There were rumours that the competition would be reallocated to Holland and Belgium, rumours that the Dutch would withdraw—as Johan Cruyff had already withdrawn—if it were not. Meanwhile, even the Argentinian Minister of Economics objected to the colossal cost of the affair; it was expected to lose some $750 million.
A further fear concerned the behaviour of Argentine players and crowds. In the late 1960s, Argentinian club and international teams had been notorious for their violence. Argentinian crowds were well known for their intimidatory effect on referees. True, the new Argentine team manager, the tall, lean, fair, chain-smoking Cesar Luis Menotti, nicknamed El Flaco (the Thin One), had promised a new era. If a team could kick its way to the World Cup, he’d said, then he would pick such a team, but it was no longer possible. Such methods were obsolete. The emphasis must be on skill. Fine, if not fighting, words, but had they real substance? In June 1977, England and Scotland played Argentina within a week of each other in the notoriously vertiginous Boca Stadium, and each game threw up an ugly incident. Trevor Cherry of England was punched in the mouth by Argentina’s Daniel Bertoni; the Uruguayan referee, Ramon Barreto, sent both of them off. The following week, Pernia, the Argentine back, knocked Willie Johnston of Scotland down with a cruel punch to the kidneys. Again, the referee sent off both players.
The Contenders Argentina
Menotti, the Argentinian manager, had great problems in building a team. The end of the World Cup had seen a great exodus abroad, notably to Spanish clubs. Brindisi, Carnevali, Wolff, Babington, Kempes, Heredia and others were in Europe now. Menotti said boldly that he’d recall no more than three players: Kempes, Piazza, the Saint-Etienne centre-half, and Wolff. Kempes had matured into the most dangerous goal scorer in Spain, with Valencia. Wolff was now playing in defence—where Argentina looked weakest—with Real Madrid. Piazza had actually been released by Saint-Etienne and was back in Buenos Aires when his wife and child were hurt in a car accident, and he returned to France. Wolff was lost because Menotti insisted he be in Buenos Aires by the beginning of April. Real Madrid could not possibly release him then.
So, without Kempes, his team—which had played a long, indifferent series in the Boca Stadium the previous year—laboured on convincingly through a number of friendlies.
Holland
If Argentina would be missing many stars, the two greatest stars of all would not be there, either. Johan Cruyff of Holland, inspiration of the 1974 team, best and most versatile centre-forward in the world, had stood firmly by his decision not to take part, despite huge offers, endless pleading and pressure. Alas for Holland, Cruyff was not the only absentee of renown; indeed, he had seemed to set a fashion. For varying reasons, Van Beveren, the country’s best goalkeeper, Ruud Geels, the excellent Ajax centre-forward and Wim Van Hanegem—as late as May 1978—dropped out, while the splendid attacking leftback Hovenkamp was hurt. It was thus a much-diminished Dutch team which flew to Argentina, even if such distinguished survivors as Rep, Rensenbrink, Haan and Neeskens were present. The new manager was Ernst Happel—an Austrian, once in charge of Rotterdam’s Feyenoord, but now the most part-time of international managers, since he had charge of Belgium’s Bruges.
West Germany
West Germany would be without Franz Beckenbauer, a loss which would prove irreparable. In April 1977 he suddenly, and shockingly, accepted a $2,500,000 offer to join the Cosmos of New York.
Schoen had already lost several other of his 1974 players. The tournament was scarcely over when the prolific Gerd Muller, the wily Jürgen Grabowski and the inventive Wolfgang Overath announced that they would play no more international football. They had had enough of its strains, its tension and its travelling. They wanted, they said, to spend more time with their families.
Yet the 1976 West German team seemed perfectly capable of winning the World Cup again, and the 1977 team won comfortably at Boca against Argentina. The pre-World-Cup season started cheerfully enough, with a fine win against Italy in West Berlin. Manny Kaltz, the Hamburg defender, was no Beckenbauer in skill and poise, but he had done well at sweeper and was, some said, at least a better defensive player than Beckenbauer. With the New Year, however, results fell away. The ‘new’ system of playing the acrobatic Schalke 04 centre-forward, Klaus Fischer, between two wide wingers was no longer so successful.
Scotland
From Britain, Scotland alone as in 1974 would make the trip, under the euphoric managership of Ally MacLeod. England, after a disastrous three years of management by Don Revie, which came to a squalid if lucrative end when he decamped to Arabia, were eliminated by the Italians. Northern Ireland found Holland too much for them. Wales went out to Scotland—controversially. The Czechs, winners of the 1976 Nations Cup with a glittering pair of performances—though they beat West Germany in the Final only on penalties—were also victims of the Scots as indeed they had been in 1974.
Wales had a justified grievance. Playing Scotland in a World Cup eliminator at Liverpool, where their home game had been switched, they were well in contention. Then a high ball came into the Welsh penalty box, a hand went up and touched it, the French referee, M. Wurz, blew immediately for a penalty, and Scotland scored. The hand, however, had belonged to Joe Jordan, Scotland’s centre-forward. Scotland went on to win the game.
Of Scotland’s talent, there was no doubt. They had more outstanding players, certainly, than any of the other British teams. There was some doubt, however, both about the experience and the detachment of their manager, who had left Aberdeen to take over Willie Ormond’s team little over a year before, and of the team’s ability to turn its talent into results.
After qualifying for the World Cup by beating Wales at Liverpool, the euphoria of the Scots was infinite and continued to be so, even if their geographical sense was not always impeccable. WE’RE ON OUR WAY TO RIO! cried the headline of a Scottish daily newspaper, next morning. Wild plans were conceived by fans desperate to get beyond Rio, to Argentina; one even contemplated hiring a submarine. Others worked their way across the subcontinent, though ultimately the following was counted in hundreds rather than thousands.
The Scots had an abundance of fine midfield players at a time when most other countries looked for them desperately; Rioch, Masson, Hartford, Gemmill, Macari, Souness. They were severely weakened, though, by the news that Danny McGrain, the Celtic right-back, who had missed the game against Wales with a chronic foot injury, had no chance of recovering in time for the World Cup finals. McGrain, perhaps the best right-back in football, a player of power, authority, mobility and drive, by turns a stout defender and an extra forward, was without an equal.
To his unavoidable loss was added the quite avoidable loss of Andy Gray, the excellent young Aston Villa centre-forward, inexplicably left out of the final forty players, let alone the final, permitted, twenty-two, by an increasingly unpredictable MacLeod. His reasons made little sense, the less so as he preferred to Gray, in excellent form, the obscure Joe Harper, who had played for him at Aberdeen. Moreover, MacLeod decided to take to Argentina the injured Gordon McQueen, though it was all but certain that the big centre-half would be unable to play.
As the competition grew nearer, so MacLeod’s statements and postures grew more extreme. ‘I’m a winner!’ he cried, promising great things, evidently borne along by the exultant optimism of the fans. The Scottish newspapers did nothing to restrain him; their nickname of ‘supporters with typewriters’, conferred on them by an English colleague, seemed amply earned.
If MacLeod was over-sanguine, he was also remarkably commercial. How much money he made in the year leading up to the World Cup is unknown, but he bought himself a public house for an estimated £70,000. (MacLeod himself said that in fact it was rented, and its cost was exaggerated). Around the Scottish camp hung such an aura of materialism, of wheeling and dealing, that it was astonishing to read a Scottish FA report, three months after the World Cup, which blamed MacLeod for not having made clear to his players how much they stood to
earn.
Brazil
Brazil, too, were under a new manager, the 39-year-old Army captain, Claudio Coutinho, an elegant polyglot who had come into football by the roundabout route of physical training. He was an enthusiast of the Cooper Test system of assessing athletes—the emphasis was on endurance—and had been physical ‘preparer’ of the 1974 World Cup team, manager of the 1976 Olympic soccer team. Charming, good looking, cosmopolitan, he took over from the São Paulo veteran, Osvaldo Brandao. Coutinho at once restored the wayward overlapping full-back Francisco Marinho to the team, which showed instant improvement, successfully completed the qualifying group against Colombia and Paraguay, then himself ran into the familiar torrent of criticism.
In his case he was blamed for trying to impose on the players the concept of ‘polyvalence’, which, he explained, was simply another way of saying Total Football. But by early 1978, when the team was in training camp outside Rio, Coutinho’s approach seemed quite another one. Now the emphasis was on fitness and what he conceived to be ‘European’ hardness. Touch players such as the gifted young centre-forward, Reinaldo, were encouraged to chase back and challenge. Defenders were exhorted to stop their opponents by hook or by crook.
Italy
Enzo Bearzot, the new Italian manager at first appointed jointly with the veteran Fulvio Bernardini, had pulled his team together. A large, dark man of almost Red Indian looks, and an international half-back, he was a passionate moralist who hated much of what Italian football had become and was anxious to wean it away from negativity. This would take time, because almost every major club played with a static sweeper and attacked on the break, but Total Football was for Bearzot ‘the true aim’.
The nearer the competition drew, the less impressive Italy seemed, though several new young players emerged—Cabrini, the attacking left-back, for instance—on the eve of the competition. Paolo Rossi, whose valuation by Lanerossi Vicenza at £3,000,000 in May, led to the resignation of the President of the Italian League in protest, was a centre-forward of outstanding talents. Small but marvellously adroit, he was unable, however, to win a place in the team before it left for Argentina.
Italy’s task had been made no easier by some politicking which had gone badly astray. Initially, before the draw for the finals was made in Buenos Aires in January, Italy had expected to be seeded, with all the consequent advantages. Strong objection to this was made, however, by the West Germany FIFA delegate Hermann Neuberger, with the result that Holland—the 1974 finalists—were seeded instead. Italy then urged that they be placed in the Buenos Aires group, a privilege granted to them. Bizarre classification, however, which rated feeble Mexico on the same level as Hungary, Spain and Peru led to a lopsided grouping. In the second pool, the West German holders and the Poles were faced merely by Mexico and Tunisia, the African entrants, while Group I was composed, formidably, of Argentina, Italy, Hungary and France. The French, who possessed one of the best players in Europe in the 21-year-old Michel Platini, a midfield player from Nancy with a superb touch and a remarkable flair for scoring from free kicks, were known to be a gifted side.
The Preliminaries
Under the impetus of EAM, Argentina made up for the slack years of Peronism and licked their stadia into shape, though there were problems till the last—just as there had been, after all, in Montevideo when the World Cup began. At the rebuilt, imposingly modern River Plate Stadium, seawater was used to sprinkle the grass, which withered and died in the sun. A new field was hastily laid. Rich and green it looked, but the bounce was often capricious. At seaside Mar del Plata, where the Brazilians were reluctantly to play, concerned about the cold weather, heavy rain had made the pitch a fiasco in which divots were kicked up in dozens.
A few weeks before the tournament was due to start, a bomb was found, despite the heavy security, in the Press Centre in Buenos Aires. It exploded as it was being taken away, killing one policeman and wounding another. Many footballers, among them Paolo Rossi and West Germany’s goalkeeper, Sepp Maier, signed an Amnesty International petition protesting about the torture and treatment of political prisoners, but it was easy for Argentina’s military government, controlling almost all sources of information, to represent to them that their country was the victim of a conspiracy of vilification.
It is true that the Amnesty International campaign told only part of the story. Though there was no denying that dreadful outrages had been committed by the military regime, they had taken over a country in a state of virtual civil war in which normal life in the great cities had become almost impossible and kidnapping and assassination were rife. The attitude of the ordinary bourgeois citizen in Buenos Aires during the World Cup seemed to be one of relief that he could now live and work without fear—though the solemn parade of the mothers each Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo, where the Presidential palace stands, was a bleak reminder of what lay beneath the surface of ‘normal’ life.
Early Games
Thus the World Cup did not go to the Low Countries, nor to Brazil, which had made it plain that it would be ready to accept it. Instead, it opened on June 1 in the River Plate Stadium with one more of those stupefyingly boring curtain-raisers, this time between West Germany and Poland.
It had surely become plain enough that such preludes, pulling two teams from the pack and placing such pressure on them, were selfdefeating. It would grow equally clear that the clumsy new formula, initiated in 1974, whereby the first stage of four qualifying groups led not to quarterfinals but to two more league groups whose winners contested the Final, was disastrous.
For this first game, Helmut Schoen surprisingly and suddenly abandoned his policy of two wingers and a centre-forward, instead fielding only two strikers in the Schalke men, Abramczik and Fischer.
There seemed some consolation in the lively form of Hansi Muller, a tall 20-year-old from Stuttgart, more midfield fish than upfield fowl, but he was persona non grata to some of the senior professionals.
Though neither team deserved to win a depressingly cautious match, which was ultimately and deservedly whistled by the River Plate crowd, there might have been a Polish victory but for a couple of alert saves by Sepp Maier. The lack of Gadocha—and of their old spirit of adventure—was plain in Poland’s team, but in Adam Nawalka, a 20-year-old right-half from Wisla Cracow they clearly had a new player of great energy and potential in midfield. It was characteristic of Gmoch’s costive approach that the clever 22-year-old Zbigniew Boniek should come on only as a late substitute for the veteran Lubanski—who had missed the 1974 World Cup Finals with an injured knee but had found his way back into the team after moving to Belgium. Boniek would, in the event, emerge as one of the outstanding young players of the tournament, balanced, adroit, insidious and a good finisher into the bargain.
Schoen did not stick long to his 4-4-2 formation. Protests from his players led him for the next game, against Mexico in Cordoba, to switch to yet another new strategy, a two-centre-forward attack. It was about this time that the old familiar pattern of West German participation in World Cups asserted itself, as his senior coaches were to be heard pungently criticising him for his vacillation. There was dissatisfaction, too, among the players with the lonely, boring life they led in training camp at Ascochinga outside Cordoba, though things there were enlivened by the controversial visit of the Nazi war hero, Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel. As a wartime fighter pilot, Rudel was said to have destroyed a thousand Russian tanks. Later, he had organised Peron’s air force. An unrepentant Nazi, he had been banned from addressing any political meetings in Bavaria.
Group I Argentina v. Hungary
The following evening, Argentina opened their programme in Group I with a torrid match against Hungary. At Wembley Stadium ten days earlier, the elderly Hungarian manager, Lajos Baroti, had stood in the evening sunshine as his players trained and told me of his fears about the tournament. Everything, he’d said, even the air, was in favour of Argentina. He was afraid that the referees might well give them
a couple of penalties: ‘The success of Argentina is financially so important to the tournament.’
The Hungarians had surprisingly eliminated their old foes Russia and then put out Bolivia in two final qualifying games. Much was expected of the 22-year-old Andras Toroscik, a small, blond centre-forward with delightful ball control, superb balance and an ability to pick his way through penalty areas to score remarkable goals. The tall, lean Tibor Nyilasi, who had played with him since they were youth internationals, was an attacking midfielder of great talent, dangerous in the air.
When Argentina took the field, it was to a snowstorm of torn-up paper, swirling in the floodlights. The River Plate Stadium, its terraces set well back from the field with a track between, was a much less intimidating one than Boca’s, but referees, as we would quickly see, were still alarmingly susceptible.
With so much bad faith on both sides, it would have required an immeasurably stronger referee than the feeble Portuguese, Garrido, to have brought the game smoothly into harbour. The Hungarians, who had been rough at Wembley against England, were harsher still here, pursuing a policy of ruthless challenge and quick counter-attack which seemed for some time as if it might pay. It was in fact a game which began with great promise but degenerated long before the end into sheer beastliness.
Hungary took the lead after only twelve minutes when Zombori completed a clever move with a shot which Fillol, the Argentine goalkeeper, couldn’t hold, Csapo driving in the loose ball. It was not till the second half, when the busy little Osvaldo Ardiles, so soon to come to Tottenham, moved from right to left in midfield that Argentina took a grip on the game, even though Leopoldo Luque had equalised within three minutes after Gujdar couldn’t hold Mario Kempes’s thundering left-footed shot.
The Story of the World Cup Page 25