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 other relied on officiating so blatantly biased it would leave the Eurovision Song Contest with a frog in its throat.
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The marking by defenders is so haphazard as to suggest a fundamental weakness. It is easy to imagine hefty scores being piled up against them in the World Cup. The Haitians do have impressive ball skills … but their coach is concerned about the lack of the physical drive usually found in Europe.
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