“Regardez! Look at that! Allez, Jean-Paul, Allez! ALLEZ! FRANCEFRANCEFRANCE....”
In millions of homes all over the nation millions of men and women were screaming the same refrain. “Allez! Allez, Jean-Paul....”
The crowd on the French side of the stadium went wild. They were in a frenzy as that red-shirted Number 2 bore down on the goal.
The huge knot of photographers behind the left goalpost steadied themselves, feet wide apart, straining forward, cameras at their eyes. Before the goal the tall German veteran waited coolly. He tugged at his cap, watching the French boy pass the ball to a teammate and receive it back. The baron was wise and knowledgeable. Better than anyone he knew the importance of his slightest move. He had to guess and guess correctly. Waiting just long enough, he raced out, bent low, and scooped the ball away as the Frenchman slammed into him and went flying over his shoulder to land with a crash on the turf. The shock of their collision could be heard all over the field.
The German was older, more solid, more inured to blows of this sort. Besides, anticipating the shock he had braced for the boy’s onrush. Yet even he staggered from the impact before he could rise, straighten out, and kick the ball far down the field. The French player who had tumbled as though shot from the sky lay unconscious upon the turf. The whistle blew loudly.
For a moment there was silence in the stadium, a silence more violent than the roaring that had preceded it. Then a screaming chant rose from the French side. What had been in the back of their minds all afternoon now came out in a torrent of sound. It wasn’t that the French—both present in the stadium and elsewhere watching—lived in the past. But that the past lived in them.
“Le Boucher! Le Boucher! Le Boucher!”
Chapter 5
THE FRENCH STOOD and chanted. Now a shrill, derogatory whistling could be heard, too, mixed with boos. A brick arched up from the crowd and landed on the field. Another entangled itself in the nets of the goal, then another and another. Immediately armed policemen with riot guns appeared. They fanned out, facing the stands and scanning them from the edge of the field. They were tough cops in boots and helmets, ready to toss out anyone who disturbed play.
No more bricks were hurled, but the chanting and whistling continued. “Le Boucher! Le Boucher!”
Nothing more fell onto the field, but the shouting and whistling continued.
Players frequently know nothing and hear nothing the moment play begins. Often the baron had to be told which opponents had scored a goal on him. But this time it was hard for him not to recognize the name they were calling him. Every Frenchman and Frenchwoman in the stadium or watching on TV was sure that the baron had injured Varin on purpose.
“Ah, quel sale type, quel salot!”
But then, everyone agreed, what would you expect? Those Germans just have to win at any cost, at any cost.
The long legs of the boy stretched out on the ground stirred ever so slightly, the first sign of returning consciousness. The baron walked over to see how he was, but the French players who had formed a circle around Jean-Paul, refused to step aside for him. Now the boy sat up, his head in his hands. Yves Robin, the French trainer, and Garnier bent over him, slopping water on his face. They helped him up and he walked a few steps, plainly dizzy. There was a cut on the right side of his forehead. Blood ran down his cheek.
The crowd noticed it immediately. “Aaaahhh...” they cried. But what would you expect from the Butcher of Nogent-Plage?
The trainer gave the boy something from a bottle to drink and wound a bandage around his head. Jean-Paul raised his hands in protest, but the trainer, paying no attention, taped the bandage securely.
The baron leaned against a goalpost. He had in his time survived many on-field collisions, but this one had shaken him up, too. His body ached. He bent over, panting, then straightened up. The French stands jeered. However, he went to Varin and patted his shoulder. Jean-Paul nodded. He was all right.
His fans shrieked for a penalty kick. Even the captain of the French team stood protesting. But the referee shook his head. Varin jogged up and down to cheers from the stands. Finally he indicated that he was ready.
The referee placed the ball near midfield, and the game got under way again. For a while the play was negative, nervous, and uncertain. Because of the injury to their star the French momentarily lost their poise. The Germans at once seized their chance. Quick, direct, with passes short and sure, their game well coordinated and neat, they broke dangerously into French territory. Schroeder, their centre forward, shook loose, and after a series of passes had a great opportunity to the left of the goal, and young Helmut Herberger, the punch of the German team, crossed over, reached the ball, and drove it with all the force of his instep toward the goalie. Bosquier, the Frenchman, made a magnificent save at point-blank range. The ball, however, spun from his grasp.
Big Schwartz, following up, kicked it again. Again Bosquier saved, diving at the ball just in time. The French stands were ecstatic.
Two great teams, two superb goalies.
As play progressed, Varin slowly regained his top form, and as he did the French side came to life, now attacking without mercy, using long, articulated passes. So perfect was their position play that a teammate was invariably reaching the ball on those passes at the exact moment. Their surge downfield was a joy to watch.
Even the Germans were impressed. So were the sportscasters. High on top of the stands a wooden platform had been constructed over supporting uprights—a precarious perch for cameramen and commentators. The little Italian television man from Milan who had been so rough with the baron at the press conference was speaking what seemed a thousand words a minute into his microphone. As Varin, taking and passing the balloon, bore down on the German goal, he screamed, “Ah, il furia francese....”
The French attack, especially that of Varin and the wingbacks, was built on speed and more speed and tinged with that Frenchiness of the French, containing all their national characteristics—dash, drive, cerebration. Whereas the Germans felt that ball control was vital at all times, the French took risks and brought them off. When the Germans obtained the balloon, they kept it until it could safely be passed to a teammate. Their passes were short, accurate. Yet, watching, one felt that there was power in their game, that they were a team that could explode at any time.
Of the two, France was seductive, artful; Germany stronger and more brutal. Never again did Obermeyer allow Varin to get loose. He kept continually at the heels of the French star, for he also was fast. And although France always seemed to be attacking, forever banging away at the German goal, the Germans’ defense was so tight that after that first sortie it looked as if the home team was never going to score. The crowd watched, cheered, groaned as two national temperaments, two styles of play, unfolded below them. Millions all over Europe sat transfixed by their TV sets.
His youthful, dynamic energy fully regained, Varin dominated the field, perhaps even more noticeably because of the white bandage around his head, a kind of helmet of Navarre. If you don’t learn football by the time you are ten years old, you never will. Jean-Paul Varin, the French centre forward, had learned it truly and well as a boy from the Père Clement, once an international competitor for France. He had learned it also by listening to and playing with the Herr Oberst or, as he called him, the Feldwebel Hans, now calmly awaiting his onslaught in the German goal.
Chapter 6
NOBODY CAN PLAY TRULY inspired football in an empty arena. It was the roaring mass of the crowd that brought out the greatness of the teams and their stars. There were twenty-two players on the field, but the concentration of the stands was on two: the baron and Jean-Paul.
The struggle became a duel not between France and Germany, but between the veteran and the youngster. Often when the German had blocked a sudden thrust or caught a stinging kick, he would tease Varin by holding out the ball, then dodging a few steps, bouncing it a few times in the penalty box as he ran forward. Then would co
me a sly roll-out to a forward at one side or that great zooming kick, high, far back into French territory.
Thousands of local fans who had no tickets, but had come to the stadium hoping to pick up one at the last minute, stood patiently outside in the sunshine, willing merely to listen to the noise from within.
They could tell with exactitude whenever Jean-Paul was off and running by that surge of sound from the French stands, that rising roar: “Allez, Jean-Paul! Allez! Allez! Allez!”
It would reach a frenzied pitch, a crescendo, as the boy neared the German goal, then subside into a vast, collective groan as the baron made another acrobatic catch, another desperate save, and the German stands cheered.
The two defenses were equally effective, but the French side had a diversity that their opponents lacked. They kept the home crowd up by the fluidity of their play. On the attack they pressed forward constantly, always assaulting the enemy goal. On the defense they contracted smoothly. The amazing accuracy of their passing was such that each man seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. They could send and receive a ground pass at full speed. Suddenly, without warning, would come that quick cross to a teammate, perhaps with his back to the German goal, who instantly whirled and shot.
But if the French were the more thrustful, tearing holes in the German defense at thirty yards out, still they could not score. That big panther in the goal, leaping from side to side, blocked everything.
He deftly deflected a stray shot over the crossbar, coolly punched another ball around the corner post, then dived to prevent a score on a low kick from Bonnet, the French winger. The Germans were technically superb. They were the epitome of controlled power. Yet over all was the baron, completely in command, vigilant, watching each man, calling crisply to his teammates as the play fluctuated up and down. He was the soul of the German side, the great tactician, the Rommel of football.
A truly magnificent player, even the French spectators agreed. But for him France would have scored and scored again as the forwards pressed the attack. In the sense that they were in German territory most of the time, the French were winning. They held the upper hand. But what good is it to dominate a game if you cannot score?
With a top-notch goalkeeper, even second-rate teams find it easy to defend—if, that is, they do nothing else. But the tactics of the Germans were by no means solely defensive. Strong, intelligent, they waited until the precise moment to strike—then struck hard. Their team had no offensive genius like Varin. But they had perfect ball control with short, accurate passes, unspectacular but impossible to intercept. It was football that demanded much of a man: patience, skill, and fitness. Especially fitness.
On the home team was that great centre forward of France, that boy with the white bandage around his head. Centre forward is one of the most important positions on a team. Rarely is it given to a youngster. But Jean-Paul Varin had an old football head on his young shoulders. He could move either way, pass with either foot. His control was so perfect that he was always able to do the unexpected: kick to the goal the instant an opportunity presented itself or pass to an unmarked teammate. Moreover, he had a peculiar trick of moving the ball up to an adversary, showing it to him, and then slipping away, almost magically, with the balloon still at his feet. There was an electric quality about his moves that communicated to his teammates and the crowd alike.
He was indeed “guele d’ange,” angel face, as the French called him.
There was a studied elegance, a kind of joy in his bearing on the field. Despite the injury he had suffered, he kept smiling. On the white bandage was a spreading reddish stain. He had a French fineness of feature that was seductive. Tall, frank, outrageously spoiled by nature, he was the boy that everyone wanted for a brother, that every woman would have liked for a husband or a son.
His character, too, made itself felt. You were attracted to him despite yourself. If you had never seen him play, you came to the field determined not to enthuse over Varin. In five minutes you were on your feet, shouting like everyone else: “Allez, Jean-Paul! Allez! Allez!”
Even the Germans applauded his skills, his moves on the field so marvelously thought out in advance.
“Ein fussballwunderkind,” they said to each other.
“Ja, ja, ein fussballwunderkind... ja, ja....”
The interchanging forward line of France, whirling, twisting, shifting, moving in a pattern to the exact spot on the field, kept passing the ball from one teammate to another. Sepp Obermeyer, who had been so completely fooled in the opening sequences of the game, now stuck to Varin unerringly.
As one German in the stands remarked to a friend, “Sepp stays with that Frenchman so closely he’ll end up in their dressing room at half time.”
Varin’s function was to set up the goal, to create the opening for others as well as score himself. Sometimes he was the decoy forward, quite as important as the man with the ball. Then next time, with everyone expecting a pass, he would turn suddenly and strike himself. Often the Germans knew exactly what he was going to do—only they didn’t know when.
On the field the referee blew his whistle for a German tripping and gave France a free kick from thirty yards out. His manner was firm and decisive. You could see he was a no-nonsense kind of referee.
The ball was beyond the penalty box. A wall of huge Germans stood before Garnier, the French captain, as he went back to kick. He tried hard to curve the ball around them and did so, but Borkowski, the big blond Silesian, knocked it away and the baron had no trouble reaching and holding it. That penalty could have been costly, he thought, as he rolled the balloon out to Otto Schoen, his winger at the left.
Play continued, chiefly about the German defensive zone. Suddenly the referee’s whistle sounded again. It was half time. The game came to a halt. Neither side had scored. The players, shoulders hunched with fatigue and strain, bodies consumed by the fierce intensity of the struggle, slumped off to their dressing rooms.
The first forty-five minutes of the match had seemed to last forever. In another way, it seemed that only a few minutes ago they had all filed out onto the field, waiting for play to begin.
Chapter 7
NOT MUCH WAS SAID in the German dressing room between the halves. What was there to say? The players were too weary to talk. They sat on the benches, heads bowed, panting, speechless. Only the baron moved from one to the other, praising a stop made, a pass executed, a kick here, a thrust there, warning someone about a single careless moment of play. The men listened to their captain. Otto Schoen was the man who spoke up. The veteran winger raised his head. He saw the lines in the goalkeeper’s face, recognized the tremendous responsibility that was on him. Rising, he put his arms around the baron.
“Hans, if you keep playing like this, we can beat that team.”
Time to resume play. They clattered across the wooden floor of the dressing room, down the long concrete corridor, and onto the field. Their appearance brought the German stands up. An ecstatic display of red-gold-and-black flags greeted them.
The second half began. The French pressure, sharp, incisive, continued. The baron’s goalkeeping was still amazing. He was a cross between an acrobat and an octopus. Unerringly he sized up each play coming toward him, guessed where the ball was going to go even before it was kicked. His arms, his big hands, his long fingers seemed to attract every shot to his grasp. Now a hard one was knocked over the crossbar, now a cannonball drive at his ankles was cleanly stopped and held. Often the kick was going away from him, but he reached and saved them all.
In that saturated bombardment of the German goal it looked so easy. But that was his trademark, making those stops look easy.
Why, you said to yourself, watching from the stands, I could have held that one. I could have stopped that kick, held that ball. You forgot, unless you knew the game, his experience and that knack of anticipating each play. Above all you ignored his amazing reflexes, which contributed so much to his skill and to keeping Germany even with Franc
e as the second half moved along without a score.
Equally steady on the high ones just under the crossbar, the short, quick stabs from in close, or those long, hard kicks beyond the penalty box, he contained them all. The ball would come at him out of a melee of arms, legs, and feet, so hard it stung his hands. But he held it. Gradually the sportswriters, the television commentators in the makeshift press box, their field glasses to their eyes, began to realize the German goalie was extracting the poison from the French attack.
Still the waves of attackers in red jerseys bore down on the baron. Each time he held them off, cleared the goal, saved Germany. Each time the dagger of France was blunted. Once Robert Laffont, the French inside left, made a superb thrust. From a mix-up in the penalty box he cleared a kick low, hard to the corner. The French stands went wild for it seemed a sure score. Somehow the baron got across, stopped the balloon with outstretched hands, an impossible stab. It got away from him and dribbled along the ground. Two French players were on the ball but he reached it first, quick as only the great player can be. Diving for it, he rolled over and over on the turf, the ball cradled in his stomach. Both sides cheered his great preventive football.
To make such a save is the mark of genius. A little while before the French were calling him a butcher. Now they applauded along with the exultant Germans. The French are like the rest of us. They wanted terribly to win that match. But, like the rest of us, they were not insensitive to talent when they saw it. What they were watching was football genius, and every French spectator knew it.
After a corner kick for France from which nothing resulted, Germany now moved to the attack alertly. France fell back, regrouped, ready, anxiously watching. For a moment the baron stood panting, weary, one arm outstretched against a goalpost. However, the swing of fortune was shortlived, the respite soon over. Following some infighting around the French goal, Varin stole the ball and was off, moving with those long, effortless strides across midfield and into enemy territory.
His Enemy, His Friend Page 9