World In Motion
World In Motion
First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2018.
First Edition.
deCoubertin Books, Studio I, Baltic Creative Campus, Liverpool, L1 OAH
www.decoubertin.co.uk
eISBN: 978-1909245655
Republic of Ireland edition: 978-1-909245-78-5
Copyright © Simon Hart, 2018.
The right of Simon Hart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Cover design by Thomas Regan/Milkyone.
Images by Peter Robinson Football Archive.
Typeset by Leslie Priestley.
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FOR MUM
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FIRST ROUND
The big bang
Island games, Part 1 – England
Island games, Part 2 – Republic of Ireland
Tico high, Tartan low
Walls come tumbling down, Part 1 – USSR
Walls come tumbling down, Part 2 – Romania
American dreamers
Arab adventures, Part 1 – United Arab Emirates
Arab adventures, Part 2 – Egypt
KNOCKOUT
Boys from nowhere, Part 1 – Totò Schillaci
Boys from nowhere, Part 2 – Roger Milla
Bilardo and the wild bunch
Legends in their own living room
Nothing compares to youse
The Lions’ last roar
Before the divorce
The Brazilians of Europe
FINALE
Agony and ecstasy
Tears in Turin
Wind of change
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
There are smirks on the top table as Sophia Loren delves into Pot 1 at the draw ceremony.
‘The referee really got it wrong’ – Cameroon’s Benjamin Massing on André Kana-Biyik’s red card, though Claudio Caniggia would beg to differ.
Cyrille Makanaky departs with a smile and a clenched first after Cameroon’s stunning opening win.
Italia ’90 general manager Luca Cordero di Montezemolo with then FIFA general secretary Sepp Blatter.
‘He seemed to be talking as if everyone was going there to cause trouble’ – England fan embassy leader Craig Brewin on UK minister for Sport Colin Moynihan (second from right).
‘No football please, we’re British’ – Gazzetta dello Sport headline after England’s draw with the Republic of Ireland.
‘The Irish fans simply had no interest in being hooligans’ – Irish writer Colm Tóibín.
‘He had tremendous charisma. When he arrived, it really surprised us that he had so much information’ – Costa Rica coach Bora Milutinović, as described by Alexandre Guimarães.
Austria’s Klaus Lindenberger adds fashion crimes to excessive time-wasting on the charge sheet against 1990 goalkeepers.
‘We never paid attention to physical power – technique was the number one’ – Dragan Stojković (left) on Yugoslavia’s secret.
‘I shouldn’t have even been on the bench but in the stand’ – Totò Schillaci prepares to take the pitch against USA.
‘I heard Bergomi, Ferri, Maldini, and Baresi yell at each other and I thought, “Ah shit, I don’t care what the result is, I’m doing something right!”’ – USA’s Bruce Murray, pictured challenging Giuseppe Bergomi.
West Germany full-back Thomas Berthold takes a tumble against the UAE.
‘Rijkaard’s a quiet guy. I don’t know what happened to him. He lost his mind’ – Thomas Berthold on the Dutchman’s dismissal for spitting.
René Higuita is left flat on his back as Roger Milla outwits him to score.
‘I was a complete goalkeeper – today, I’d be in a team like Barcelona’ – Colombia goalkeeper René Higuita.
Packie Bonner smiles after saving Daniel Timofte’s spot-kick.
‘Andy Townsend and Tony Cascarino ran from the halfway line into the penalty box and jumped on top of me, and there was still another penalty to be taken’ – Republic of Ireland goalkeeper Packie Bonner.
‘I remember falling on my knees, thinking “What’s just happened?”’ – David Platt, the man at the bottom of the pile of England players after scoring against Belgium.
‘My agent said, “You didn’t score a goal, but at least everybody will remember that moment.” It’s true – nobody forgets your red card!’ – Czechoslovakia’s Ľubomír Moravčík on his quarter-final dismissal.
‘We went there totally relaxed – we went out and laid on the pitch before the game watching Argentina play in the other quarter-final on the big screen’ – Ireland captain Mick McCarthy on the pre-match scenes before facing Italy.
‘If you ever see it, he’s got a black eye, and I think that one’s down to me’ – Mick McCarthy on Totò Schillaci.
Jack Charlton bids farewell to Italia ’90 after Ireland’s defeat in Rome.
Cameroon goalkeeper Thomas Nkono is booked for protesting the award of Gary Lineker’s winning penalty.
‘Diego in our hearts, Italy in our chants’ – The message on the banner promising the Naples crowd’s support for the Azzurri against Argentina.
‘It was the most important save of my life – it changed my relationship with the world’ – Argentina’s Sergio Goycochea on his semi-final penalty save from Aldo Serena.
‘There was a black hand at work’ – Diego Maradona’s lament at the end of Argentina’s campaign … and the strain is already showing on semi-final night.
The England dressing room at the Stadio delle Alpi.
‘We actually played the best football of the tournament in that game’ – England captain Terry Butcher leads his team out in Turin.
‘He’d express himself. That’s what Gazza did in that 1990 World Cup. He just expressed himself. He wasn’t afraid of the competition. He just went out and enjoyed himself’ – England midfielder Bryan Robson.
Bobby Robson watches from the bench as England’s fate is sealed.
Rudi Völler and Jürgen Kohler celebrate with an embrace.
‘The Argentina players started from the first foul in the opening minutes to say they’d been told FIFA didn’t want them to win the World Cup’ – Referee Edgardo Codesal on the mood even before he sent off two Argentinians.
In a nod to the future, the closing ceremony had fireworks – and toga-wearing models.
‘With players from the East joining, the German team will be unbeatable. I’m sorry about that for the rest of the world’ – West Germany coach Franz Beckenbauer’s famous post-final quote.
Luciano Pavarotti and Italy coach Azeglio Vicini play the role of spectators on final night.
INTRODUCTION
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW. IT IS THE EVE OF THE 2018 WORLD CUP finals draw and it is hard to imagine a more alluring location as I leave behind St. Basil’s Cathedral and approach the red-brick, fifteenth-century Spasskaya Tower. For the world’s press, this tower, built into the huge wall that marks the western edge of Red Square, is the route into the Kremlin, the traditional heart of Russian power. I pass the guard at the foot of the giant gate and step through into the snow-laden interior.
English-language signs for ‘Media Centre’ lead past a line of gold-domed churches and cathedrals and on to the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses: a place built for Communist Party gatherings but tomorrow the setting for Gary Lineker, the main draw presenter, and his support cast of fellow World Cup greats to pick the balls and chart the way ahead for the 32 teams at Russia 2018.
Another global showpiece awaits, with all its joys and controversies, but this is not the reason I am here. Instead, as I stand in the media zone waiting for Fabio Cannavaro, Italy’s 2006 World Cup-winning captain and one of Lineker’s draw assistants, my thoughts are on a tournament receding into an ever distant past.
Italia ’90 is further away today than the 1966 World Cup, England’s moment of glory, was in 1990. For any English football fan over the age of 35, though, the mere mention of Paul Gascoigne’s tears and Luciano Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ and the national team’s thrill-ride to the semi-finals can still make the soul smile.
As a journalist, I have covered World Cups on four different continents, from Japan to Brazil via Germany and South Africa, but none prompts the same stirrings of nostalgia as that 1990 tournament – seen, in my case, through seventeen-year-old eyes in the lounge of the family home in Liverpool.
When Fabio Cannavaro stops to speak to me, it becomes clear that Italia ’90 cast its spell on him too. He was certainly closer to the action as a sixteen-year-old ball boy inside the Stadio San Paolo in Naples on the night Argentina broke the hopes and hearts of the hosts in a semi-final just as dramatic as the one between England and West Germany.
‘Of course I cried,’ he remembers, flashing his Colgate smile. ‘I was a child with a lot of passion.’
The purpose of this book is to examine the impact of Italia ’90 across the globe and Cannavaro is one name on a long list of more than a hundred people I spoke to who witnessed at first hand the power and emotion of that World Cup 28 years ago.
It was a tournament which took place at a pivotal moment in the sport’s evolution; the advent of the Premier League and Champions League was around the corner, the influence of television was growing, and the world of football was about to become a much smaller place. In a sense, it acted as both a last hurrah and a searchlight on the future. It had a direct impact on the way the game would be packaged and played in the decades to follow.
To gauge fully this impact, I travelled to eleven countries over a period of ten months, an itinerary which included Cameroon, whose footballers emerged as the darlings of the tournament.
‘The victory of a whole continent’ is how the Cameroon Tribune described their victory over Argentina in the opening match – the first for any sub-Saharan African nation at a World Cup and the cue for a groundbreaking run to the quarter-finals. FIFA responded by guaranteeing greater representation thenceforth for the countries of CAF, the African confederation. ‘Their demand is justified,’ declared Franz Beckenbauer, West Germany’s coach. ‘The Africans have caught up.’
To emphasise the excitement that must have shaken Cameroon, this was the first time its twelve million people – the population in 1990 – had been able to follow their team’s World Cup matches live on television.
They were not alone in taking a big step forward. Tournament newcomers Costa Rica and the Republic of Ireland both progressed to the knockout rounds. It was a World Cup of consequence too for the United States, restored to the world’s elite after a forty-year absence, and the United Arab Emirates, who gained a deeper understanding of the sport’s soft power.
As for Europe’s Eastern Bloc nations, competing in Italy as seismic changes unfolded with the Iron Curtain’s collapse, it was a moment for a generation of footballers when old realities crumbled and new doors opened – and some of the personal testimonies gathered, on journeys to Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Balkans, evoke a lingering bittersweetness.
It was a World Cup with more novelties than most: Fair Play flags, statistics on our TV screens (RAI, the host broadcaster, offered a table at the end of each half listing shots on goal, saves, corners, fouls and offsides), and England’s first-ever penalty shootout. It also heralded significant changes to the Laws of the Game – a point underlined to me in an illuminating interview in Zurich with Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president.
One of my most memorable encounters was with Totò Schillaci, Italy’s bolt-from-the-blue centre-forward who won the Golden Boot for his six goals at his home World Cup – yet scored only one other international goal in his entire career. Schillaci, a Sicilian then more at ease speaking in his regional dialect than Italian, explained one autumn afternoon in Palermo his struggles to cope with the attention his feats attracted, and it is difficult to imagine a World Cup footballer today, with their cottage-industry entourages, suffering in this way. (Oliver Bierhoff, the Germany team manager, today uses the term ‘independent entrepreneur’ for his players.)
Similarly, Roger Milla’s story has a thick slice of romance that would be virtually impossible to find reproduced in 2018. It is a story he recounted to me at his home in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, remembering how he stepped out of semi-retirement on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion to lead defences a merry dance with the Indomitable Lions.
Another highlight was lunch at a restaurant in Argentina named Italia ’90, and owned by Sergio Goycochea, the man who began the World Cup as the Albiceleste reserve goalkeeper and ended it as hero of two penalty shootouts.
It is these human stories, combined with the transformative background events, which make Italia ’90 so compelling. It is a tournament whose participants, I learned, inspired a Costa Rican film and a Czech play. Irish writer Roddy Doyle set his novel The Van against the backdrop of World Cup mania in Dublin, where half a million people turned out to welcome back Jack Charlton’s team. (Such was the hold of the tournament on Ireland that the Limerick Leader, seeking the advice of a local pharmacist, ran a front-page article afterwards headlined ‘World Cup fever could lead to withdrawal symptoms’.)
In England, there was An Evening with Gary Lineker, the play by Arthur Smith and Chris England centred on a group of friends sat around watching England’s semi-final match. Smith tells me, ‘It was a more insulated world then. There wasn’t football on the telly all the time, so any individual game that was on had a greater impact and you’d all gather and watch it together.’
A World Cup then came with a Christmas-morning tingle. Four whole years had passed since Mexico ’86 and the last month of wall-to-wall football on television.
In the words of journalist Adrian Tempany, writing in And the Sun Shines Now, his outstanding book on the Hillsborough disaster and football’s development thereafter, ‘… its magic belonged to another age, one of scarcity and rarity.’
In my research, I heard a resonant line from ITV commentator John Helm, who, early in the Cameroon-Romania group-stage match in Bari, told his viewers: ‘Cameroon today [are] playing in green shirts, red shorts and yellow stockings. It’s not often we see anything like that in England.’
He was right. The World Cup was an explosion of colour into our living rooms. In the 1989/90 season, not a single European club competition match was broadcast live on the BBC or ITV – not even the European Cup final. To the football watcher born after 1990, after the arrival of football’s satellite age, the rarity factor cannot be overstated.
During the English season leading up to Italia ’90, there were twelve domestic top-flight matches broadcast live, compared with 168 in 2017/18. Moreover, the armchair viewer had to wait until 29 October 1989 and the meeting of Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, fully ten weeks into the season, for the first live match.
Arsenal and Liverpool had produced the most gripping finish to any league season the previous May with the north London side’s last-gasp, title-grabbing 2-0 victory at Anfield. It was a match broadcast live by ITV on a Friday night but it had evidently not altered the thinking of the rights holder, who considered that people were more likely to stay at home and watch football once the clocks had gone back and the longer nights had set in.
For its part, the BBC screened eight FA Cup ties live that season – including, for the first time, both semi-finals on the same day. With the Liverpool-Crystal Palace and Manchester United-Oldham Athletic matches yielding thirteen goals between them, this was the first Super Sunday before the phrase had even tripped off the tongue of a Sky Sports executive. (And like that 1989 Liverpool-Arsenal classic, it provides a loud call for nuance from those drawn to a simplistic, Year Zero reading of the subsequently remodelled game).
For European football enthusiasts, meanwhile, the only continental action came from Wednesday night highlights on BBC’s Sportsnight or ITV’s Midweek Sports Special.
If there was little international club football on our television sets, so there were few players from abroad in the old First Division. On the last weekend of 1989/90, just fifteen players involved came from beyond the British Isles. Only two would go to the World Cup: Sweden’s Glenn Hysén and Roland Nilsson, then with Liverpool and Sheffield Wednesday respectively. The World Cup in 1990 seemed like a voyage of discovery.
The first World Cup tournament I had embraced, the first such voyage of discovery, had been España ’82. I once sat in the manager’s office at Wycombe Wanderers’ training ground and heard Gareth Ainsworth, who, like me, had turned nine in the weeks leading up that World Cup, reminisce about running out of his house to replay the action in the back garden of his family home in Blackburn.
I still recall my own fascination with the Radio Times’ 1982 World Cup preview magazine. There was the exciting discovery, made while poring over it on a bench on the promenade at Grange-over-Sands, that there was a team in Chile called Everton. The El Salvador team profile, meanwhile, contained a grim account of the death of one of their players: shot by guerrillas, with his body found dumped in a dustbin. I was hooked.
There were also hours spent playing the England World Cup record, ‘This Time (We’ll Get It Right)’, and Scotland’s admittedly superior ‘We Have A Dream’. Eight years on, I went down to Woolworths and bought an even better record, New Order’s ‘World In Motion’.
The fact the 1990 finals were taking place in Italy had enhanced the anticipation. This was a place where everything felt bigger and better: the United States of Football. As the introductory voiceover in FIFA’s official film of the tournament put it: ‘Italy had become the spiritual home of the modern game.’
Italy had the teams – AC Milan, Juventus and Sampdoria completed a clean sweep of 1990’s European prizes – and it had the stadiums too, five of them with capacities upwards of fifty thousand. Champions Milan recorded an average attendance of 57,890 in that 1989/90 season when Old Trafford’s 39,077 was as good as it got for the English game.
As for the continental competitions, the old First Division’s finest were still in the chill of exile following the ban put in place after the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster.
So much was different then, and stepping back into the Palazzetto dello Sport for the World Cup finals draw on 9 December 1989 demonstrates the point.
Luciano Pavarotti – the big, beaming tenor with the big, booming voice – performs ‘O Sole Mio’ and ‘Nessun Dorma’, while Sophia Loren brings some bouffant-haired Hollywood glamour. On ball-picking duties is a cast of World Cup winners: Pelé, Bobby Moore, Daniel Passarella, and – in outrageous, Dynasty-style shoulder pads – Bruno Conti.
Giorgio Moroder, the Italian record producer and songwriter, is present too. His freshly composed official tournament song, ‘To Be Number One’, gets an airing – as does ‘Notti Magiche’, the Italian version. More than one thousand journalists look on.
To the modern viewer, there is something endearingly unpolished about proceedings. The top tier of the auditorium is filled with schoolchildren who respond boisterously to the cues of presenter Pippo Baudo. They chant ‘Sophia’ at Signora Loren and, in a foretaste of his cartoon-villain role at Italia ’90, throw in a few whistles when Diego Maradona’s name is mentioned.
These whistles come during Loren’s brief Q&A with Baudo, an exchange noteworthy for its candour. After naming Maradona as her favourite player, she is asked to provide a tip for visitors to Italy and, with her reply, touches instead on the fear of hooliganism – a fear which had ensured, before a ball was picked, England’s presence out of harm’s reach on Sardinia. ‘I hope they come here with the mindset of tourists and not warriors,’ says Loren.
She even displays an ambivalence towards football which would have the sport’s PR machines combusting were it to happen now, when she is asked how much her children are looking forward to the World Cup: ‘My sons don’t really follow football.’
The feel of an old-fashioned Saturday night variety show is heightened by the appearance of the tournament’s stickman mascot – represented by eight lycra-suited dancers in tooth-paste stripes of green, white and red with half-footballs on their heads. His name, Ciao, was chosen following an eleven-week polling process involving over 30 million votes cast – and featuring the regrettable demise of rival contenders Bimbo and Dribbly.
One of the most intriguing sights is found directly behind Sepp Blatter, the twinkle-eyed, 53-year-old FIFA general secretary, as he conducts the draw ceremony itself. The backdrop shows the flags of the 24 competing countries. Above his left shoulder is the USSR; on the row below are Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia: all countries in a state of upheaval following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Seven months later, two days before the World Cup final, Nato declared a formal end to the Cold War. Never again would the names Czechoslovakia, USSR and West Germany appear on the World Cup map.
England’s own place on the football map would shift considerably too in the near three decades between Blatter apologising – in Italian and French – for conducting the 1990 draw in English and Gary Lineker’s turn as master of ceremonies in the Kremlin.
The national side’s enthralling run to the semi-finals of Italia ’90 and the drama of a shootout defeat by West Germany gave a sense of rebirth to the English game, with their clubs’ five-year exclusion from Europe brought officially to an end six days after that epic night in Turin.
England had begun the tournament deliberately detached from the mainland but if there were outbreaks of trouble in Cagliari, Rimini and Turin from their feared supporters, by the latter stages a different narrative had taken over as a cheeky-faced poster boy called Paul Gascoigne – a player of rare, game-changing spontaneity – led his team, and their hitherto vilified manager Bobby Robson, on a journey out from the shadows.
Italia ’90 fever at home grew with the progress of Robson’s side. In the wake of the quarter-final victory over Cameroon, off-licences and takeaway shops reported sales up by forty per cent.
Chris Waddle’s decisive penalty miss in the semi-final against West Germany was the cue for a record electricity surge of 2,800MW, the equivalent of 1,120,000 kettles being switched on at the same time – which is probably precisely what happened given the record estimated TV audience of 26.2 million. One tabloid newspaper reported that in Enfield, north London, a man had celebrated Gary Lineker’s semi-final goal by running through a glass patio door.
By the time it all finished, Fabio Cannavaro was not the only one watching who was ready to cry. My hope is that this book will explain just why Italia ’90 meant the world to so many people all around it – and why its legacy endures.
FIRST ROUND
The big bang
THE 1990 WORLD CUP BEGAN WITH A BANG. AND NOBODY FELT IT more than Claudio Caniggia. If Argentina 0 Cameroon 1 was the most seismic opening result of any World Cup, there is arguably no more famous a foul in finals history than the one Benjamin Massing, the west African nation’s huge central defender, effected on Caniggia, the long-haired Argentina forward, with two minutes remaining of the tournament’s curtain-raiser at the San Siro on 8 June 1990. It is certainly hard to think of a more laughably blatant one.
Not for Massing the sly rake of studs down calf or other such acts of cunningly disguised destructiveness. No, this was full-frontal stuff, cartoonish in its crudeness. It was like a mischievous Quentin Tarantino remake of that classic scene from the 1970s BBC comedy series Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em where the accident-prone Frank Spencer is flying down the street, out of control on a pair of roller skates. In that sequence, Spencer hurtles across a junction, zigzagging between a Mini and a Ford Capri, and then squeezes beneath the trailer of a passing truck. Here, the flying Caniggia evades two green shirts but then, splat – the haulage truck, aka Massing, flies into the frame and simply wipes him out.
‘It’s a nice thing for me,’ grins Massing. ‘Wherever I go, it’s, “Ah, he’s the one who did the tackle on Caniggia.” Everywhere. Everyone says it to me, even when I went to Equatorial Guinea a few years ago for the Cup of Nations. It’s what people recognise me for. So I have to say, it’s affection I get more than anything else, and if it was a source of money, I’d be a rich man.’
He begins his retelling of the incident with teammate Emmanuel Kundé, the first man in Caniggia’s path, and, as he puts it in French, ‘un partisan de la non-aggression’. It is not meant as a compliment. ‘He’d come off with his shirt spotless, just as he’d come on,’ he says with a frown. ‘Then I saw Victor [Ndip], who was my direct partner. We knew each other’s game well. He couldn’t get to him. When Caniggia hurdles him, I said, “Shit, this is dangerous.”’
The cheetah-quick Caniggia had originally picked the ball up five yards outside his own box. He had passed Kundé as he crossed the halfway line, then hurdled – just – the raised boot of Ndip.
Ndip’s nibble had left him striving to regain full balance and his head was down and arms flailing as Massing steamed in.
‘I was marking Diego [Maradona], but I left him,’ he adds. ‘I thought, “If he’s got time to get his balance and pass the ball, we’re stuffed.” That’s why I came in on him like a truck. I got to Caniggia and flew in on him. I wasn’t thinking that clearly. I was a bit wound up that he’d got past my two colleagues. Knowing that he was breaking clear, and about to get his head up, that was going to be dangerous.
‘And that’s why I really went for it.’
He really did. ‘No leavy go’ is what Massing’s defensive partner Ndip, from the Anglophone south-west of Cameroon, would shout at the French-speaking Massing in pidgin English during matches – don’t let him go. There was no leavy go for poor Caniggia.
Massing claims he once ran 100m in 10.1 seconds. In he flew, landing on the Argentinian’s left foot and sending him skidding across the turf.
Five Argentina players rushed over to protest to referee Michel Vautrot, as Massing bent down to pull back on the boot which had left his foot with the force of his challenge.
None of the World Cup’s thirteen previous opening matches had witnessed a red card. This one had now seen two, with Massing following teammate André Kana-Biyik into the dressing room. Kana-Biyik thought that the match must be over at the sight of his teammate. ‘He starts raising his arms and he’s expecting me to do the same,’ Massing recalls. ‘He says, “What’s going on?” so I tell him,
“No. They’ve sent me off too.”’
To underline the size of the shock witnessed by the crowd of 73,780 inside the San Siro that evening, it is worth noting that no team from south of the Sahara had ever won a World Cup finals match before.
Three Maghreb nations had – Tunisia in 1978, Algeria in 1982, and Morocco in 1986 – but this was a first for black Africa. And they had not beaten just any team. Rather, in front of 150 countries watching around the world, Cameroon had upset Diego Maradona’s Argentina; the holders felled by the 500-1 outsiders.
The impact of Senegal’s scalping of reigning champions France in the opening game of Korea/Japan 2002 does not compare. Then, Senegal had a starting XI made up entirely of players based in France (compared with just one Ligue 1 player for Les Bleus). Cameroon’s 1990 team, by contrast, included five home-based players – officially termed as amateurs.
Only five of their 22-man squad played top-level football abroad. François Omam-Biyik, their match-winner, had – like Massing – spent the preceding season in France’s second tier.
For Cameroon, it was the springboard for their history-making run to the quarter-finals. Moreover, it was an evening which set the tone perfectly for what was to follow at Italia ’90.
There was controversy, drama, brutality. There were pantomime heroes and villains. And, at the end of it, huge headlines.
To review the action through the softer prism of 21st-century sensibilities invites the occasional shudder – and sympathy for Maradona, who rises wearily off the turf more than once, with something approaching stoicism. The final foul count read Cameroon 28 Argentina 9. Each of substitute Caniggia’s first four runs earned a clattering, with Massing’s crushing contribution still to come.
Not that the crowd, who had whistled loudly through Argentina’s anthem, cared. The two red-carded Cameroonians left the pitch to cheers.
To the Milanese, Maradona, who had just taken the Serie A title down to Naples in the south of the peninsula, was the bogeyman.
When Napoli collapsed spectacularly – and, some suggested, suspiciously – in the 1988 title race, Maradona said, ‘Today, the racist Italy has won’. During Argentina’s preparatory camp in Austria, he had returned to the same theme, speaking of Napoli’s title triumph as ‘the revenge of the south against the racist north’.
The Argentina skipper mined the same seam with his sardonic response following this opening upset: ‘The only pleasure I got this afternoon was to discover that thanks to me, the people of Milan have stopped being racist. Today, for the first time, they supported the Africans.’
*
EDÉA LIES ON CAMEROON’S ROUTE NATIONALE 3 CONNECTING THE administrative capital, Yaoundé, set among the hills of the Central region, with Douala, the country’s main port in the south. It is a single-lane highway cut through a lush forest landscape. Or, as Martin Etongé, the local journalist sharing the back seat, sighs, ‘This is a death trap.’
The toll stops along the route feature cash collectors stood roadside in orange work coats. This is a country of bright colours – even the security guards wear yellow.
On the outskirts of Edéa, we reach the Hostellerie de la Sanaga, a hotel named after the river that flows behind it, a river running out into the Gulf of Guinea.
Tall, thin coconut trees frame the view.
The date is 28 April 2017. We are here to meet Benjamin Massing. He arrives in a Toyota Corolla which looks to have taken almost as many bumps as Diego Maradona did on that unforgotten evening in Milan.
He is now a chief of the Bakoko, the people native to Edéa. His business card explains he is a third-class chief and includes the honorific Sa Majesté – His Majesty – and he certainly looks the part.
Over his pale checked shirt he wears a black waistcoast complemented by a long, matching skirt. A large necklace hangs around his neck, displaying three lion teeth. He has a broad, handsome face and – belying the memory of that tackle – a surprisingly gentle manner.
Inside the hotel, a meeting of chiefs is about to begin, with the environmental impact of a local mining project on the agenda.
It is a role he combines with his vice-presidency of the national footballers’ union. ‘You have to settle disputes between members of your community,’ he explains. ‘At the end of a tribunal, you’ve got to make a ruling that’s fair for everybody.’
It was here in Edéa that three of Cameroon’s principal actors in the drama of 8 June 1990 shared their formative football moments. Massing and Kana-Biyik, the two defenders dismissed to the San Siro dressing room, became friends after the latter left his home village of Pouma, thirty miles away, to attend school in the town.
Kana-Biyik then introduced Massing to his younger brother, François. The man who would head the goal that stunned Argentina was already the owner of a prodigious leap, as Massing explains.
‘Omam-Biyik played his first match here because his older brother, Kana-Biyik, came to school here, and when there were days off, he’d come and stay with us for a couple of days. He’d stay a couple of nights – Friday, Saturday – and then go back to school on the Sunday. That was when we started to play. We started playing for a local club while still at the lycée. During the holidays, he said to us, “I’ve got a little brother, and he’s really good.”
‘At the time, François didn’t play as a forward; he was a libero. When we went to the inter-district competition, François came. We realised then that at every corner, he was the one jumping the highest to win the ball.’
It was in the 67th minute of Italia ’90’s opening match that the rest of the world discovered what Massing had seen as a teenager.
‘He had this timing,’ adds Massing. ‘He knew how to do it. I don’t think he’d ever jumped as high as that, though.’ There were only two Cameroon players against five defenders in the Argentina penalty box to attack a free-kick from the left flank. As the ball landed, Cyrille Makanaky, the dreadlocked midfielder, got a foot to it ahead of Néstor Lorenzo, sending it looping over to the far post.
There, Omam-Biyik, aided by the negligence of Roberto Sensini beside him, had a near-clear leap at the ball. Up he rose, hanging in the air. His header was tame, yet Nery Pumpido, Argentina’s goalkeeper, fell lazily onto the ball and it escaped beneath him. ‘Disaster for Pumpido,’ said Barry Davies, describing it to the BBC viewers.
The goal came six minutes after his brother’s red card for clipping the heels of Caniggia. Kana-Biyik blew three kisses to the crowd as he stepped off the pitch. The ten men became nine two minutes from the end.
By today’s standards it would be absurd to defend Cameroon’s tackling. Maradona did not manage a shot on goal that day, but he did suffer twelve fouls. It was in this climate of casual brutishness that FIFA decided, in the wake of Italia ’90, that enough was enough.
Massing does not hide the intent to intimidate. ‘We knew full well that Maradona wasn’t a player you could play against normally. He was somebody you had to brutalise a bit, so he’d lose a bit of heart. We knew that with Maradona, you had to hit him. It wasn’t all about finesse with him. He liked a battle. He didn’t say anything to you. He had the same logic.’
It is an extraordinarily frank insight into a defender’s mindset at the time. In truth, self-preservation might have been driving Maradona’s logic, as he reflected later in his autobiography, ‘Cameroon had really given us a kicking.’
And yet, in Cameroonian minds, there were question marks against the red cards. ‘For the first, for Kana-Biyik, the referee really got it wrong,’ Massing says of the straight red issued for a challenge that occurred forty yards from goal with another defender in close attendance.
‘In our era, we African footballers had a lot of problems with European referees. Maybe we played too hard. Maybe there were problems with racism. With Vautrot, it wasn’t the first time we had a match together, and there were times he blew for fouls which weren’t.
‘Put simply, it’s a contact sport, and the contact in football isn’t like in boxing where you get weighed, see you’re both the same weight, and then face each other. In football, you can weigh eighty kilos and be up against someone who’s sixty-two kilos. And if you go into a challenge and he goes down, it doesn’t mean you’ve committed a foul; it means he’s lighter than you.’
A similar attitude is found in the World Cup reports in the Cameroon Tribune newspaper. The country’s main paper said of the opening match, ‘Under the pretext of protecting football from violence, in accordance with FIFA’s wishes, Vautrot went too far, showing clearly a reverential fear for Maradona and company.’
The paper speculates that Vautrot ‘even came to mix up the Cameroon players’ in his decision to dismiss Kana-Biyik.
The sense of injustice finds expression too in a cartoon showing goalkeeper Thomas Nkono comforting a sniffling, kneeling Maradona with the words, ‘It’s Monsieur Vautour, er … Vautrot who’s had you. A lion is twice as dangerous when he is wounded.’ Vautour, in French, is vulture.
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CAMEROON HAD PARTICIPATED IN THE WORLD CUP FINALS ONCE before, in 1982 in Spain, where they departed the tournament unbeaten after draws with Peru, Poland, and Italy. It was after that tournament that Thomas Nkono, the subject of offers from clubs in Spain and Brazil for his outstanding displays, joined Spanish club Espanyol, the start of an enduring association with the Barcelona club, where he is now the long-serving goalkeeper coach.
Nkono meets me one bright, spring lunchtime at Espanyol’s training ground, the Ciudad Deportiva Dani Jarque. Outside stands a statue of Jarque, the defender who died suddenly in 2009 and whose name Andrés Iniesta wore on a t-shirt after his winning goal in the 2010 World Cup final.
Nkono may now, at sixty, be spectacled and bald-headed, but the trademark black tracksuit bottoms are still on – just as they were on those hot, humid evenings of Italia ’90. It was a habit born out of practicality.
‘We trained on a dirt pitch in Yaoundé,’ he says, flashing an easy smile. That pitch, incidentally, is still there today, still being used by his old team, Canon Yaoundé.
Looking back, Nkono explains that Cameroon’s 1982 side had ‘more individual talents’ than their 1990 successors – notably a then thirty-year-old Roger Milla and Nkono himself, whose nickname ‘Mr Fifty Percent’ told of the difference he made to his team.
The Lions ended level on three points in their group with Italy, the eventual winners, and with an identical goal difference of zero. However, the Azzurri had scored one goal more and thus progressed.
Eight years on, Cameroon’s preparations for Italia ’90 were mixed. They performed poorly at the Africa Cup of Nations in Algeria that March, falling at the group stage after defeats by Zambia and Senegal.
Meanwhile, the recall of the now 38-year-old Milla, following a decree by national president Paul Biya, had drawn raised eyebrows – and frowns – from some of the junior members of a squad unconvinced by the merits of reintroducing a man in semi-retirement on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.
‘At the start, some people didn’t understand it,’ says Nkono of the internal debate that went on. ‘The players who knew him better did. I have a great friendship with Roger.
‘When he was at Montpellier, I’d visit him there, as it’s only three hours away. We’d won a lot together and done a lot in African football, and were the leaders – myself, Roger, [Emmanuel] Kundé, [Stephen] Tataw. We were quite strong, and the youngsters accepted it. We said to Roger he’d have to wait and be our joker, but he’d succeed that way, and so it proved.’
At their camp in Yugoslavia, the team won two and lost two of their five fixtures against local club sides. There was uncertainty over the merits of the playing system which, Nkono says, led to a switch from 4-4-2 to a 4-4-1-1 spearheaded by Omam-Biyik. Nkono, who had played all three matches at Spain ’82 as Cameroon captain, had his own particular anxiety over the decision of Valeri Nepomniachi, the squad’s Russian coach, to favour Bordeaux goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell as his No1 for the World Cup.
Nkono and Bell had had a career-long rivalry – a blessing for their country with one spurring on the other – but Nkono was reluctant to stand in the shadows.
He duly confronted Nempomniachi, a reticent figure who communicated with his players through an interpreter. ‘I came from Espanyol after the best season of my life, got to Yugoslavia, and before starting the preparations, I had to sit down with the coach, his interpreter, and his assistants.
‘He said, “You’re not going to start.”
‘I said, “Why not?”
‘He said he was going to change the system in defence and use a high line. He said his decision was taken. I was ready to go back. Espanyol were in the second division and playing to win promotion. In the end, my wife convinced me to stay.’
As it was, Nkono would feature in the opening match against Argentina, though the player himself only discovered this on the morning itself.
The reason was that Bell – ever outspoken – had given an interview to L’Équipe, the French sports daily, criticising Nepomniachi’s preparations and predicting a defeat against the South Americans. Nkono had not anticipated the late twist.
‘I was going to be in the stand with my wife. It wasn’t like today, when everyone has a phone. I called her the day before and said I had the tickets, and tomorrow we’d meet up and go in together.
‘I was in the same room as Omam-Biyik. I said, “François, sleep well, because tomorrow, you’re going to score a goal.”
‘The next day, we had breakfast, and at midday, we had a team meeting, but the coach’s interpreter came to me and said the coach wanted to speak to me. I was with [third goalkeeper] Jacques Songo’o in his room and said to him, “I bet he says I’ve got to play”. It was around eleven o’clock.
‘The coach said, “How are you to play?”
‘I said, “You said I couldn’t play. I have to think about it, I’m going to call my wife.” But I couldn’t get hold of her, as she’d gone out. I kept calling the reception.
‘The meeting was at 12.30, and at 12.15 the federation called me. They said, “They’ve told us you don’t want to play.”
‘I said, “Yes, because the coach said I wasn’t going to play, and I’m not ready.”
‘They said, “We’re going to decide, because Bell isn’t going to play.” There’d been some declarations from Bell in the French press, they were quite strong, and he was out. In the end, I said, “You can tell the head of state I’ll play for him.”
‘When my wife called me at lunchtime, I said, “We can’t meet up now, love.”
‘“What’s wrong?”
‘“Because I have to play now.”
‘She couldn’t eat after that.’
The goalkeeper saga was not the only source of last-minute panic. There was some confusion over the official squad list too, with a wrong date of birth for Jean-Claude Pagal one of several discrepancies.
Three different versions were submitted to FIFA in the end. À la camerounaise, as Benjamin Massing puts it.
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FOR DEFENDING CHAMPIONS ARGENTINA, THE FOCUS, AS EVER, WAS on Diego Maradona, their inspirational leader and the dominant figure of the 1986 World Cup.
On the eve of the opening match, Carlos Menem, his country’s president, announced the thirty-year-old’s new status as an ambassador for Argentinian sport and presented him with a diplomatic passport at the San Siro.
As a reflection of this status, the beige-suited Menem waited in front of a couple of hundred journalists at the stadium’s media centre until Maradona, in Argentina shirt and tracksuit bottoms, had completed his pitch walkabout and was able to join him on the dais.
Waiting for Maradona was nothing new, of course. The previous summer, Napoli had done just that after the player responded to his club’s refusal to permit him a transfer to French side Olympique Marseille by prolonging his summer break in Argentina.
He cancelled his return flight to Naples 34 times. When he returned, he had a beard and was seven kilos overweight.
In his autobiography, El Diego, Maradona details the efforts undertaken to ensure his readiness for his third World Cup. He had entered spring 1990 suffering from excruciating pain in his lower back, unable to train and overweight once more. Yet, after returning to the Napoli team on 11 March against Lecce, he began a series of weekly visits to the Italian Olympic Committee’s Institute of Sports Science in Rome and embarked on a rigorous fitness programme and diet.
Physician Dr Henri Chenot likened his charge to ‘a Rolls Royce abandoned in a garage’, yet by cutting his sugar and salt intake and eating only fruit, vegetables, cereals, and white meat, Maradona lost four kilos inside three weeks.
On the Argentina squad’s arrival at the World Cup base in Trigoria, he had his own exercise machine installed in the gym at a cost of sixty thousand dollars.
If Maradona was losing weight, the squad selection of Carlos Bilardo, still at the helm four years after the team’s triumph in Mexico, had left him with a heavy heart. Although he had pushed successfully for the inclusion of Claudio Caniggia, he felt keenly the exclusion of Jorge Valdano, a scorer in the Mexico ’86 final and somebody he has described as ‘the only man capable of lifting my spirits with a single word’.
Valdano had formed part of Argentina’s inner circle in Mexico along with José Luis Brown, a late withdrawal because of injury, and Ricardo Giusti who was struggling for fitness along with Jorge Burruchaga, Julio Olarticoechea and Oscar Ruggeri. In Maradona’s eyes, the World Cup-winning spine of 1986 was broken. And yet, they had Maradona.
The mere sight of him in the corridors of the San Siro was too much for a couple of Cameroon players. As defender Victor Ndip recalls, ‘Alphonse Yombi and Roger Feutmba started crying before the match when they saw Maradona.’
Out on the pitch, the opening reels of Italia ’90 had begun to whir. Gianna Nannini – sister of the Formula 1 racer Alessandro Nannini – and Edoardo Bennato performed the official tournament song. A choir from La Scala sang parts of ‘Aida’.
One hundred and sixty models oozed glamour in the creations of four Italian designers, one for each of the continents involved.
A giant ball, adorned with hundreds of decorative daisies, rose from the centre of the pitch and floated up and out of the stadium. The cynical-minded might suggest it was an unwitting augury for the anti-football that would follow.
Meanwhile, there were colourful happenings offstage too. The testimony of an unnamed employee from the local organising committee tells of the ‘many condoms’ left littering the VIP toilets that evening, suggesting that Italia ’90’s low-scoring trend did not apply to Milan’s beautiful people.
The most striking thing of all, of course, was the San Siro itself; a great space station of a stadium, whose newly added third tier had raised the capacity to 80,000. From down on the pitch, the dramatic, red roof girders framed a rectangle of sky.
To English eyes, this was supersized football, a Cecil B. DeMille makeover. At the time the old First Division’s biggest arena was the 50,726-capacity Old Trafford. John Williams, an associate professor in sociology at Leicester University and author of fifteen books on football, was attending the match on a research trip for the Football Trust and he articulates the wow factor: ‘There was no stadium like it in England – no stadium of that size and of that completely enclosed aspect. That was all going to come in the post-Taylor years. It was absolutely alien to the English experience.’
Yet, as Victor Ndip points out, African football could do big scale too. ‘I’d been in the national team four or five years, and it was just like in Surulere in Lagos, when I was in the junior national team and there were 120,000 spectators. When I saw the crowd at the San Siro, to me, it was very simple.’
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THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE ARGENTINA AND CAMEROON teams, limbering up inside, in the same warm-up space, held its own fascination. It was there that Cameroon gained a psychological foothold.
Eugène Ekéké, later a scorer against England in the quarter-finals, remembers: ‘The Argentinians started warming up, and our players were a bit intimidated. One player started watching Maradona juggle the ball and says, “We’re dead here.” We couldn’t carry on like that, so we decided to start making some noise.’
It would not be the only time that Cameroon’s battle songs would leave an impression on their Italia ’90 opponents. ‘The Argentinians came in and started singing, so we started singing even louder,’ recounts Nkono.
Roger Milla adds, ‘We couldn’t understand them, but we thought they were making fun of us. When we started singing loudly, they left.’
le Pasteur