Haan began the movement with a sweeping long ball from left to right. René Van de Kerkhof controlled it, slipped round Tarantini, centred; and Nanninga rose splendidly to head into the goal.
There was still time for Passarella to elbow Neeskens in the face, then, in the very last minute, for Krol perfectly to put Rob Rensenbrink through. The Argentine defence was scattered, but when Rensenbrink shot, he hit the left-hand post and, did we but know it, the Cup had passed from Holland.
In extra time it was logical and legitimate to expect the Dutch to go on dominating what looked an exhausted Argentine team, but somehow (will we ever know quite how?) Menotti roused his men, as Alf Ramsey had at Wembley. The Dutch restored Brandts to defence, and suddenly found themselves under pressure; Argentina were running and probing again. With fourteen minutes of extra time played, one to go, Kempes received from the lively Bertoni, forced his way through the defence again, almost lost the ball to the brave Jongbloed, managed to retain it and made the score 2–1.
That was that. The second period saw Holland throwing men up in desperate quest for a second equaliser, leaving great gaps in which the Argentinians frolicked. Luque, taking the ball from Krol, was once clean through, only for Jongbloed to frustrate him; but with five minutes left, another marvellous burst by Kempes and a one-two with Bertoni allowed the winger easily to score the third. The stadium now was a volcano of joy; the streets of Buenos Aires would be thronged all night by ecstatic thousands. If it had not been a famous victory, it had been a thrilling one, and if Holland deserved sympathy for losing their second consecutive World Cup Final, perhaps Argentine football deserved its honour, for the players it had given us over the years.
Kempes was not the least of them.
RESULTS: Argentina 1978
Group I
Argentina 2, Hungary 1 (HT 1/1)
Italy 2, France 1 (HT 1/1)
Argentina 2, France 1 (HT 1/0)
Italy 3, Hungary 1 (HT 2/0)
Italy 1, Argentina 0 (HT 0/0)
France 3, Hungary 1 (HT 3/1)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Italy 3 3 0 0 6 2 6
Argentina 3 2 0 1 4 3 4
France 3 1 0 2 5 5 2
Hungary 3 0 0 3 3 8 0
Group II
West Germany 0, Poland 0 (HT 0/0)
Tunisia 3, Mexico 1 (HT 0/1)
Poland 1, Tunisia 0 (HT 1/0)
West Germany 6, Mexico 0 (HT 4/0)
Poland 3, Mexico 1 (HT 1/0)
West Germany 0, Tunisia 0 (HT 0/0)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Poland 3 2 1 0 4 1 5
West Germany 3 1 2 0 6 0 4
Tunisia 3 1 1 1 3 2 3
Mexico 3 0 0 3 2 12 0
Group III
Austria 2, Spain 1 (HT 1/1)
Sweden 1, Brazil 1 (HT 1/1)
Austria 1, Sweden 0 (HT 1/0)
Brazil 0, Spain 0 (HT 0/0)
Spain 1, Sweden 0 (HT 0/0)
Brazil 1, Austria 0 (HT 1/0)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Austria 3 2 0 1 3 2 4
Brazil 3 1 2 1 2 1 4
Spain 3 1 1 1 2 2 3
Sweden 3 0 1 2 1 3 1
Group IV
Peru 3, Scotland 1 (HT 1/1)
Holland 3, Iran 0 (HT 1/0)
Scotland 1, Iran 1 (HT 1/0)
Holland 0, Peru 0 (HT 0/0)
Peru 4, Iran 1 (HT 3/1)
Scotland 3, Holland 2 (HT 1/1)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Peru 3 2 1 0 7 2 5
Holland 3 1 1 1 5 3 3
Scotland 3 1 1 1 5 6 3
Iran 3 0 1 2 2 8 1
Group A
Italy 0, West Germany 0 (HT 0/0)
Holland 5, Austria 1 (HT 3/0)
Italy 1, Austria 0 (HT 1/0)
Austria 3, West Germany 2 (HT 0/1)
Holland 2, Italy 1 (HT 0/1)
Holland 2, West Germany 2 (HT 1/1)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Holland 3 2 1 0 9 4 5
Italy 3 1 1 1 2 2 3
West Germany 3 0 2 1 4 5 2
Austria 3 1 0 2 4 8 2
Group B
Argentina 2, Poland 0 (HT 1/0)
Brazil 3, Peru 0 (HT 2/0)
Argentina 0, Brazil 0 (HT 0/0)
Poland 1, Peru 0 (HT 0/0)
Brazil 3, Poland 1 (HT 1/1)
Argentina 6, Peru 0 (HT 2/0)
GOALS
P W D L F A Pts
Argentina 3 2 1 0 8 0 5
Brazil 3 2 1 0 6 1 5
Poland 3 1 0 2 2 5 2
Peru 3 0 0 3 0 10 0
Third place match
Buenos Aires
Brazil 2 Italy 1
Leao; Nelinho, Oscar, Zoff; Scirea, Gentile,
Amaral, Neto; Cerezo Cuccureddu, Cabrini;
(Rivelino), Batista, Maldera, Antognoni
Dirceu; Gil (Sala, C.), Sala, P.;
(Reinaldo), Mendonça,
Roberto. Causio; Rossi, Bettega.
SCORERS
Nelinho, Dirceu for Brazil
Causio for Italy
HT 0/1
Final
Buenos Aires
Argentina 3 Holland 1
(after extra time)
Fillol; Olguin, Jongbloed; Krol,
Galvan, Passarella, Poortvliet, Brandts
Tarantini; Ardiles Jansen (Suurbier);
(Larrosa), Gallego, Van de Kerkhof, W.,
Kempes; Bertoni, Neeskens, Haan; Rep
Luque, Ortiz (Nanninga),
(Houseman). Rensenbrink,
Van de Kerkhof, R.
SCORERS
Kempes (2), Bertoni for Argentina
Nanninga for Holland
HT 1/0 FT/1
SPAIN
1982
The 1982 World Cup, top heavy with its twenty-four teams, ill-organised by its host country, ill-augured from the farcical moment of the draw itself, beset by heat and by displeasing incidents, none the less ended in a dramatic crescendo. That Italy should win seemed impossible at the outset, improbable after their three dull games in the opening round, yet splendidly appropriate by the end of a Final in which the ‘disgraced’ Paolo Rossi emerged as the Italian catalyst, the most dazzling star of the tournament.
The draw was made in Madrid in January. The egregious João Havelange, Brazilian President of FIFA, who had wished the twenty-four team World Cup on the game as the price of his election in 1974—when the votes of the Afro-Asian block sustained him—praised Spain for having accepted the challenge in the spirit of Don Quixote. Proceedings then took place very much in the spirit of Sancho Panza. One of the revolving drums from which the teams, each represented by a ball, were drawn stuck. A ball broke. Neuburger, the West German representative, rebuked one of the blue-clad orphans who were making the draw. The balls representing Scotland and Belgium were extracted too early, thus defeating the whole elaborate object of the exercise which was to keep South American teams apart.
It was hard to find favourites, though the West Germans looked good. Paul Breitner had returned to international football, now as captain and a dynamic midfield player. Hansi Muller, in the same section, had much matured, though he had problems with his knee. A little 21-year-old right-winger, Pierre Littbarski, quick, clever and daring, had forced his way into the team. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, European Footballer of the Year, was among the best strikers in the game, and the giant Horst Hrubesch had proved a fine centre-forward when Germany won the 1980 Nations Cup.
But Bernd Schuster, perhaps the chief star of that team, a driving, blond midfielder, had had such trouble with his knee when playing for Barcelona that there was no hope of having him. A tour of South America, in which Brazil and Argentina had been met, had been most encouraging.
Argentina were still under the able managership of Menotti, and he had a wonderful new weapon in Diego Maradona. Twenty-one years old, thick-thighed, enormously quick in thought and
movement, a superb finisher and a fine tactician, Maradona was a host in himself, and with him, from the youth team, had emerged the swift centre-forward, Ramon Diaz. Osvaldo Ardiles had returned from his triumphs at Tottenham to reinforce the midfield, but the team had looked tired in Buenos Aires before it left for Europe.
Since the highly doubtful custom of an opening game would be adhered to, Argentina would open the ball in Barcelona against Belgium, who had qualified with France, at the expense of Holland, runners-up in the two previous World Cups; and of Eire, victims of shocking refereeing decisions in both Paris and Brussels.
The twenty-four-team complement meant that the competition would be more than ever a madman’s flytrap. There would be no fewer than six groups, made up of only four teams each. The first two in each group would qualify for the so-called second round, to be played entirely in Madrid and Barcelona, by four groups of three teams each. Points would decide; and if not points, then goal-difference. If this in turn was dead level, the complications became so infinite that almost Talmudic exegeses could, and eventually did, ensue. It could even come down to which team had done better in the previous round.
The four semi-finalists then played off on a knock out basis, not in Madrid and Barcelona as you might expect, but in Barcelona and Seville, thus giving an enormous advantage to the Barcelona-based teams, the more so as France and West Germany, the eventual semi-finalists, found themselves held up till the small hours of the morning in a chaotic Seville airport.
Add to this the ravages and depredations of the Mundiespana Organisation, to which the Spanish Federation handed over the organisation of hotels and tickets, and the recipe was complete for a World Cup which further compounded its anomalies with a timetable that left excessive delays between staggered games without properly parcelling out the periods of rest. Michel Hidalgo, the French team manager, was especially bitter about this; and about the obligation to play under such intense heat that his players risked sun stroke.
Brazil’s Zico, before the competition, accused Argentina of being a one-man team. Maradona, the one man, retorted that the Brazilians had no forwards which, by contrast with Zico’s stricture, proved substantially correct.
Brazil brought with them almost a surfeit of midfield players. Claudio Coutinho, their 1978 manager, had not only gone, the poor fellow had been drowned. His successor, Tele Santana, was much better attuned to the inner rhythms and patterns of Brazilian football. Players, now, were encouraged to attack and express themselves as the samba beat out from the terraces. But the plethora of midfield players—Zico, bearded Dr Socrates, the lanky magician Cerezo, and Falcao, back from Rome—was not complemented by fine players up front. Pelé, Garrincha, even Tostao and Vavà, were mere memories.
Britain had three entrants. England were among those present for the first time since 1970, but wouldn’t have been there at all had it not been for the enlarged tournament, enabling two teams to qualify from their group. Apart from a fine, unexpected performance in Budapest, inspired by the veteran West Ham inside-forward, Trevor Brooking, who scored two splendid goals, England’s performance under the shaky managership of Ron Greenwood—obsessed by the waning charms of Kevin Keegan—had been pitifully mediocre. Not till Don Howe, Arsenal’s coach and the England right-back in the 1958 World Cup, was called belatedly was the defence decently organised.
Scotland, too, had a manager clearly past his substantial best in Jock Stein, who had never recovered from an appalling car crash on his way back from Glasgow Airport. Unlike England, the Scots had qualified not by default but on abundant merit, winning a group which included Portugal and Sweden; and gallant little Northern Ireland, who slipped into second place under the aegis of Billy Bingham, their outside-right in the 1958 World Cup.
Among the interesting outsiders were the Cameroons in Group i, the Algerians in Group ii, and Kuwait in Group iv. Immense sums of money had been poured into their preparation, supervised by the little Brazilian coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, who in 1983 would be appointed manager of Brazil themselves.
Remoter still seemed the chances of El Salvador, who had qualified despite the fearful civil war devastating the country; their rivals Honduras, drawn in Group V with the hosts Spain; and New Zealand, who had narrowly got the better of China, competing in a World Cup for the first time.
The opening match may not have been a distinguished one, but at least it produced a goal for the first time for twenty years. The surprise was that the Belgians should score it, the more so as they left out the 37-year-old Wilfried Van Moer, inspiration of their midfield in the Nations Cup finals two years before. His place went to a completely new cap, the blond 24-year-old Vandermissen. But instead of shadowing Maradona, as was widely expected, Vandermissen, who did well, was only one of several Belgians who passed Maradona on to one another with such good effect that the presumed star of the game was seldom seen to effect, apart from one fine free kick which hit the crossbar.
Overall, the Argentines seemed weary, as they had in Buenos Aires. Some thought that the effect of the lost Falklands War weighed upon them. Be that as it may, Kempes, hero of 1978, looked a fish out of water on the extreme left; Diaz, who’d later be criticised by his colleagues, was out of form in the middle; and the defence lapsed horribly when a long cross from the left by Vercauteren was allowed to reach the unmarked Vandenbergh, who was able to score almost at leisure and pleasure.
The Italians next day opened their programme at Vigo, and played an unimpressive draw against the Poles, who’d knocked them out in Stuttgart in 1974 in a game which has ever since produced claims and counterclaims of attempted bribery. Paolo Rossi, a hero of 1978, looked explicably out of touch and practice.
He had disgraced himself by being involved in the Italian fixed odds betting scandal while on loan from Lanerossi Vicenza to the Perugia club. A game at Avellino had been drawn 2–2, Rossi scoring twice. His alleged complicity led to a three-year suspension, subsequently reduced to two. The mythical words of the old Chicago White Sox (or Black Sox) scandal of 1919, ‘Say it ain’t so Joe’ (or Paolo), became the apposite catch-phrase. It seemed impossible that the ingenuously boyish Rossi could be involved in such chicanery, but he cut a poor figure at the tribunal in Milan and out he went, returning in time for only three Championship games with his new club, Juventus.
Both that game and the one between Peru and the Cameroons at Coruna ended in a goalless draw. Tardelli hit the Polish bar, and Zbigniew Boniek, the key Polish midfielder, explained his poor form on the grounds that he was overwhelmed by having to play against his future colleagues of the Juventus team.
In their next game, once more at Vigo, Italy were most fortunate not to give away a penalty when the notorious Claudio Gentile brought down Peru’s swift winger Oblitas, only for Eschweiler, the referee, to turn a blind eye. To give him his due, Eschweiler had just been winded by the ball.
Bruno Conti, the elusive little Roma winger, one of the relatively few newcomers to Enzo Bearzot’s team, scored the Italian goal after eighteen minutes; Diaz equalised seventeen minutes from time.
The handsome young Italian players were the delight of the Galician girls, who hung around, admiring, outside their training camp, but within it, matters were tense. The team had played appallingly badly in Braga, Portugal, on their way to Spain, and the violent, sometimes malicious, criticism by the Press, not least about the size of their bonuses, provoked a head-on collision.
It had only just been avoided in Argentina, largely through the good offices of the ebullient little public relations officer, Gigi Peronace, but Peronace had died sadly of a heart attack in Bearzot’s arms just before the team set out for the Mundialito tournament in Montevideo in December 1980. Now there was no buffer. The players refused to talk to the Press except through their veteran goalkeeper, Dino Zoff, renowned as the most taciturn of all, and they maintained their ban right to the very end.
Fortunately for them, the Poles continued to play still less efficiently and could wel
l have lost to a bright and eager Cameroons team, which had a splendid goalkeeper in N’Kono, who would stay on in Spain, and a forceful centre-forward in the French domiciled Roger Milla. In the end, Poland were glad of a goalless draw, but they came vibrantly to life in their third game, crushing a feeble Peru, 5–1, the two redheads Boniek and Buncol, and the incisive left-winger, Smolarek, running rings round the flat-footed Peruvian defence.
Against the Cameroons, Italy showed again how much they missed the cool attacking skills of Roberto Bettega, lost to them through injury. True, the sometimes prodigal Conti missed one astonishingly easy chance, but the goal with which Graziani put them ahead on the hour came only because N’Kono slipped; and the Cameroons equalised right away. Later, some Italian journalists attributed their team’s fine form thereafter to the fact that the weather in Galicia had been so cool, by contrast to that elsewhere. But the muscle stimulant administered to the team may have had still more to do with their undoubted and somewhat untypical energy.
England made a very good beginning against France in Bilbao. They scored after only twenty-seven seconds, the quickest goal in the story of the competition, flagged briefly in the second half when Alain Giresse split the defence with a through pass to Soler, but ran out clear 3–1 winners in the end.
Bryan Robson scored the first two English goals and had he not injured a groin in the ensuing game, England might have done vastly better. A Geordie, developed by West Bromwich Albion and sold at a massive fee to Manchester United, Robson had the energy, strength, talent and temperament to make him one of the most complete midfield players since Johan Neeskens.
His first goal was banged in when Coppell took a long throw in on the right and Terry Butcher came up from centre-half to flick the ball on at the near post. His second was a brave piece of opportunism when he beat a hesitant French defence to head in. Things went better for Robson and for England when he moved from the left of midfield into the centre where he felt so much more at home. On the left, ‘I seem to get lost a bit in the game.’
The Story of the World Cup Page 28