Jupp Derwall was still under severe criticism. ‘What this team needs,’ said Horst Hrubesch, ‘is an iron hand.’ Well, that was just what it used to have when little Sepp Herberger was in charge, but what it had never had since his tall, gentle successor, Helmut Schoen, had taken over and changed the whole pattern and attitude of play. The huge excitements of Total Football, so superbly played by the West Germans in the Nations Cups of 1972 and 1976, the World Cup of 1974, might be a memory, but the basic design was the same.
But the defeat by the Algerians, the shoddy accommodation with Austria, lay like a shadow across the team’s performance in the present World Cup: and worse, in Seville, was to come. If Stielike’s injured spine had not prevented him being a highly effective sweeper, Muller’s knee clearly rendered him inoperative, and took away from the midfield the only player but Breitner capable of springing surprise. As for Rummenigge, the muscle he had pulled—for the first time in his life—on June 16 was so far from being healed that it was known he could not play the whole semi-final, if any of it.
Still, Littbarski, after being strangely and controversially left out of most of the England game, was back in the side and in form while the massive, blond Briegel, a human Panzer division in himself, another revelation of the 1980 Nations Cup, was formidably versatile, though as a back-four man now rather than the midfielder he had so effectively been in Italy.
The defence, indeed, was generally extremely strong. Schumacher rivalled Dassaev as the best goalkeeper of the competition, Karl-Heinz Foerster was an implacable centre-half and if Kaltz was a better right- back going forward than when staying in defence, his value as an overlapper was considerable.
In the event, Derwall restored to the side the Hamburg inside-forward Magath, who had not been especially effective so far, while Rummenigge would not appear till five minutes into extra time. At centre-forward Fischer, the smaller, quicker man, was preferred to Hrubesch, as he had been against Spain, the huge Hamburg player getting on only after seventy-two minutes in place of Magath. Perhaps Jupp Derwall consoled himself that on the other two occasions West Germany had won the World Cup, they had each time lost in the first round, just as they had in Spain.
For the French, the choice of their team was much easier; though like Brazil, they did have something of an embarrassment of midfield talent. Platini, Genghini, Tigana and Giresse were all chosen; four artists, running the risk that there was no real hard man, no tackler, no Tardelli, shall we say, among them. Ettori played in goal; an inadequate figure, but France were no better off for goalkeepers than Brazil … or Scotland.
The heavy Lopez, sweeper by choice, forced by the presence of Trésor to play as an unwilling and permeable stopper, did not start the game, but he would come on for the maltreated Battiston, himself a substitute for Genghini, after fifty-nine minutes. Up front, Dominique Rocheteau would be partnered this time not by Soler but by a survivor of 1978, Didier Six. It had been expected that if Six did play it would be in place of Rocheteau, who had strained the outer ligaments of his right knee, in the match against Northern Ireland.
Luck, by their own journalists’ admission, had been with France. Losing that first game to England in hot Bilbao had been a blessing in disguise. They had finished second in the group which had placed them in Madrid with Austria and Northern Ireland, rather than West Germany, who awaited them now, and Spain. Absent against Austria, Platini’s impressive return against Ireland laid to rest the whispers that the team played better without him and his enormous, manifold talents as goal maker and goal scorer, his beautifully struck free kicks, perfected in hours of practice shooting past lines of life-sized wooden dummies.
The match may be said to have turned on a horrifying incident in the fifty-seventh minute. At that point the score was level at 1–1, as it would be till extra time. Patrick Battiston, who had just come on as substitute for Genghini, raced through the middle on to a beautifully executed pass which turned the defence. Out of his goal raced the burly Schumacher. Battiston beat him to the ball, but Schumacher thundered into him, brutally smashing him to the ground with a blow of the forearm, and callously leaving him, minus two teeth, so badly hurt that there were fears he would die; fears compounded by the idiocy of the Seville police who had banned the Red Cross from the pitch. Battiston had to lie there for three long minutes before he could be treated. It was this incident, above all, which would make most neutral observers supporters of Italy in the World Cup Final. No penalty was given.
The French were obliged once more to reorganise their side, bringing Lopez on for Battiston. Schumacher should undoubtedly have been sent off, which would almost surely have condemned the Germans to defeat, but Corver, the Dutch referee, had not seen the incident and his linesman, incomprehensibly, did not enlighten him. As an embittered Michel Hidalgo, the French manager, complained afterwards, he was also obliged to use up his remaining substitute so that he did not have a fresh man to send on in extra time.
It was the Germans who took the lead after seventeen minutes. Though Giresse had been quite eclipsing Breitner in midfield, Breitner it was who suddenly and cleverly sent Fischer through. The centre-forward’s shot rebounded from the knees of Ettori, but little Pierre Littbarski, following up, drove the ball into the goal.
It took the French ten minutes to gain a merited equaliser to this goal. A cleverly floated free kick by Giresse had the German defence in turmoil: Bernd Foerster fouled Rocheteau, and Platini, first planting a conciliatory kiss on the ball, then put it on the penalty spot, sent Schumacher the wrong way, and scored.
Ettori, belying his previous form, rose to the occasion when his colleagues seemed angered and unsettled—not surprisingly—by Schumacher’s outrageous foul. His two excellent saves saw to it that the game went into extra time.
Platini and Giresse were still in lambent form, but the necessary reshuffle, the arrival of Rummenigge, ultimately gave West Germany an edge. Marius Trésor gave fresh hope in the second minute of extra time when he acrobatically—and quite unmarked—converted another teasing free kick by Alain Giresse. Six minutes later, though Rummenigge was now on, Giresse seemed to have made matters sure. Splendidly served by Platini, his powerful shot beat Schumacher and went in off a post.
The Germans, however, as England might well remember from Leon in 1970, are seldom so dangerous in a World Cup as when they are two goals behind. After 112 minutes, Derwall’s gamble in putting on Karl-Heinz Rummenigge abundantly paid off. A chip from Littbarski, a tap by Rummenigge, and the ball was home. Six minutes later, West Germany, against all odds and logic, were level. Bernd Foerster crossed, the giant Hrubesch nodded back, and his fellow centre-forward Klaus Fischer, the man who had kept him out of the initial team, scored. A glorious shot from little Amoros came back from the German bar.
So, abominably, irrationally and unforgivably, a World Cup semi-final would be decided, for the first time ever, on penalties. One hopes, without any great conviction, that it will also be the last. The excuse that time was of the essence hardly holds. It was the mindless organisation of the tournament which left longueurs between so many matches. But the manifold idiocies of World Cup committees should perhaps occasion no surprise by now.
Penalties, at all events—with their synthetic drama—it would be. Giresse, Kaltz, Amoros, Breitner and Rocheteau all scored. Next, Uli Stielike; but when the German sweeper shot, Jean-Luc Ettori saved. Stielike flung himself to the ground in despair; little Littbarski was the only one who came to console him.
Stielike, clinging to Littbarski, did not even watch as Didier Six took the next penalty; and Schumacher saved! Littbarski himself now scored. So, inevitably, did Platini; and Rummenigge. But when Maxime Bossis, the full-back, shot, Schumacher saved again; and it was all down to the next penalty, taken by none other than Horst Hrubesch, the man who had called Derwall a coward for leaving him out of the team without facing and telling him.
Hrubesch scored; and West Germany were in their fourth World Cup Final.
The taste, however, was exceedingly sour. Hidalgo, a man by nature quiet and moderate, furiously condemned Corver’s flaccid refereeing. Both he and Platini insisted that Rummenigge’s goal was an outrage: ‘Scandalous’, Platini called it, pointing out that both he and Giresse had been fouled before Rummenigge scored; he himself in a manner ‘which must have been seen by everybody but the referee.’ Hidalgo properly condemned Schumacher’s vicious assault on Battiston. ‘We have been eliminated brutally,’ he insisted, ‘I would say, scientifically.’
Now came the chaos of Seville airport, where already exhausted players had, as Hidalgo later complained, been obliged to sit on their suitcases while plane after plane took off. Paul Breitner made a scathing attack in his excellent Spanish—he had played for Real Madrid—on the gross ineptitude of the Spanish organisation. Whichever team had won would have been at a severe disadvantage against the Italians, who had not had to leave Barcelona, not had to play extra time, and not had to play in the evening.
Before the Final, a reprise of the extraordinary semi-final between West Germany and Italy in Mexico City twelve years before, there was the mammoth irrelevance of the third-place match, which took place, whimsically, in Alicante. Poland played without Smolarek, France without most of their team, including Platini, Giresse, Rocheteau and, of course and alas, Battiston, about whose injuries Schumacher spoke with such cold-blooded indifference that he cut a worse figure still. An eventual, clearly obligatory, visit to Battiston merely threw the goalkeeper’s crass behaviour into still greater relief.
For what it mattered, Poland won the game 3–2, thus taking their second third place in the space of three World Cups. Girard, brought into the depleted French midfield, scored a fine individual goal after thirteen minutes, but the pitiful goalkeeping of Castaneda allowed first Szarmach, a hero of 1974, then Majewski, after the keeper missed a corner, to make the score 2–1 in the minutes before half-time.
Castaneda, in the depths of a nightmare, gave Kupcewicz a goal direct from a free kick immediately after half-time, and though Tigana’s admirable pass launched Couriol for the second French goal seventeen minutes from the end, the Poles ran out winners.
Who would play in the Final? Rummenigge? Antognoni? Fischer? Hrubesch? Frantic attempts to get the unlucky Antognoni fit were in vain; when the teams took the field, the Fiorentina inside-forward was sitting behind the Press Box at the Bernabeu Stadium. In the event, Enzo Bearzot decided daringly, even if it may not at first have seemed so, not to attempt to replace Antognoni with a similar player—and who was there? Certainly not the still inexperienced Dossena and certainly not the pedestrian, defensive Marini—but to give the 18-year-old Bergomi another chance. Since Derwall, after immense Sturm und Drang in the German camp, decided to let Karl-Heinz Rummenigge start the game, Bearzot was able to put Bergomi on him. The young Inter defender’s cool resourcefulness might have allowed him to dominate even a fully fit Rummenigge, but the hobbling player we saw in the Bernabeu Stadium presented him with an easy evening.
To the tender mercies of Gentile was confined, not Rummenigge, but the little winger Pierre Littbarski. The Germans chose Dremmler in their midfield again, Hansi Muller as a substitute who eventually came on for Rummenigge a mere nine minutes from the end, and Fischer rather than Hrubesch at centre-forward.
After the fiasco of Gonella’s refereeing in Buenos Aires four years earlier, it was no reassurance to learn that the uncertain Brazilian, Senhor Coelho, would be given the job. The obvious choice was Abraham Klein, the Israeli who had made such an excellent job of the potentially cataclysmic Italy-Brazil game, just as he had made such a fine job of the Argentina-Italy game in the River Plate Stadium in the previous tournament. But the Referees’ Committee, pleased with itself and as incompetent as ever, compromised pathetically by assigning Klein to … the replay. Which, in parenthesis, was scheduled for Barcelona, another decision calculated, if it were implemented, to create the maximum confusion given the insufficiency of Spanish administration and communications. Breitner had not been wrong.
Coelho had made a poor fist of refereeing the match between West Germany and England on the same ground; there was no reason to hope that he would do any better in the colossal tension of a World Cup Final. Mean-spirited, over physical, negative, largely unadventurous, a throwback to the times of Sepp Herberger rather than to the more adventurous, open times of Helmut Schoen, the West German team was well- equipped to retort to anything the Italians threw at them in kind. So, predictably, we saw a wretched first half, in which each team was chiefly concerned to stop the other playing. True, the Italians squandered a penalty kick, but that was one of the very few decent chances created in forty-five minutes which were given their tone when Bruno Conti, almost immediately, fouled and felled his man.
The best you could say for Senhor Coelho was that he wasn’t as bad as Signor Gonella, but then he did not have to compete with the frenzied atmosphere of the River Plate Stadium, its huge crowd united behind the home team.
Perhaps a fit Rummenigge would have scored as early as the fourth minute. When Breitner centred and Fischer moved the ball on, Rummenigge, turning on the ball, had perhaps more time than he realised. His shot was hurried, and a bemused Italian defence was glad to see it fly past the post.
Three minutes later Graziani was tackled and, falling, exacerbated the shoulder injury which had forced him off the field in the semi-final against Poland. Though Bearzot would clearly have preferred to use a substitute much later, given the possibility of extra time, he knew that he had the right man in waiting. On went the Big Pin, Altobelli, who had done so well when he took Graziani’s place against Poland. He might not be so robust, but his technique and movement were substantially better.
Gradually, the game began to be something rather more than a mosaic of ill will and sullen fouling. After twenty-four minutes, one of those fouls, a singularly futile one, gave the Italians a penalty. Altobelli crossed, little Conti went in for the ball and the gigantic Briegel, his direct opponent, lurched in and brought him down. A penalty, instantly and correctly given. Up in the stand sat Antognoni, whose powerful right foot would have taken it. Instead, it fell to the left foot of the left-back Cabrini who sent his shot feebly wide of the post. It was a tribute to the morale of the Italians, of Bearzot’s benign influence over them, that they should not then go to pieces.
The rest of the first half was eminently forgettable, though Stielike’s dreadful foul on Oriali, four minutes from half-time, is easily remembered. As the stocky little Inter midfielder, a busy, straightforward man of all work, raced for goal, Stielike brought him down on the edge of the box with a violent body check. It was a foul worthy of expulsion, one which, in the context of the coming English season, would have led to automatic dismissal. But all the Italians got was a free kick of no value. Stielike, amazingly, was not even shown the yellow cautionary card.
The closest the Germans came to scoring was ten minutes earlier, when Fischer would have scored but for a splendid saving clearance by Collovati. A couple of minutes before half-time, Kaltz, who had frightened Greenwood to death but scarcely troubled Bearzot and Italy at all, finally got over a centre but Dremmler shot over the bar.
So to half-time and, it is said, a veritable Götterdämmerung in the West German dressing-room, with Stielike violently condemning the choice of the injured Rummenigge, and Rummenigge in turn allegedly asking another German player to hit him!
The game would finally and fortunately be unblocked after eleven minutes of the second half, and it was most appropriate that Rossi should be the scorer, Tardelli the very motor of the team in midfield, the man who took the initial free kick. Perhaps it was less expected that Gentile, who could always play good football when he wanted, should himself be centrally involved.
By an immense irony, it was a foul by Rummenigge—dropping deep into his own territory—on Oriali, who deserved some consolation, which made the goal possible. Tardelli very quickly and percipiently nudged
the ball to Gentile on the right. Gentile’s cross found the German defence uncharacteristically bemused. Past Altobelli and Cabrini it went, but not past Rossi. Once again, the little centre-forward had exquisitely timed his run. In he dashed from the left, untrammeled and unobserved, to head inexorably past Schumacher. Now, at least and at last, the Germans would have to come out looking for a goal; and one hoped the Italians would not retire into their shells to avoid one.
They didn’t. The good, progressive habits briefly inculcated in Barcelona would endure. On the hour, Dremmler was booked for a foul on Oriali; ironic, again, when one considered what Stielike had disgracefully got away with. Dremmler lasted only another couple of minutes; then Derwall brought his sharpest critic, Horst Hrubesch, on. The Italians simply moved Collovati on to Hrubesch instead of Fischer and played on, untroubled, happy with the space that the increasingly anxious Germans were now vouchsafing them, making light of their lack of a midfield general in the steps of Antognoni, Rivera and Mazzola, and getting little trouble from Littbarski, locked in the bulldog grip of Gentile.
Hrubesch, quickly into the game, had a header pounced on by Zoff—better on his line than when it came to dealing with crosses, perhaps no surprise at 40 years of age. Then Zoff, under great pressure, grasped a cross by Briegel at the second attempt.
The killer goal came four minutes later, in the sixty-eighth minute. Conti began the movement, Scirea broke out of defence up the right to make the extra man, and sweetly exchanged passes with Paolo Rossi. Over came the ball and just as Tardelli seemed to have lost possession, he struck it with an acrobatic shot which tore past a wholly helpless Schumacher. It was a goal worthy to win a World Cup Final; and there was still another Italian goal to come.
Ten minutes from time, the massive Briegel goes thundering into the Italian penalty area, where he topples like a forest giant. The ball is played out to little Conti, who roars away up the right with inexhaustible energy—the energy, perhaps, conveyed by that muscle stimulant. More than half the length of the field he goes, till at last he pulls the ball across the German goal. The German defence is scattered to the winds. Altobelli, the Big Pin, coolly stops the ball, advances, and beats Schumacher in his own good time. 3–0.
The Story of the World Cup Page 31