When Holland faced Germany it was always ‘problematic’, never more so than at Italia 90 when two rivals clashed
A 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 behaviour was so utterly out of character.
The snap in question? Rudi Völler standing in thoughtful meditation with his hands on his hips in the immediate aftermath of one of the most unjust dismissals in World Cup history, while over his right shoulder, his Dutch rival Frank Rijkaard looks to be inspecting the massive grolly he had just violently expectorated and left dangling from the back of the German striker’s bubble perm like a Christmas tree bauble.
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