THIS fantastic series continues next Sunday with Italy at 10 pm.
World Cup Stories is an adult sports documentary with an intelligent script !
How rare is that?
I love a programme that tells me things I don’t know.
It was nice to see Raymond Kopa, the son of a Pole, talking about his legendary strike partner, Just Fontaine, who scored 13 goals in the 1958 World Cup Finals.
Kopa might have said, “I knew where he wanted to run.” But he said something slightly different. Kopa actually said, “He knew where I wanted to pass.”
I didn’t know that Aime Jacquet was managing Bordeaux in 1982 and didn’t know that Helmut Schoen was originally an East German.
In the 1982 World Cup in Spain there was an unforgettable sporting atrocity when France were drawing 1-1 with Germany and keeper Harald Schumacher elbowed substitute Patrick Battiston outside the box.
That was the most psychotic foul I’ve ever seen on a football field. Battiston was knocked unconscious, left the field on a stretcher, lost teeth, had his vertebrae damaged, and could have been killed. Schumacher should have been sent off and banned for life but Dutch ref Corver didn’t even give him a yellow card.
France then led 3-1 but eventually lost on penalties and their players were devastated.Some of them played for Bordeaux, where Jacquet had always told his players : If you’re leading by two goals, slow it down a bit, spoil it a bit.
Sixteen years after that trauma in Seville, Aime Jacquet healed the pain with a team of strong characters and phenomenal athletes, most of them the sons of immigrants : Zidane, Thuram, Desailles, Karembeu, Vieira and Henry.
Last night’s Germany episode focussed mainly on 1954 and 1974.The Germans had not been allowed to compete in the 1948 Olympics or the 1950 World Cup, which added to their feelings of shame and guilt. So in 1954, when West Germany beat the Hungary of Puskas in Switzerland, they lifted the morale of the war-shattered German nation.
Sepp Herberger had been their manager before the war and had made sure his players were given less dangerous postings. His assistant Helmut Schoen had escaped from East Germany just in time.
In their third group game in 1974, West Germany had been drawn to play East Germany in Hamburg and Jurgen Sparwassser scored the only goal of the game, one I remember clearly.
Here we saw Sparwasser, now a grey-haired fiftysomething, describing how he ran after a ball into the box. He wanted the ball to bounce up and hit him on the chest but it struck him on the nose, rebounded in a way that wrong-footed the last defender, and he fired it past Sepp Maier.
That defeat was traumatic for the West Germans and goal keeper Maier and others sat up till 3 am, drinking and talking with Schoen, who said, “There’s no point. I’m going home now.I can’t expose myself to this any longer.”
It was a unique moment in German football history and it was more unique for Helmut Schoen than anybody else.The pressure was just too much, especially for an East German exile. From that point on, unknown to the German public or the media, skipper Franz Beckenbauer took over, made the calls, and they went on to meet Holland in the final.
The German players, locked away in a training camp that was like a prison, thought the long-haired Dutch players were “like hippies on the field.” They looked like rock stars, enjoyed parties after every game with their wives and girlfriends
In the final, English referee Jack Taylor gave a penalty in 80 seconds when Cruyff was tripped by Uli Hoeness just inside the box and Neeskens blasted it in for 1-0. The first German to touch the ball was Maier when he picked it out of the net.
Unfortunately, Jack Taylor gave a penalty to cheating winger Bernd Holzenbein for a dive which was a replica of one he had done against Poland in the semi-final. As always, history is written by the winners. Poland were almost as good as Holland in 1974 but they never get a mention.
What’s the overall message of this wonderful series? As we go into another World Cup, what does the series about previous winners tell us?
Mostly that it’s always very hard to win it. It’s never easy. Watching France, Argentina and Germany, we saw that it’s never easy.
It takes a special nerve, a special spirit, a special collective determination, a special degree of self- sacrifice by a squad of players, to win a World Cup.If you don’t have that belief, that desire, forget it. Yes, you need a bit of luck. But you have to be good enough to make your own luck.