Germany conjured football of a savagery unwitnessed against significant opposition in the tournament’s historyWhen it comes to the World Cup, hosting is supposed to help. Just ask Uruguay (1930), Italy (1934), England (1966), West Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and France (1998), or Sweden (1958), Chile (1962) and South Korea (2002), who unexpectedly finished second, third and fourth, respectively. Rival teams should be cowed by the passion and the number of home fans, the hosts buoyed.Not this time. “You looked at the faces of the Brazilian players when they walked on the pitch during the World Cup and it looked like they were about to compete in the Hunger Games,” said Zico, great Brazilian midfielder of the 1970s and 80s. “They...
Having been given the largely irrelevant honour of leading England at the World Cup, the Tottenham forward must not lose focus on what got him the jobGareth Southgate may lack tournament experience as manager of a national team though it is already clear he prefers to remove doubt and uncertainty in favour of getting things done. Name the squad early, announce the captain shortly afterwards, and everyone knows where they stand.That makes it sound as if the identity of England’s captain in Russia is something people have been itching to know for weeks, when in reality the honour just bestowed on Harry Kane is simply a formality that needed to be addressed so it could be moved out of the...
Paul Gascoigne’s bottom lip wobbled as he was ruled out of a World Cup final England would never reach, and Gazzamania was born“I got the ball in the centre circle and bundled my way forward. Then, as Matthaus tried to nick it off me, I nudged the ball out of his reach, but overran it. I had to stretch as Thomas Berthold came across. I was giving it 110%. It was the World Cup semi-final and I didn’t want to give them anything for free. To this day I honestly don’t think I touched him, but down he went, rolling around as if in agony. I crouched down to make sure he was OK, and at that stage I wasn’t...
One of the greatest World Cup games has been largely overshadowed by the West German keeper’s dastardly actThe semi-final stage of the World Cup has, on balance, not been particularly kind to France. In 1958, the free-scoring team of Just Fontaine and Raymond Kopa were more than holding their own against Brazil until Vavá clattered into the captain Robert Jonquet; as the defender’s leg sailed in an arc across the Stockholm sky, France’s hopes and dreams, in those days before substitutes, departed with it. In 1986, Les Bleus faced West Germany with star man Michel Platini only half-fit; the rest of the team failed to turn up until the last 10 minutes or so, by which time it was far...
When Holland faced Germany it was always ‘problematic’, never more so than at Italia 90 when two rivals clashedA sort of photographic antithesis of Bobby Moore’s post shirt-swap embrace with Pelé in 1970, it is one of the iconic World Cup images. Four years after the photograph was taken, it was further seared on the collective football consciousness when the author and journalist Simon Kuper used it to illustrate the cover of his award-winning bestseller Football Against The Enemy. Kuper would later regret doing so and apologised to one of the players featured in the photograph on the grounds that it was probably unfair to highlight such an unseemly act when it had been perpetrated by somebody for whom such...