). And of course those having the biggest laugh are the manufacturers of the white and black "Teamgeist" ball, who have sold close to 15 million worldwide since the tournament began, and not the quirky Philosophy Football outfit who make the T-shirt that caught my eye.

    But it isn't just that. Football in its purest form has been present throughout the tournament. Or can you really tell me that the suspense of the semi-final between Germany and Italy - that certainty shared by millions that after 118 minutes of athletic prowess we were in for penalties and then the sudden plot twist, the goal, changing everything - is not football? Klinsmann's hurried look as Italy celebrated, thinking there are still a couple of minutes, we can turn it round again, urging his men not to give up. Del Piero's impatient run "to make his appointment with the ball" as my Italian friend so eloquently put it - that's not football?

    And Zidane's calm, cool, collected penalty in the semi-final against Portugal, determined, confident - is that not football? The debatable nature of the penalty itself, the arguably boring quality of the game, the impossible task of the referee, the reprehensible anger of Felipao - that's not football?

    And it's not just the goals either: the infinite dissection of every move, every decision, every gesture (the wink, the dive, the hug, the shrug); the impossibility of any agreement over an image we have all seen repeatedly (is that a punch or a careless arm-stretch? Did he stamp on his testicles or merely take a gentle step backwards? Was there any contact before he fell?). Even the debate about whether or not it's scoring goals that matters, that old aesthetic versus result discussion, permeates every preview and every post-match analysis.

    What's more, all the traditional tribal enmities come to the surface. Hand in hand with the defence and support of our team comes derision of the other. The danger here is the team's equation with nationality. As a Boca fan, I know I can make swiping statements about River supporters which would never be taken as any more than an expression of the irrational licence that football grants us to vent negative feelings. Somehow, when it comes to being an Argentinian making a statement about Brazilians, caution is of the upmost importance.

    Football nationality has nothing to do with real nationality, a leading Scottish-born sportswriter who lives in England said to me last week. Because football is not real, he added. But some of the exchanges ignited by the event feel real. As one person commentated on an earlier blog of mine, the discord among us is worthy of an Edgar Reitz epic.

    Football has everything to do with territoriality. Football is mine, we all feel; I am the one who really knows this game, I understand it in a way that 'others' don't. Football is all about "us" and "them", a battle for territory and possession, and a sense of belonging for individuals through a common objective. Football belongs to all of us, we all have an expert opinion and a personal history and a bundle of shared memories and hopes. Football is about strategy and poetry. In the words of JB Priestley, Art and Conflict for a shilling.

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