Sweet Sweet, The Memories You Gave Me

roughly six weeks ago, a few days before the start of France 98, a friend and I had a lengthy telephone conversation, during which we agreed upon several key incidents that we felt would take place during the 16th World Cup finals.

Donning our sportswriters’ mortar-boards and settling comfortably into our Brian Glanville fantasies, we arrived at the joint conclusions that Brazil would reach the final; that France would go out on penalties, probably at the semi-final stage; that England would win their group before bombing out in the quarter-finals; that only one African team would get through the group stages; that one Asian team, perhaps South Korea, would make it into the last 16; and that Italy and Argentina would be there or thereabouts when it mattered.

A mere two of these six possibilities occurred, which says more for the drama quotient of this World Cup than it does for our powers of prophecy. And yet, with the possible exception of Croatia’s 3-0 victory over Germany in the quarter-finals, there was not a single scoreline during France 98 which could remotely be classes as a seismic “shock”.

France 98, if it stood for anything at all, represented a consolidation of the world’s major footballing power-bases. The last eight consisted of six European sides and the two big South American dreadnoughts, and only the Danes would have been mildly startled to find themselves still involved at that stage of the competition.

Tactically, it is hard to draw many lessons from this World Cup, unless you are a USA fan and/or one of those unfortunate souls who sit on FIFA committees, being paid to work out how many goals came from corner-kicks and so forth.

At least we got a final contested between the two best teams in the tournament. France used several mutating variations on 4-4-2 for almost the entire competition, switching only to 4-3-2-1 for their meaningless win over Denmark at the end of the group stages. Laurent Blanc, a player who has spent most of his career as a stylish sweeper, was used as a centre-back, while Lilian Thuram, usually a central defender for Parma, moved out to the right flank.

Much was made of France’s inadequacies up front, and it is true that some of their finishing against Brazil was embarrassing, but although their main centre-forward, Stéphane Guivarc’h, experienced a massive and sudden loss of form, he was hardly facilitated by having to spend most of his time on the pitch haring after opposition full-backs and chasing lost causes (and don’t forget that he picked up an injury in France’s first match as well). What was best for the team was not necessarily best for him, which is probably why he finished France 98 without a goal to his name.

It has been evident for some years that France, along with Italy, possess the best defence in Europe and perhaps the world. What was less clear-cut was the oscillating standard of their midfield. Thierry Henry illuminated the early games before being dropped in favour of the rather more pragmatic Karembeu; Zinedine Zidane flitted in and out of proceedings to intermittently brilliant effect before dominating the final completely; Emmanuel Petit overcame a quiet start to develop into one of the best players in the competition; and Deschamps rivalled Edgar Davids as the tackler of the tournament.

Brazil’s tactical formation (though not their approach) was ostensibly the same as France’s, or at least it would have been a 4-4-2 had Rivaldo not commendably insisted on joining the forward line for much of the tournament. Indeed, Mario Zagallo’s substitutions during the final against France, coupled with Rivaldo’s increasing encroachment into the French penalty area, resulted in Brazil having only a one-man midfield (Dunga) for most of the second half. This, and not the numerous unforced errors of Júnior Baiano, is why Guivarc’h was given enough goalscoring chances to complete a hat-trick before his eventual substitution.

Brazil also displayed an over-reliance on hitting long diagonal passes across the field (usually towards their overlapping right-back Cafú), which France were able to easily telegraph in the final. Since their defeat by France, the talk has centred on Ronaldo’s troubled mental state and his failure to touch the ball more than four times in the whole match, which conveniently ignores the aforementioned depletion of Brazil’s midfield, not to mention the reluctance of their full-backs to stay at home and mind the house instead of relentlessly charging upfield all the time.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to suppress a smile when recalling Ronaldo’s sheer hubris (fuelled, perhaps, by the millions of Nike dollars bankrolling his every public utterance). He certainly created a rod for his own back before the tournament by boasting that he would shatter Just Fontaine’s World Cup record of 13 goals in six games; he managed four in seven matches.

My abiding memory of Ronaldo in this tournament is of an incident which didn’t actually result in a goal. His incredible run from the right side of the penalty area against Scotland in the opening match, tying four defenders in knots before forcing a wonderful one-handed save from Jim Leighton, was one of the most exhilarating moments of France 98. A pity that he didn’t get away with that sort of stuff more often.

What of the other pre-tournament favourites? It is easy to blame Germany’s demise on their collective age (they possessed the oldest squad of all 32 finalists), but the real cause of their downfall would appear to be that they couldn’t adjust from their usual prosaic brand of play when they had to, instead depending excessively on the aerial power of Oliver Bierhoff.

The Spanish paid very dearly for dozing off against Nigeria, while Holland made it as far as they were equipped to do, and ran out of gas just at the crucial moment. Italy’s deficiencies in the centre of the park eventually caught up with them – of all the teams who reached the knockout stages, perhaps only Paraguay had a less creative midfield – but it’s still worth speculating what a fully fit Alessandro Del Piero would have done. It’s worth remembering that he is still only 23, and like Ronaldo, his time will surely come.

Argentina were many people’s pre-competition favourites, including mine, but it is still hard to know what to make of them. They were a little fortunate to see off England in the manner they did, yet rather unlucky to go out to the Dutch, who they subjugated for long periods. The feeling persists that they had it in them to do to Brazil what France did, but now we’ll never know.

Of the two British teams, I wrote at length about England’s plight in the last issue of HP, but it is instructive to note how their cumulative showing in France 98 was interpreted as a nobly heroic failure, while Scotland were reviled like beasts for what basically amounted to 21/2 decent displays and a calamitous second half in their final game.

At the interval against Morocco, only 1-0 down and with 45 fine minutes behind them, there seemed to be no reason why Scotland should not go on and save the game. That they promptly conceded one of the softest goals of the tournament, to Abdeljilil Hadda, said less about their footballing abilities than it did about their mental state going into the game. The Germans have come back from two-goal deficits so many times that they now feel it is somehow in them to do so; similarly, it is so common for Scotland to die roaring in a World Cup finals match that, when they reached the 20-minute mark against Morocco without going behind, alarm bells must have started ringing in their heads as to why the fun hadn’t started yet.

Last January, Scotland were handed a fairly facile qualifying group in the Euro 2000 preliminaries (Czech Republic, Bosnia, Lithuania) so we can presumably look forward to more of the same suicidal mayhem in two years’ time. England, on the other hand, have Michael Owen, and they seem fairly content with that.

If you split the field of 32 teams along regional lines, the France 98 picture becomes slightly less muddled. All five African teams, for instance, bombed out within the first fortnight of the competition. Tunisia plainly never had a hope of reaching round two; Cameroon can legitimately point to a shocking refereeing decision they suffered against Chile; Morocco lost out not because of Norway’s late penalty against Brazil, but because the abysmal Benzekri’s feeble goalkeeping betrayed them against the Scandinavians; South Africa looked well out of their depth; and Nigeria simply took a little longer to get found out than the others did. None of the quintet did the continent’s cause any good.

The performances of the Asian sides, similarly, raises questions as to why two of them (Japan and South Korea) will be granted automatic entry to the next World Cup. Only the Koreans seemed to have anything to offer at all, playing an attractive pass-and-move game that would surely have brought a reward against Mexico if their goalscorer hadn’t foolishly got himself sent off. They did the tournament a big favour by eliminating the dismal Belgians, and will surely be stronger in 2002.

That’s not something you could necessarily say about Japan, who might have achieved more with a less powderpuff forward line. Saudi Arabia contributed nothing to the tournament whatsoever, while Iran would have been totally unwatchable but for the effervescent contributions of their right-sided midfielder Mehdi Mahdavikia.

They weren’t the only ones; four or five other teams stood out from the pack by dint of their utter refusal to engage in anything that might involve enterprise, innovation, spirit or risk-taking. Even a team as good as Yugoslavia got in on the act, for Christ’s sake. Most of them, mercifully, went home after the first round, though the mind boggles as to what a team like Austria or Belgium is doing at the World Cup finals while the Czechs, Portuguese, Ukrainians and Russians (and, at a stretch, the Peruvians) sit at home gobbling their popcorn.

As always, though, the bottom line is entertainment. After the sheer screamingly awful tedium of Italia 90, the heat-sapped exhaustion of USA 94, and the dreary sterilities of Euro 96, this tournament came as a welcome explosion of goals and drama. For every piece of Croatian maggot-acting, there were several cameos of brilliance. For every sly dive, there was a coruscating Oliseh shot, a thunderous Desailly challenge or a flying Chilavert save. Perhaps more importantly, we were served up the best final since 1978.

If the Premiership still holds greater visceral appeal for you after this World Cup, then go off and tend to your Sky dish, and leave the rest of us with our memories. We have little enough to keep us going now that it’s all over.