Hungary were unbeaten in four years. West Germany had no chance. Yet in the 1954 final the underdogs produced one of the great World Cup shocksThe rain was teeming down in Bern and Hungary were about to win the World Cup. Ferenc Puskas had put the Mighty Magyars ahead after six minutes and Zoltan Czibor had doubled the advantage after eight. They were 2-0 up inside 10 minutes and they had not lost in four years. They were 2-0 up inside 10 minutes against a team that they had beaten 8-3 barely a fortnight earlier. They were 2-0 up inside 10 minutes against a side who, four years earlier, did not even exist.What unfolded over the next 80 minutes, if...
The captain’s 2002 exit was the subject of more hand-wringing and tomfoolery than almost any incident before or since in modern Irish life. Perfectionist or traitor? The jury’s still out“He came. He saw. He went home.” So ran the tag-line of the Irish box office smash hit comedy I, Keano, an epic musical melodrama about a Roman legion preparing for war. It was inspired by a real-life melodrama of even more epic proportions: arguably the most fractious falling-out in the history of Irish sport, a gripping and often amusing controversy prompted by Roy Keane’s contentious departure from the Republic of Ireland World Cup squad in 2002.The captain’s headline-grabbing exit from the squad briefly transformed the tiny western Pacific island of...
Italy should have seen off Haiti with ease in 1974 but the group game burst into life through the unheralded Emmanuel Sanon …The win-or-bust, tension-ratcheting final rounds of the World Cup allow memorable moments and dramatic sub-plots to breed like bacteria on a soggy handkerchief. Italy v Haiti, however, was the opening game of Group Four, a match which the heavy favourites won by a two-goal margin. And yet it was a day when one man rose into legend and another crashed into infamy; an afternoon knitted with spectacular yarns and statistical curiosities and embellished with one of the sport’s most controversial substitutions.We should start, though, with qualification, a process through which one side sailed with record-breaking ease, while the...
In 1934 a revolutionary Austrian side reached the World Cup semi-finals on the back of a storming run. History beckoned. And then turned its backOn the morning of 23 January 1939 Gustav Hartmann burst through the door of a Vienna apartment in search of an old friend. He found him, lying naked alongside his unconscious lover. Matthias Sindelar, Der Papierene, the greatest footballer in Austrian history, shining star of the Wunderteam, the forward fulcrum around whom a ground-breaking new style of play wowed Europe in the early 1930s, was dead. He was 36.The most prosaic explanation is the most likely – carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked chimney flue was the cause of death recorded on the police report...
Global political turmoil might be set to wreck Russia’s World Cup but, fear not, Gianni Infantino won’t take his eye off the ball and has some interesting other ideas for us allTwo months out from a World Cup hosted by an aspirant rogue state, what is on the mind of deeply scrutable Fifa president Gianni Infantino?Is it the sense of gathering storm in international relations, at the very heart of which is the tournament’s host nation? Is it the mounting air of absurdity that might attend an event hosted by a Russian leader seemingly bent on playing the pariah, who is engaged in gruesome and increasingly provocative proxy conflict in Syria, and who was at the weekend accused of tampering...